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.