Week 1 - Post Media Condition - Ars-onist

“The Post-Media Condition” by Peter Weibel offers a historical and political explanation of art in the era where New Media gains significant influence on varied practices of art. The distinction between knowledges established in ancient Greece, in a world where the perception of what constitutes the arts began through a hierarchical form of knowledge between the human mind and body. Aristotle argued of the sciences (epistemé) – ranging from arithmetic to rhetoric – reserved for free citizens, and the arts (techné) – from agriculture to sculpture – for the undignified labourers. The hierarchical distinction continued as the artes liberales – from grammar to arithmetic to music theory – formed the curriculum of our schools and universities, so they sought little competition in between themselves unlike the artes mechanicae. This then began ‘paragone,’ starting with painting and sculpting. They each argued on the merits and the ‘intellectual achievement’ of each, defending the technological medium of the art despite it being seen as unliberated crafts or trades work by the slave. Even centuries later, as we now have a different perception on the arts, we find that we continue this kind of thinking with media arts, as we still ‘devalue’ the artist as it depends on the technology and the machine, and now see the art preceding it as the esteemed ‘basis’ of it.

In the second reading “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”, Friedrich Kittler explores the impact of the digitalization on traditional media and their influence to the current one. He states that the new media reinvents the traditional painting & sculpture by absorbing its essence into itself: “compact disc digitalizes the gramophone, the video camera the cinema” [1]. The typewriter creates an homogeneous and standardized representation of the writer’s words by removing the interpretation found in hand written language. Kittler argues that this digital transformation makes the hallucinatory power of reading and writing obsolete by removing the author out of the equation. By the means of the binary representation of the digital data, his main arguments converge into the post-media condition creating a uniformity and interchangeability between various mediums of representation. Thus, merging the different mediums such as film, gramophone & typewriter into one central medium of knowledge giving life to the long gone authors through its channels. The latter aligns with Weibel's second phase of the post-media condition, "mixing of the media". The first phase of the post-media condition in Weibel's article is about the New Media gaining equality amongst traditional arts, but in Kittler's arguments there is a sense of superiority, or rather, devaluation of the traditional media by the homogenous and immense capacity of the new record devices.

[1] Kittler, Friedrich, Dorothea Von Mücke, and Philippe L. Similon. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter." October 41 (1987): p.118. doi:10.2307/778332.