The Medium is The Message

At first, I wasn't quite clear with the concept of "the Medium is the Message"; but after reading this article, I was convinced with what Marshall McLuhan referred in the passage, though not absolutely agreed with, at least worthy of attention.
I 'm pretty interested in the part that he talked about the "medium" brought out by the new technology and how they affect the world because the new technological invention can be directly perceived  through out senses. Railways and airplanes are mediums that bring out new living patterns and those are "messages".
The most direct way that "the Medium is the Message" makes sense to we is that in last a few days there were big incidents happening both in US and my country China: Boston had the Marathon Bombing, 3 dead and hundreds injured; China had the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 160 lives and more than 2000 injured. In both incidents, people receive the fastest information from the internet instead of the traditional medium. The internet and the invention of social networking website gives pressure to the traditional medium since it changes the way how we get used to receive information; we are not satisfied by the way we receive news as before, and the change of technology and our demand force it to improve again, that process happens interchangeably, so "the Medium is the Message".

Here is a short video from google introducing the data of people using mobile now. "Mobile is so big. It's changing and creating new customer behaviors. Mobile is entertaining us in new ways."We are spoiled by the convenience it brought to us and it is forced to be more perfect. Message is the ways and patterns that it brings to us, which still holds Marshall Mcluhan's idea from long time ago.

Is the medium really the message?

I'll come right out and say that I don't completely buy McLuhan's assertion. He seems obsessed with industrialization and links the specificity of transportation to art. I don't disagree that the railway "accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions," but an artistic medium is different from an industrial process. In arguing that the medium is the message, I feel that McLuhan is overly homogenizing entire styles of art. If the content is just the distracting juicy piece of meat that he asserts it is, why bother making new art? Such an emphasis on form over content devalues the artist and overvalues the engineer or inventor who creates new forms of artistic expression. Different artists utilize a given medium in very different ways, even within similar schools of thought (e.g.: the French New Wave).
McLuhan argues that "the effect of the movie form is not related to its program content." However, I don't quite understand what he means by "movie form." Does he mean to assert that any series of images projected in front of a lightbulb on a moving strip of images is essentially the same? One only needs to juxtapose the work of Bela Tarr and Sergei Eisenstein to realize the absurdity of such an assertion. Film can explore time and space, but also can sacrifice either notion for the other or lose track of both. Stan Brakhage's more abstract pieces (those that involve directly painting on strips of film) illustrate this point. Below I've included a clip from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies and Eisenstein's October, just to illustrate two very different filmic experiences. Even more different might have been a clip from a Tarkovsky film, but I just really love the opening scene to Werckmeister Harmonies.

Unless You Will

Here is the link to the Unless You Will website, an intriguing online magazine published bi-monthly. And here is a link to the blog. More amazing photos.

Installation Art

I was really interested by the part about surveillance, and how when someone is watching TV, the TV also seems to be watching the viewer. I thought that an interesting take on TV was Nam June Paik's 1963 Wuppertal exhibition piece in which he projected distorted images off TV's and said that "TV has attacked us all of our life, now we're hitting back". I appreciate the message, however I think that the way in which TV has negatively affected people is their own fault. A TV and the power it has over us is our own fault as we empower it by turning it on and paying attention to it. So, instead of just ignoring the TV I think Paik is just empowering it and being contradictory to his own message. Even if we are watching distorted images they are still images that Paik put in the TV and therefore when someone else looks at them its just drawing us more towards an artificial image.

I am posting a short clip about the negative effects of TV on the mind, but I really think that it shows how people refuse to take responsibility 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXne72RyX78

Installation Art

While reading Michael Rush's chapter on video installation art, I was struck by the confrontational nature of each piece he described. Virtually every installation recounted in the chapter is aggressive and invasive, hostile toward the spectator and toward the practice of video watching. Is this sort of hostility necessary to in order to transform the context of art into its content? Must a reflexive piece mean an antagonistic point of view?

Last week, I was disappointed by Rush's admonishing view of popular culture, advertising and television, and this week I was let down again. He presents television and video installation as though they were opponents. For Rush, Installation art is the noble crusader battling against television's tirade of brainwashing, artistically void mass media sludge, and I so disagree. Growing up, I was kind of a solitary kid. I had friends, I just preferred at moments to take time and recharge by myself, and who was my companion on afternoons when I was all alone in my big empty house? It was the TV. Some of the time I watched programs, but some of the time I just needed the noise on in the house to not feel alone. I'd curl up with a "chapter book" and my dog, Willy, and would just enjoy the ambience of the television running.

 For my link, I've included another advertisement. This specific ad for Samsung TV features a unique form of installation art, one that exists outside the museum; and yes, it is art.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LD2fVZDG8VI

Interactivity in Installations

Installations focused around surveillance, especially live ones, reliant on interactivity with its audience like Dieter Froese's, are interesting in the way the embody the art/audience relationship. All art, by necessity, has to be viewed for it to have an effect, and viewed by a wide audience in order to achieve the status that allows it to be discussed and analyzed. (The only exception to this being other works that are viscerally aware of the necessity of this relationship, and choose to attempt to break it down in some way.) '

Rush says, on page 131, after discussing Froese's piece Not A Model For Big Brother's Spy Cycle, that from around this time "video installations took an active role in energizing the viewer to respond to the object viewed." It's a role that video can play more effectively than any medium of art previously, because of the numerous ways it can be used to achieve liveness and be in a constant state of change and flux. The question is whether this liveness -- parallel, in a number of discussions, to realism -- is something all video art should be striving to capture, simply by virtue of it being unmatched in other media.

Reading this brought to mind this post that I was linked to by a friend. The post itself is situated as a joke, obviously, but when thinking critically about performance art and large-scale installations like this, it becomes dramatically more interesting. The matching of the piece and the clothing is complete coincidence, and likely only to happen once in the entire course of the installation, but other museum-goers, many of whom probably recognize it as additional to the piece, see it as art.

Installation Art

Installation art, in my opinion, seems to be the meeting point of cinema and video art. To me, the main difference between video art and film(cinema) is that going to see a movie, one is not just going for the experience of seeing that particular movie, they are going to take in the experience of "going to the movies' as an idea itself. Video art does not have this same romantic experience. Video art installations thus prove themselves to be what the movie theater is to film. It is not just that one experiences watching a video, it is the experience of the environment in which one watches a video. It is pretty clear here in Bill Viola's piece "An Ocean Without a Shore"