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

On ***** Media- Anna Lenhert

I enjoyed reading this week’s reading On ***** Media by G.H. Hovagimyan, and there were two points that I wanted to draw out for this post. The first was photography is the most “truthful” medium in the arts, and marked a shift away from photography to a form of technology that we identify as real information because of how closely it mimics the workings of our own eyes. I remember in one of my first music lessons my teacher said that the first and most advanced instrument everybody possesses is our ear. Similarly, using our eyes are the foundation for visual media, photography captures reality but only in a still moment whereas video captures more of the fluidity of vision in real time. Of course beyond this editing and affects add layers of meaning beyond realism (for example, I can imagine using choppy editing to portray not how something was really seen, but how memory has distorted the original experience.) Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the author’s point was that these visual media are tied into ideas of representing reality-“The symbolic language of representational painting just doesn’t compare with the information of a photograph.” (117)

            Secondly, the author ended with a broader view of new media culture that I found interesting: “All of these threads of Media ideas create a meta-language of New Media discourse that I believe is the new climate of the arts. I do believe, however, that we are moving away from recording or what I term ‘Playback Culture’ into a new form of generative art…There is no master and subsequent copies. There is only dynamic iterations of form.” (120) This reminded me of something else I had read (the nerdiest gift I requested for Christmas was The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics), a chapter titled “Beyond Music: Mashup, Multimedia Mentality, and Intellectual Propery” by Nicholas Cook. In it, Cook discusses many different facets of this topic, but one idea that I thought echoed Hovagimyan’s idea of a “Playback Culture” was the distinction between Read/Only and Read/Write cultures of communication that he took from Lawrence Lessig’s article Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy: “Read/Only culture broadly maps onto modernist autonomy culture, in which art forms such as music are professionalized, generalizing commodities (works) designed for appreciation by passive, paying audiences. By contrast, RW culture is predicated on participation: music is conceived not as a collection of fixed works, but rather as a signifying practice in which materials are circulated and reworked in much the same way that ideas are in other domains of culture.” (55, Cook) Though the example here deals with music specifically, Cook later goes on to discuss video mashup work by Eclectic Method and how their work falls into the RW culture not only in terms of its production, but in terms of how it invites audiences to actively work at interpretation.

Aisyah: Response to Hovagimyan's "On ***** Media"

     One of the things that captured my attention in this reading was when Hovagimyan said, "Meaning for any art work is a communication process, a shared tribal agreement on the meaning of any icon, symbol, etc. In this sense, meaning has more to do with language and the evolving nature of linguistic forms. I place art in the category of a language as well." Art is a great form of communication because, generally, it is universally understood. Whether they are paintings, photographs, videos, screen-prints, murals, etc. they tell the history, evoke opinions on social matters, educate us, and many more. They also evolve overtime and improve/expand out of their fields. For example, the Ancient Egyptian architecture incorporated paintings and carvings onto the walls, telling the history of the pharaohs and what life was like back then. In my lifetime, I see photographs and videos being used to teach us history rather than the use of painted walls.

     It was also interesting to read about how the art forms evolved not only as a language form, but also evolve from their initial purposes. One great example that Hovagimyan brought up was the radio – back then, it was used as a political rhetoric and propaganda to incite and terrify people. Nowadays, it is used as social entertainment. Knowing this, it makes me wonder what some of these art mediums’ functions will evolve into after fifty years or so. Will it stay the same, or will it branch out and expand from its capabilities? Everything must reach its limits one day, right?

On Media Response- Karina Banda

Hovagimyan stated “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”. During that time media and their purposes were constantly changing as recording technology was constantly being updated and evolving. Painting started to go into a new direction after photography provided a better way to represent reality. As the camera's abilities started evolving and people started manipulating its processes, it has evolved into a bigger thing involving lights and careful set-ups.

Now we have played enough with all these new technologies and rather than letting the technologies change us, we are now changing and manipulating the technologies we have, in other words, using it as a language as Hovagimyan describes. When you first start learning a language, you need to follow the careful structure of it but once you are comfortable enough, you can deviate from textbook-like sentences and create new ones of your own. Technology has become such a big part in our world that “the new cultural mythos is a mapping out of human society that is extended into its technology and in a sustained symbiosis with that technos”. In our Post Media environment that Hovagimyan describes, we are letting computers manipulate and create our art forms and because of this, there is no uni-formal way in approaching the different types of mediums we currently use as there are hundreds of processes you can choose to use for any type of medium to shape it.

Artist Agathe Snow's video “Total Attitude Work Out Video” (http://ubu.com/film/snowa_workout.html) is a great piece that showcases the ideas of Hoyagimyan presents. In this video, Snow has borrowed the “language” (the presentation) of self-help videos and mass produced work out videos to make her own statement of societal views of “hot-girls” in this parody video.