media

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future. Source: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/deep-time-media

“Between Floors: The Ups and Downs of Mediated Narrative” and the accompanying creative remediation project, “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” meld theory and practice of print with electronic literature and installation art. I argue that as the medium changes, the narrative is transformed. The narrative can be reconstructed and pieced together as the reader or viewer becomes increasingly involved, even embodied within the work. This embodiment is what Nathaniel Stern calls “Moving and thinking and feeling” (1) and can result in a more direct emotional experience. The form, structure, and medium (sjužet) rely on authorial intention, yet as a narrative becomes more interactive and experiential the feedback loop shifts, placing meaning, message, and construction of narrative (fabula) between media and reader/viewer. This necessarily complicates the notion of authorship, yet within an embodied space, such as the installations included in this analysis, there is a potential for greater emotional understanding between author/artist and reader/viewer. In the print story “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” the protagonist, June, visits her father in a hospital after a tragedy and ends up spending the rest of her life there. The metaphor of an elevator throughout the print, electronic, and installation versions furthers the trapped, claustrophobic feeling of the narrative as well as the ups and downs of relationships and grief. Pieces of the narrative remain recognizable through the electronic literature and installation, yet as the reader/viewer is increasingly immersed in the narrative, it becomes his or her own—a more subjective and overwhelming emotional experience. The elevator metaphor extends through the analysis—an emblem of traditional linear narratives and the narrative arc and technological immersion. The analysis explores theories of language, medium, authorship, nonlinearity, interactivity, and embodiment through existing narrative, new media, and installation theorists such as Peter Brooks, Marshall McLuhan, and Nathaniel Stern. This dissertation and to an extent, experiment, uses theory and practice to illuminate narrative using a recombination of existing theory and an original remediation in three distinct forms, to further the understanding of the nature of narratives, media, authors, and readers, while blurring boundaries between disciplines.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.

(Source: Stanford University Press catalog copy)

ENGLISH SUMMARY Digital Poetry: Aesthetic analysis and the role ofmediality in the communication of artwork Digital poetry (language-based digital art) is a global, interdisciplinary movement consisting of poets, artists and programmers who study and develop opportunities for programmed writing. Digital poetry combines writing with animation, images and sound. There are moving letters, interaction and autogenerative programming. Some digital poems also consist of actual programming code. Digital poetry can be colourful, expressive, technologically advanced, organic, delicate and minimalistic. The thesis consists of analyses of selected examples of digital poetry and investigates, discusses and demonstrates how digital poetry can be analysed. This results in a wide range of theoretical issues concerning genre and intermediality, media philosophical questions regarding technologies of writing and issues related to programming, materiality, temporality and agency. The thesis is a methodological reflection on which concepts should be applied and what new set of questions should be asked in the analysis of digital poetry and contemporary digital art in a broader sense. The methodological approach is based on the theory of enunciation. This means that rather than focusing on the artwork as object or on the experience of the artwork, the analysis focuses on the relation between object and recipient and investigates the specific conditions for experience provided by the artwork. Throughout the thesis, this analytical approach is supplied with investigations that examine issues related to medial issues and their effect on the communication of artwork. The thesis contributes to the research field of digital literature with aesthetic analyses of digital poems. It argues that the analysis of operational logics (i.e. formal studies of code) and hermeneutic traditions fail to provide adequate tools to analyse the potential experiences and effects of digital poetry. Digital poetry is in the thesis characterised as a diaspora in continuation of historical literary avant-gardes, but it is also considered important to include comparative perspectives on other art forms and genres than the literary and in general to move away from literary entrenched logics by, among other things, using the more inclusive terms ‘work’ and ‘recipient’ instead of ‘text’ and ‘reader’. The thesis consists of an introduction to digital poetry, as well as to the methodology, questions and concerns of the research project. This is followed by six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is called ‘MO [VE.MEN] TION – Code, Materiality and Concretism in Digital Poetry’. The Australian poet mez and her work practice in which programming languages are combined with phonetic English are analysed. This raises questions of programming language versus natural language, and drawing on the theories of N. Katherine Hayles and Nelson Goodman, among others, questions concerning materiality are explored. How is materiality complex in the digital field where works should be regarded as processes and events rather than as objects? This procedural nature is made explicit in the digital poem ‘La série des U’ where the letters move, and it is investigated how that affects the meaning. The chapter finally investigates issues of concretism through a short outline of historical concrete movements in various art forms, and it discusses why digital poetry is not concretistic in the same way; historical concrete works usually experiment with the limits of the work's own art form, while digital poetry is too complex a mixture of art forms to be determined at all. Digital poetry is distinctly multimodal, which among other things means that you cannot operate with notions such as ‘writing’ or ‘text’ as the smallest medial units. This fact is important for the development of a multimodal approach to the analysis of digital poetry. Chapter two is named ‘Mediality and Historical Language Technologies’. Drawing on Walter J. Ong and Friedrich A. Kittler's analysis of historical language technologies the chapter argues for the use of a broad concept of media. As W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen have argued, the collective singular media could be used as a third term capable of bridging, or ‘mediating’, the binaries (empirical versus interpretive, form versus content, etc.) that have structured media studies until now. This bridging is exemplified by how analyses of ‘moveable writing’ are interested in the meaning as well as the effects hereof. However, analyses should not exclude empirical interest in the digital computer as a ‘language technology’ that determines the moving letters. Based on the broad media concept, chapter three, ‘Art Form, Mixture, Hybrid – The Role of Multimodality in The Communication of the Artwork’, develops an analytical approach that helps to avoid notions such as ‘writing’ and ‘text’, as the smallest medial units, by instead operating with Lars Elleström’s model of the modalities of media, in which all media consist of material, spatiotemporal, sensory and semiotic modalities. This terminology is applied in an analysis of the Swedish poem ‘Väljarna’ [The Electorates] by Johannes Helden. It is argued that traditional art forms can be defined by their specific combination of the four modalities, but that digital poetry as a genre is so composite that each new work will constitute a new combination of the four modalities. This is used as an argument to move the model from a descriptive level to an analytic one to be used on types of works where the combination of modalities is precisely ‘new’ and therefore can be said to be explored at the level of signification. The mode of investigating how the medial (in this case the multimodal) affects the communication of the works is an important part of the methodology of the thesis, and it is repeated in the last three chapters which focus on other medial elements: issues concerning programming, temporality and distributions of agency, respectively. Chapter four is called ‘Limits of Sensing, Incestuous Interaction and Breathing Letters – On Secrets of Programming and its Role in the Communication of the Work’. The chapter analyses David Jhave Johnston's digital poem ‘Human-Mind-Machine’ and discusses how knowledge of programming can be incorporated in the analysis if relevant characteristics are incomprehensible on the phenomenological level. In continuation hereof the differences between human and machine ‘senses’ and issues of interpretation and agency are investigated, followed by a discussion of whether a concept such as ‘liveness’, which is otherwise attributed to human bodies, can be used to denote the performance of digital programmes. The issue of secret programming is also discussed as a cultural issue relating to secret surveillance of data. Chapter five bears the title ‘WHEN NOW IS MORE NOW THAN NOW - On the Role of Temporality in the Communication of the Work’. By focusing on specific temporal organisations and their significance, the chapter analyses ‘Mémoire Involuntaire no. 1’ by Braxton Soderman, ‘Dada Newfeed’ by Eugenio Tisseli and ‘Last Life: Your life. Your time’ by Gregory Chatonsky as well as other types of works and digital artefacts. The analyses explore how the works thematise issues of presence, memory and trace, and focuses on how the temporal organisation determines different senders and subjects. How does it, for instance, affect the significance of pronouns in a digital poem where the words move about? The chapter makes use of Paul Ricoeur’s differentiations between cosmic, phenomenological and historical times, Bernard Stiegler’s theory concerning the relation between time, technology and memory and his concept of tertiary memory, and Mark B. N. Hansen's concept of ‘diachrone things’. The analyses, among other things, determine how moving letters (also in artefacts that are not poetry or art) can ‘outsource’ the communication in the sense that a statement, even though it has a specific sender, has never been formulated by a subject. This interest in the relation between medial forms and the determination of a subject is continued in the thesis’s sixth and final chapter titled ‘Cyber- identities and Economies of Communication - on the Role of Distributions of Agency in the Communication of the Work’. The chapter's analysis is, among other things, motivated and inspired by Bernard Stiegler’s criticism of contemporary communication technologies that the user is unable to understand, influence and develop. Through analysis of ‘_cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log 07/08 XXtracts_.’ by mez, it is studied how agency is distributed in works where the medium or the technology appears to control the communication or where it is obvious that a sender has been ‘communicating’ with the technology before communicating with us. This analysis provides an opportunity to discuss issues related to the interpellation of communication technologies and further discuss possibilities for various Internet identities and their correlations with medial conditions. The thesis is a contribution to the research field of digital literature, but it is also a contribution to intermediality studies, using Elleström’s model of the modalities of media to describe modalities and their composition in addition to talking about arts (e.g., literature and visual arts) or ‘basic media’ (e.g., text and image) and their combinations. Furthermore, it is argued that intermedial and multimodal dimensions should be treated not only on a descriptive level when they are essential to the creation of meaning and therefore should be analysed. Hence, the thesis also contributes to the development of methods of aesthetic analysis by supplementing them with a medial sensibility. The mindset behind the broad mediality concept and the model of the modalities of media can contribute with analyses that avoid dichotomous differences between human and machine performances, between analogue and digital media, between ‘reality’ and ‘Internet’. At the same time, the broad mediality concept and the model of the modalities of media provide opportunities for an analytically accurate identification of these phenomena and their distinct differences. It is an approach that has far-reaching potential for further developments, e.g. in connection with studies of relations between communication and identity in different media.