Week 1 Sound and Vision Lecture Context

“Digitality is among us. It
haunts all the messages and
signs of our society, and we
can clearly locate its most
concrete form in the test, the
question /answer, the
stimulus / response”

Jean Baudrillard 1993.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

As Radical as Reality


Digital Natives and Analogue Man


The Digital Age - New Media Ecologies

• Switch from analogue culture to
digital.

• Old media (tv, film, photography,
print, vinyl etc.) to new media
(computers, ipods, blogs, mobile
telephony, wi fi , internet, email,
kindle, ipads....).

• Intensification rather than break.


The New comes from Old
• New Media work have their roots
in earlier movements and in the
work of earlier artists. Processes
of intensiﬁcation, reformation and
remediation.

• Like these older forms, many new
media forms see themselves as
creating more meaningful, engaged
roles for viewers, readers,
listeners. As such like many older
media forms they are premised on
a critique of other media forms
(tv, ﬁlm)


The Chameleon

• The limits of naming and
describing New Media

• All New Media forms can be
put to uses their makers
never envisaged or could have
predicted.

• “there is nothing in the
technologies themselves that
dictated how they would be
used by the societies that
invented them”( John Ellis,Visible Ficitons,
1982)


The Musical Revolution


Withered Hand

• one to one, autonomy, self management, independence....(?)

• “the internet, allied with
digital reproduction, has
generated a new problem
for the owners of copyright
because the ability to record
is allied with the ability to
distribute’
• New Media: A Critical Introduction, pg. 194


The paradoxes of change

• Dematerialisation -
distribution - free culture?
Copyright breakdown.
• Demise of concentrated
listening (?)
• Soft control - creative
templates.
• Old hierarchies lose power?


The Digital Age - New Media New Forms
• New Media forms are highly decentralised
and dispersed. New Media content is
highly migrant, 360 degree programming
(convergence)

• Rise of ‘prouser’. Media production have
been radically ‘popularised’ - theoretically
anyone can access ‘specialist’ production
techniques (Final Cut, Logic, Photoshop
etc.). Dissolving of professional / amateur
division.

• Distribution has partially been
‘democratised’ (myspace, soundcloud,
vimeo, the web) . In part this is due to
dematerialisation of many forms (eg.
music). Non hierarchical networks. One to
one replaced by many to many


The Digital Age - New Media New Experiences
• New ways of representing and
interpreting the world (eg. immersive
virtual environments, cloud databases,
online archives eg. wikipedia, youtube
etc. )

• New textual experiences and patterns
of consumption (computer games,
simulations, cgi, augmented reality.

• New conceptions of community, identity
and the body. New Media forms such as
email, social network sites have radically
transformed our sense of time and
place. IMAGE SMART MOBS

• Blurring of boundaries between real and
virtual, the natural and the artiﬁcial, the
human and the cyborg.


The Digital Age - New Media Key Terms

• Digital
• Interactive
• Hypertextual
• Virtual
• Networked
• Simulated


The Digital Age - Reasons for these changes
Cause and Effect - Chicken and Egg

• From Modernism to
Postmodernism

• Globalisation - dissolving of
nation state and boundaries,
greater economic, cultural
social exchange (friction free
economy)

• In the west, the shift from
manufacturing production to
postindustrial information
age (knowledge economy)

• Decentring of power from
west to east.


“Depression occurs, Franco Bifo
Beradi argues, when the speed and
complexity of the ﬂows of
information overwhelm the
capacities of the ‘social brain” to
manage these ﬂows, inducing a
panic that concludes, shortly
thereafter, with a depressive plunge.
Depression is so widespread today ,
Bifo argues, because the
contemporary organisation of
production of surplus value is
founded on the phenomenon – the
accumulation – of speed”

Jason Smith, pg. 10 introduction to
the soul at work


• integration of media effects?
and everyday life
• changing relationship
private public
• hybridisation human
and machine
• shifting identities,
subjectivity (avatars)


The mediated nature of everyday life
The externalisation of the human nervous system -arthur Kroker

• “Understanding the self as a
networked presence has
almost become commonplace
- consciousness is increasingly
understood as an ’assemblage’
in which technologically
mediated communications
systems are as much part of
our consciousness as ‘nature’
or the body’
• New Media :A Critical Introduction, pg.
168


The postives.....


Paradise Regained?
• Marshall McLuhan -four
stages- primitive, oral
culture, the culture of
literacy (middle ages) , print
culture (the Guttenberg
galaxy) the power of the
word - the electronic
culture -marked by Sensory
plenitude - shift from
logocentrism (the power of
the word over all overs)
haptic harmony a global
village... all at onceness,


New Claims for New Media?
• Social network sites (re)create
communities and offer spheres of
public debate (cyber communities)
• Information and communication
no longer centrally controlled (rise
of the blog)
• Alternative media (unofﬁcial news
reporting -see student protests Jody
McIntyre )
• The possibilities for new identities
new relationship’s via said virtual
communities etc.
32


Smart mobs

• arab spring, global student protests....

Techno Utopianism and Dystopian
The digital divide

‘Not only is access to
online resources globally
uneven, it has been shown
that the digital divide
mirrors income inequality
in Western countries’

New Media, pg. 185


“nothing
could be
more useful,
and nothing
more
useless”
Jean Baudrillard (1990)


‘the unthinkable complexity of cyberspace” William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)


The Digital Age - Responses
• How to represent the scale
and complexity of this new
global, digital culture? To ﬁlter
the volumes of visual , audio,
literary information now
accessible to us.
• How to make art that is as
radical as the reality we are
faced with.
• How to make visible the
invisible workings, the ﬂows
of this networked culture.


To be of one’s time

History
Gare Saint-Lazare, the Saint-Lazare railway station (1877)

Umberto Boccioni
'Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space' 1913


A Culture of Denial?


• ‘the development of print[..]in the mid ﬁfteenth
century is generally seen as the ﬁrst mass
medium and is often cited as a key factor in the
development of modern rationality and
subjectivity, and the undermining of the
medieval religious world’ Mark Poster, Postmodern
Virtualities (1995)


Week 1 Sound and Vision Lecture Context

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