The C+ Gang - Week 1 - Post Media Condition and etc.

Our discussion this week began with the question of how the distinction between "sophisticated arts" and "technical practices" of ancient times gave birth to media arts as we know them today. To start things off, we looked at Peter Weibel's Post Media Condition and how he summarized the changes to and perceptions of art from Ancient Greece to today. We explored how Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, "techne" and "episteme", changed to a distinction between the arts themselves in the roman era. From then on, the arts became artes liberales and artes mechanicae. As we understand, artes liberales became what is the sciences of today and formed the curriculum of free citizens back then, while artes mechanicae was still technical knowhow reserved for slaves or wage laborers. After that, we came to an agreement that artes mechanicae was removed from that umbrella by people like Diderot in his Encyclopedie and that the lines became blurred. We thought that there were arguments made about which art forms were superior and that no one came to an agreement until media arts completely removed the distinctions between art forms. At that point, all art forms became "old media". We then discussed how media, as the text puts it, was all encompassing and that the first phase in "the post media condition" involved the dissolution of boundaries between art forms. Following that, we finished off this reading by looking at examples of the second phase of the "post media condition", which involves the mixing and mashing of arts. For instance, we brought forth the idea of a digital collage, which would include sound, video, photography, painting and other art forms. So, in conclusion, media arts tried to break out of the stigma of being looked down upon as mechanical arts.

Following the first part of the discussion, we came to the conclusion that the first reading discusses the role of media arts in the comparison between arts liberales and arts mechanicae and that, in short, media arts are shunned and not appreciated as a form of art. However, we thought that the second reading, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich Kittler, was more about how media arts has rendered writing and literature obsolete as it took its place as a better method for keeping track of history and its events. For example, the writer Balzac was fearful of the rise of photography as, according to him, "photo albums establish an infinitely more precise realm of the dead" (11) than what he could accomplish with his literature. On top of that, we saw that the rise of the phonograph and cinematography put another nail in the coffin because of their ability to record "time" in a way that writing never could. According to the text, "time is what determines the limit of all arts" (5). Furthermore, we explored the part of how handwriting, while possibly leaving the writer exposed, fails to capture the perfect essence of the moment in ways that other medias like cinema can. This makes the writing medium less than ideal. However, we didn't quite come around to fully understanding how machines and media arts came to rob poetry and literature of their romantic meanings, but we acknowledge that it has something to do with machinery being able to replicate everything precisely and removing interpretation, as well as their "hallucinatory powers" (11) Overall, we felt like this text was quite unclear and convoluted in its examples and what exactly it wanted to cover, but we did our best to try and understand it.