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