Media Materialism

Media Materialism is a way of looking at technology from the past, now and the future and how it relates to culture.

Technology, Technique and Culture

‘Technology is the consolidation of knowledge, processes, skills and products whose aim is to control and transform’. Murphy and Potts

Technology

• Consolidation – tools, hammers, iphones, steps
• Processes – microwaves, text messages, code in computer.
• Skills – bricklaying, piloting, programming

Therefore technology is not just a tool, ‘it involves cultural values, ideologies and eithical concerns and it also shaped by political and economic developments.’

Technique

These are skills that are uniquely human like using a screw driver, mental process like mathematics. It is traditional in that it can be passed down through the generations.

Culture

• Identifying subgroups with the main culture eg. Youth culture, Italian culture, hackers etc.
• Characterising humanity. How we operate as a species.
• Creative expression such as art, film, books, music.

Does technology dictate culture and society as it progress?

Technology determines its own path. Eg. Bronze Age, Steam Age, Technology Age. It also it affects our destiny and the way we engage with the world.

With the invention of the camera, one film maker, Dziga Verto, saw it as a natural extension of thought it was an extension of his eye, brain and body. Here we have his film ‘Man with the Movie Camera’ by Dziga Verto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97Pa0ICpn8

Competing view is cultural materialism, in that we determine how we use technology. For example, the NRA claims that ‘people kill people, guns don’t kill people.’

Here is a video of technological materialism being re-determined by ‘culture’ (humanity).

TASK – BLOG O’CLOCK

Dan asked us to have a moment of stream of consciousness and ‘blog away’ by choosing a topic. I chose ‘Humanity is in charge of its own future…’

Not really. Look at the planet. It is going to hell in a hand basket despite knowing the consequences of our anthropogenic pollution that is melting icecaps, fouling the water, warming the planet, killing what we so need – life.

We’re too diverse. We are beset by short term needs and goals, those few in power fight and destroy humanity and the environment, countries, governments, social cohesion all for the bottom line. Nothing is going to change while we have governments being corrupted by big business and the selfishness that goes with it.

It could, however, if humanity could unify and agree it could be a wonderful future. Imagine, free renewable energy for everyone, integrated transportation, off the grid systems, companies that gave back to the community, built better worlds or mandated that the environment was a number one priority.

The rest of the lecture was about our final semester submission. We must talk about our top five posts and provide a final reflection.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

 REFLECTION

I’d never thought of technology in this way and its forms. I’ve always taken the view that technology will determine our future, in particular, the militarisation of artificial intelligence. That may be another argument to explore because we’re not far off from having a consolidated tool being able to use its skills and processes to determine our culture as well as its own. I was moved by the video Kara (above) ‘I want to live.’  Perhaps we will have a symbiotic relationship where we become part of technology and it becomes part of us.
I do relate to the above quote by Beckett. It is something I’ve been doing all my life with all my new art projects.

THE REMIX & THE GLITCH

Lecturer Dan Bins

‘There is no such thing as an original idea.’
Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in Mechanical Reproductio

Walter Benjamin was a German academic and escaped the Nazi’s only to commit suicide later. He has written the seminal book, Work of Art in Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin raises the issue that with the emergence of changing technologies (film, sound) it popularised ideas and spread them around the world. Benjamin considered how reproducing something changes it.

‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be… The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.’ Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Without the source the copy loses all meaning and authenticity.

‘… the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.’ Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Today we have a multitude of ‘authentic’ media experiences, particularly social media. It adds another layer to our experience of the world to perhaps a pure ‘Pure Aurora’ as Dan proposed, a more authentic space than the real world, that we get a sense of someone through their engagement with social media. Is this a more pure mode of engagement?

REMIX THEORY

The aesthetic of sampling by Eduardo Navas is a seamless music such as experience ‘Beat Matching’ a high hat beat. DJ was the true remixer and sampler, using two turntables, slip cueing and amplifying. Then home computers changed the mashup experience. Girl Talk music, is an artist who samples and remixes to form a totally new music track.

TASK

Listen to the Girl Talk mix and guess as many samples as possible:

• DMC
• The Cure
• Duran Duran
• Jackson 5
• Salt and Pepper
• Sonic Youth
• Led Zepplin
• Beatles
• INXS
• Mash up Break downs.
• Pop Art

Glitch Art

The digital fragmentation that occurs in digital forms are accentuated and/or exploited to find their own form or protocol.

‘Glitch art is often about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one. The perfect glitch shows how destruction can change into the creation of something original. Once the glitch is understood as an alternative mode of representation or a new language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitch-being is vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or appearance that is recognized as a novel form (of art). Artists that work with glitch processes are therefore often hunting for a fragile equilibrium; they search for the point when a new form is born from the blazed ashes of its precursor.’  Video Vortex Reader 2, p.341

REFLECTION

I didn’t realise the extent of mixing and sampling or how much you could change something into a completely new sounding track. It’s an interesting proposition that Benjamin raises about the authenticity of a something that has been reproduced. For example, listening to a recording of a live band is not really the same as attending the event. So, have you had a less authentic experience? I would counter what you haven’t experienced you can’t miss and with the reproduction you can project or find meaning to the music.

Institutions. What are they?

We can see institutions in a number of ways. For example, the police drama The Wire is comprised of institutions such as police, gangs, unions, city council and journalism. But there is also a well known institution that is used all around the world. That is the institution of marriage. Or ‘marri-arge’ to quote Little Britain. It is:

• governed by rules and expectations – faithful, values, loyalty
• Framed by a legal document and regulation
• Religion – another institution enmeshed with it.
• Widely accepted and practiced
• Cultural norms and rules
• Ceremony/rituals/symbols – rings
• Witnessing
• Government intervening, eclipsing the church’s role.
• Symbology – blue dress, white dress, tossing of bouquet
• Performed in cultural narratives – romantic love, kinship – family starts, extended with relatives and reproducing
• Wedding Industry – Commercial industry – photography, reception centres.

Apart from this relationship contract, there are the more obvious examples like Media Institutions.  These can include:

• ABC
• The News
• Journalism
• Newscorp
• Cinema
• Broadcast TV
• Community Radio
• PBS, RRR

Then there’s the Contemporary Institutions like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Newscorp, and other social networking sites.

REFLECTIONS

It was interesting to note that schools were noted as institutions by Michel Foucault, so this idea that institutions are about social control is a salient point. Do people act better or worse once the context is removed? It can be, as much as control, the glue that keeps people together eg. work friends.
Institutions also carry status like the BBC or Guardian or a low status like The Herald Sun or The Courier. Institutions give a legitimacy/illegitimacy and authority/no authority depending on how they are perceived by people outside and inside them. For example, Harvard University as opposed to going to Footscray University. One carries more academic status than the other.