Thoughts About On ***** Media

This article offers an interesting survey on different types of media and how “all of these threads of media ideas creates a meta-language of New Media discourse.” I thought that some especially interesting remarks were made when painting and photography were contrasted. The article read “One could no longer stand in front of a heroic painting or soldiers and generals and fantasize about the glory of battle, or rather one could compare the actuality of war by looking at a photograph.” Is the author saying that paintings traditionally romanticize their objects (such as war) while photography traditionally gives the viewer a more realistic sense of the object? If so, I would most definitely agree. Photographs of war are always more jarring and powerful than paintings. I think this has to do with a later statement the author makes; photography can be viewed as “reproducing reality so completely that one can’t tell the difference between real and recorded or real and reproduced.” It is cool to think about the realities of different types of media.

                One quotation that I really loved was “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.” I found this quotation to be very powerful. I definitely believe that art is meant to be communicated and shared as much as possible. One of the reasons why I love art is because it is interpreted and experienced differently by everyone who sees it. The artist’s own personal messages and experiences can be communicated to others through their art, creating a unique blend of the artist’s thoughts and the viewers’ thoughts.

                Since I enjoyed reading the part about Alexander Graham Bell and Watson creating the first telephone, I looked for some sort of recreation of that event online. I found this funny little silent film on Youtube, which I thought I would include since the article also discussed silent films and how they incorporate text “into the moving image creating a binary presentation of text | image…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfLWtebubtY