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.