Julia On Media response

What stood out most to me from GH Hovagimyan’s essay is the line in the final paragraph. Hovagimyan notes, “In generative art or music or theater, computer algorithms create or manifest the forms of art. In this way the art is ever changing.”  I want to consider this quote in relation to glitch art. Glitch art is when an artist alters the code on a image or sound bite, to create a distortion or abstraction of the original piece. Often times the artist has little control over how the glitch affects the piece art. I think glitch art could be classified under Hovagimyan’s term “generative art” because the content that is being created in glitch art is so randomized and reliant on the computer algorithms. We might also consider laptop orchestras as an example of generative music.  In which artists/musicians gather and generate music using just their laptop. The results are often random and based on the reliability of the devices used.  Both of these could fit into what Hovagimyan refers to as the “‘Post Media’ information environment” because the art is ever changing within these manifested forms the message is less communicative. Hovagimyan’s discussion of various media helped to establish what has preceded this Post Media age, but his failure to address examples of what he considers Post Media lessened his overall essay. 

On **** Media by G.H. Hovagimyan

 Personally, I found G.H. Hovagimyan’s article On **** Media to be undeveloped and lacking a well sort out thesis. Though he generated some good ideas and explanations on this shift into a “Post Media” era, I believe the point he was trying to convey was very vague and flat. His thoughts were not formulated properly and so they didn’t really convince me that the world we are living in today is shifting into “Post Media” times.

The thing that irritated me the most about Hovagimyan’s article and possibly the underlying reason as to why I found it to be undeveloped is the fact that in the second line of his article there is an error. A day before I read this article, I read a passage by W.J.T. Mitchell entitled Addressing Media that mentions Marshall McLuhan and his thesis, “The medium is in the message.” I had also written a two-page response paper on this idea and so upon reading the second line of Hovagimyan’s article, I immediately recognized it. However, by the time I finished reading the third line I realized something was wrong. I immediately pulled out my reading from my Introduction to Media Studies class and checked if my hypothesis was correct, and it was. G.H. Hovagimyan spelt McLuhan’s name incorrectly by adding an extra C to his name. Realizing this fact, I immediately lost faith that anything Hovagimyan would argue in the reminder of his paper would be correct or worth believing. Not only did he misspell the name one of the greatest contributors to Media Studies and gave his quote a random guy, but he was also deceiving his readers who were unaware of who McLuhan was.

However, despite the fact that Hovagimyan lost my trust I must admit that he did have some decent points. In the case of painting and photography it is true that there is a shift into the “Post Media” era with cameras now having the ability to capture images with such precision that it feels realistic. The act of capturing an image no longer requires great effort (sitting down for hours to get a portrait painted), but can be done in a matter of seconds. This makes the distribution of art easier and more accessible but as Hovagimyan mentions this is the reason why we are in a “Post Media” era. Machines are now capturing the art form that humans have been doing for years and there is no turning back from this advancement. Sooner or later in this “Post Media” era, the need for human interaction will be no longer necessary, for with the right programs and developments these technologies will be able to run on their own.

This comparison between painting and photography along with other good points forced us to think about the future and where technology will lead us. Nonetheless, as I mentioned before, if Hovagimyan expanded on his examples and demonstrated how they will impact this shift into the “Post Media”, his point would have been clearer and further developed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEzuWWmn9xI

-Danielle Rennalls

XR: Response to On Media

         Hovagimyan discusses the changing progress throughout 20^th century in the article, ans there is several points he brings up caught my attention. Hovagimyan writes, “mesaning has more to do with language and the evolving nature of linguistic forms” (117). The meaning of a piece of art work half depends on the the intention of the creator, half is interpreted by the people who look at it. Individual communicate with the creator, and then perceive the art in their own different ways. For example, when look at a war documentary photo, we first directly focus on explicit information, then we try to decode the symbolic language, searching for its implicit meaning, such as the light is dark, perhaps it promotes a gloomy atmospheric mood, or perhaps simply during the war, the air is polluted. Thus, art has been entitle with band new meaning when it is represented and shared to the public. Art is like a language, talk to and gain feedback from the audience. Therefore, I disagree with Benjamin’s opinion on art loses value when it is reproduced, instead, I believe its value multiplied when is presented to the crowds.          Hovagimyan further explores film language and I particularly feel connected to his statement of the relationship between image, film medium, photography and multimedia.  Film incorporates a series of media elements, such as image, sound, painting and so on, at the meanwhile, it has to deal with the time, how to construct a film plot within a limit of time, what to delete and what to keep, how to ensure that the audience could understand the filmic language. The film language is a process of extraction of images from the daily life. It forms the basis of a film, also it offers the secure base for further performing art forms, such as drama. 

        Author mentions the cross media and hybrid media, which is very familiar to me. I took Early Cinema in my freshman year, and it is a determining point for me to learn film media. During every class, professor Carli provided us a screening of silent film, and professor himself played the background music on a piano. This experience is memorable, that for the first time, I feel the history of the film reappears in front of me. And the incredible cross media, extends from the two dimensional screen. During the screening, audience combine the information comes from two sources and establish communication with both of them. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dha7ggBu_Jo

Christian Cieri - On ***** Media

Hovagimyan’s article entitled “On ***** Media” brings up some rather interesting points on what exactly Digital and New Media are, by highlighting trends in media history, both recent and older. The first point made reflects on paintings versus photography, and what occurred to painting as photography developed. According to the article, as photography came to the forefront of visually documenting events in history, painting turned to become more abstract, and thus more “art” then documenting. This makes sense, as photographs can capture a realistic image that the human hand will just never be able to successfully reproduce on a canvas, or at least not with the ease that cameras can. So naturally painting became more of a leisurely pastime, and focused more on art then trying to be realistic.

In the end, Hovagimyan mentions that society is entering into an era of generative art, where computer algorithms create art so that it is always changing and never the same, thus avoiding copies and duplicates from occurring. But I don’t agree with this statement; our society is one that is so focused on documenting and remembering the past, and this is seen within media itself. Though paintings and photographs are “art” forms, they also document as they visually capture a specific moment of history and are easily duplicated. In fact, there is not art medium that cannot be somehow duplicated in one form or another. I do not believe that society will ever create medium that cannot be duplicated; there will always be a master copy somewhere, and if people are willing to buy replicas, they will be sold.

While reading the article, I found the section on randomly creating digital art most impressive, as I had a difficult time wrapping my head around art that is not reproduced on a mass scale. The video I am sharing is from YouTube and is about a random art generator program that produces a set image, revealing certain parts in random. While this is not exactly what Hovagumyan is describing, I think it is an interesting bridge between the reproduced (the image) and the non reproduced (the patterns).

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PSU3qNXe-Y

On Media Response

I’m going to deconstruct Hovagimyan’s argument for my own sake. It seems as if he agrees with McCluhan’s concept that “The Medium is the Message” historically, but believes that art no longer relies on its medium to gain meaning or to portray information. In other words, “Post Media” has to do with the idea that—due perhaps to technology—medium has become an irrelevant aspect of an art piece when it comes to the message it is trying to express. Hovagimyan uses the introduction of photography as an example, stating that when distribution of war photographs began, artists stopped painting war scenes. Following the logic of the argument, it appears that this might be because the medium of photography did a better job of conveying the message and “truth” of war than the medium of painting, rendering painting relatively useless for war information distribution.

Another clue that I used to identify Hovagimyan’s main point is the fact that he says in his concluding paragraph that “computer algorithms create or manifest the forms of art.” The key word here is “forms.” I’m not entirely sure where this concept of computer algorithms came from and why he felt it appropriate to just throw a term like that in an article about art in his last paragraph without an sufficient explanation. But anyways, back to the significance of using the word form: by stating that computers are generating the forms of art, not just the art work itself, he is further suggesting that the form in which a piece of art takes is irrelevant and merely computer generated. Put simply, we no longer rely on medium to receive information. 

I’m not sure any of this made sense. If this is actually what he is arguing, then I find this very compelling. However, Hovagimyan’s article was so scattered that I struggled to really identify a cohesive argument at all.

On Media Yukun Liu

The statement that Hovagimya gave is “at the start of the 20^th century mechanical recording and reproduction media were beginning to change the way in which societies communicated and formed their tribal mythos.” I disagree with him. I would say media is more like a system and an environment. Media doesn’t change us more than we change media. For example, the example Hovagimya gave us, “painting moved increasingly towards abstraction upon the arrival of the photographic process” is not that convincing. With the arrival of new technologies, it’s a common thing that people start using new things and throw away old things. I don’t consider it as what media change us, it’s more like we find an easier way to do something and start using the easier way. Mechanical recording and reproduction media can’t replace painting even in non-abstraction area at all because certain people are still using painting as a medium to show their ideas. It’s not a simple thing to just replace an important media with new technologies. For example, people are still using films even if digital is a better media for most of us.

The other thing caught my eyes is the post media part in the conclusion. “In generative art or music or theater, computer algorithms create or manifest the forms of art.” I agree with him. Computer algorithms can produce things that people can’t produce and they can understand things people can’t understand. These make post media unique and important. As he mentioned in the end, “in this way the art is ever changing. There is no master and subsequent copies. There is only dynamic iterations of form.” These are the features of post media. Moreover, these make post media as an independent media, which we are moving into now.

This is the video I found:

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/video/Murata_Takeshi_Silver_2006.mp4

On Media - Lauren

Hovagimyan’s opinion and description of new media is a nice introduction to the very complex and largely debated topic.  Much of this piece simply revolves around the attempt to better describe McLuhan’s famous original piece, “The Medium is the Message”.  Hovagimyan briefly talks about several different aspects of new media and its application as an art form, such as the radio and the evolution of video.  For the most part though, it felt as if the author had very scattered arguments, most likely because there are so many aspects of new media to touch on. 

The passage that stood out most for me was at the very end of the piece where Hovagimyan states that we as a society are moving towards a “post media” which can be defined as “computer algorithms [that] create or manifest the forms of art”.  A previous piece I read delves much deeper into the definition of what new media is, which very much overlaps with Hovagimyan’s definition of post media.  In Manovich’s “What is New Media” piece, he defines the 5 necessary characteristics to qualify something as new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.  Numerical representation is more or less what Hovagimyan argues when he talks about computer algorithms, that everything can be created using a computer; Manovich simply elaborates saying that pictures can be represented as RGB values or a shape can be represented as a mathematical function.   Modularity is where the media can be reduced to a single unit and these units are independent of one another.  Videos are simply many shorter videos put together, which are also put together from still images.  Automation and variability, like Hovagimyan was explaining about post media art “ever changing” and simply being “dynamic iterations” of the same form, is where computer algorithms generate different things, whether that be numbers, images, or anything computer generated.  Finally, transcoding is “to translate into another format”.  This relates to the idea of numerical representation, such as how computers use binary code to represent characters.  Binary code is normally unreadable to most humans, but because computers can translate binary to characters, humans are able to understand computer languages.      

Jack Scardino - "On Media"

Havagimyan has an interesting perspective.  One argument that caught my attention was in opposition to Walter Benjamin’s view that art loses some value and impact when reproduced.  I think Havagimyan is absolutely correct about art being a communication process, and that the meaning derives from that process between artist and audience.  It often rides on cultural assumptions and shared emotions to non-verbally make statements that have emotional impact.  Familiarity with an image, the kind of familiarity that 20^th Century mass production has allowed, can drive an artistic insight into an audience in a way one-of-a-kind works cannot.  Photos that have circulated in textbooks around the world (at least, in the U.S.) are so powerful because they are shared so widely, such as the Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, the Times Square VJ-Day kiss in 1945, and “The Blue Marble” picture of the Earth I believe do all they originally did and more now.  Recorded music works in a very similar way, perhaps in a more powerful way.  However, I will also agree with Benjamin that in some circumstances, art can be devalued because of mass-production.  One can become desensitized to a work and its meaning from over-seeing it.

I think of Star Wars when I think about this argument.  Or Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”.  I couldn’t count the number of times, couldn’t even guess, I’ve revisited those works.  (Incidentally, I maintained a streak listening to “Born to Run” every day for nearly two consecutive years.)  I still watch those movies and listen to that song regularly.  In some ways the magic of seeing Star Wars for the first time has worn off, and surely the gravity of Empire’s big reveal at the end doesn’t carry quite the same impact it did when I first learned it.  Benjamin is onto something there.  But in other ways, I have come to appreciate more about these two works in particular because I know so much about them.  I can reapproach them on a technical level, or even attempt to let my imagination seep into the context of the art.  With “Born to Run”, I do still consistently feel the power and spirit in the music, and I experience that on a level much deeper than my first time listening.  I mean it when I sing it.  Maybe that comes from my own maturity, but I believe it comes from the collective understanding of my previous experiences with the song as well.

Finally, this leads me to note some of Havagimyan’s final thoughts.  I do not totally accept that “we are moving away from ‘Playback Culture’”.  First of all, I am already weary of hearing the words “pre” and “post” slapped onto the names of different genres.  But I also know that there are in fact masters and subsequent copies used today to produce art.  Computer algorithms may create the forms of art, in that they write onto CDs or digital tape, but I think it is generally accepted that most art today does come to a point of completion.  I just don’t understand the connection between the line about computer algorithms and “in this way the art is ever-changing.”  Star Wars has been re-edited a number of times.  “Born to Run” has been remastered.  Is this what he means?  When people create movies of music, they are exactly recording and playing-back as a way of creating.  However, these are just means of efficiency and revision in the artistic process.  The only difference as I understand it, is that modern technology allows for faster and wider distribution of art works.  Using a computer to splice footage or mix a musical recording is a tool used in constructing a composition from what is only an abstract idea.  Am I way off?

I'm going to post this because I can't help myself, and I know it's pre-digital, but this kind of thing is still done today. (1:42-4:20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UqFhDaJN38&feature=player_detailpage&x-yt-cl=84838260&x-yt-ts=1422327029#t=102