Week1 Yukun Liu

I started getting confused when Foster adding the concept of art to the article. As Foster said, “Theoretically, any medium an artist is working can serve intermedia purposes. As a practical matter of fact, I think that few do”, he questioned it. Then he started to argue whether video is alive or not. I agree with Foster’s opinion that video is alive. However, I disagree with the reason he said. Like he said, “Video enables and has a high potential for intermedia because it, as a medium, compels”, when we watching a video, we feel things that the author of the video wants us to feel, such as sadness or happiness, or encouragement or depression. But then he gave the reason that video is alive, which is “our conceptual and perceptual apparatus for ‘images’ is dead”. I turned to disagree with him. I don’t think “our conceptual and perceptual apparatus for ‘images’ is dead”. Images are always typical for certain objects, how can’t you feel sad when you see an image of an old man standing by a gravestone? For this part, he did a good job express his statements but failed to make good examples to support his statements.

He also talked about intermedia and multimedia. “This, it seems to me, is what makes work ‘’intermedia” rather than ‘multimedia.’” He thought that intermedia pieces not just “break down traditional art boundaries” and used the Duchamp “Fountain” as the example. The “Fountain” is a good example here, “simply” changed a porcelain urinal’s positioning to make an “new” object. Foster explained the reason that the “Fountain” is not intermedia, “it occupies a place between art and plumbing.” In the end of this paragraph he concluded his idea, “That ‘thing’ is the agent of the phenomenon of intermedia.”

This is the sound I found, it’s like a mix of everything of the 20th Century:

http://www.ubu.com/sound/dj_food.html