Sunday 18 February 2007

Media (hypermediacy, immediacy)

Velazquez Las Meninas
(Richard Hamilton Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?)

I want to show the following images, the first dated from 1656, by Diego Velazquez, and the second from 1956 by the collage artist Richard Hamilton.

The reason I'm showing these images, is to illustrate a particular way in which we use media for artistic self-expression. The two paintings are from very different periods. What they share in common, is an explicit acknowledgement of the media. In Velazquez period, media was usually withdrawn from the process of representation. It was merely a vehicle for achieving immediacy, which is the presence of the represented object(s) in face of the viewer. Of course, this desire for immediacy was never complete, since the complete 'erasure' of the media is impossible.

As a reaction to this, artists started to express themselves not only through the media as carrier of representations to an 'external' world, but through the media itself, as the collage work by Hamilton demonstrates. Contemporary art is marked by the fascination with media, and has moved away from the classic representations of scenes (real or imagined) closer to direct expression through manipulation of the media. This is framed by the concept of hypermediacy. In Velazquez' painting which I show above, hypermediacy is present in the awareness of the process of mediation. Velazquez paints himself in the process of painting the Spanish royal couple, which appear in the mirror, while their daughter stands in the center of the image next to the artist. In the later work of Hamilton, the act of mediation is at the center of the art work, in a more radical way, with its collage of different elements - many of which refer to media items in a culture obsessed with it.

Saturday 17 February 2007

Postsecret blog

Now I want to talk about a specific type of 'thick' blog, which motivated my interest as a nice example of remediated art.

The 'Postsecret' blog http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ is self-described as an 'ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard'. The experience translates real 'hard' media, that goes through postal service, computer digitalization, and ends in a digital weblog-style timeline among a multitude of secrets posted by other people. The blog keeper is only doing the task of 'remediating' (more on this concept soon) the received letters into the blog. The experience is one of sharing secret feelings anonymously with a wide audience, which may bring comfort to those who post them by the act of sharing itself, and possibly by receiving support from others in the form of feedback on the blog, and may also bring comfort to people who share the same feelings being exposed on the blog.
A fast skip through this blog revealed many touching, sincere thoughts, that brought me a heart-warming experience in an otherwise 'sterile' and isolated setting such as the one I am in right now - alone, sitting in front of the laptop screen.

thin and THICK blogs

I want to address and try to categorize the content of blogs. Blogs generate content at different levels. Some report on external news items, which can be of a specific kind: new gadgetry in the http://us.gizmodo.com/, technology and science in www.slashdot.org, political gossip in http://www.wonkette.com/, music in http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/, sports in http://www.arseblog.com/, or global(ised) culture in http://www.global-culture.org/. These are basically 'feed' blogs, which means that they feed into other sources for news. What they add, however, comes in two levels: a first level is the high degree of personal opinion and interpretation that is juxtaposed on the news, and the second level is the structuring of the diversity of information available around the blog author's own 'storytelling' line. These blogs I call them 'thin' blogs. They can be very thin when they are mostly about rearranging external information, or they can become progressively 'thicker' as opinions and other content is added to them.

'Thick' blogs are those where most content is 'new'. Occasional links to other blogs or sites may still appear, but the aim of these blogs is not about reporting on external happenings. This content can be in the form of expert opinion and advice, as in the case of the webdesign blog http://www.alistapart.com and the blog about photography http://www.digital-photography-school.com/, in the form of cooking recipes http://fireinmykitchen.blogspot.com/, personal ramblings about one's life http://www.myboyfriendisatwat.com/, or stories in prose http://www.waiterrant.net/.

The blog you are reading is, under this crude classification, a thick blog, since the starting point are my own thoughts about blogging. A pure distinction doesn't exist, but these two different patterns (starting from external news, or starting from own thoughts) can easily be found. Of course many blogs do not fall into one of the categories, but are rather at the intersection. Still I think it's a useful way to think about blogs, and the reasons for that will come in later posts.

Many of the blogs I refer to, I found them on the 'bloggie award' list for 2007: http://2007.bloggies.com/

Friday 16 February 2007

More about this blog


Why am I writing this blog?

This blog was born out of an essay idea for a course on 'Philosophical Anthropology', which I follow as part of a program in Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. I pretend to run a blog, where I reflect on it about blogs' possible cultural consequences, namely how the blog defines the subject. Concepts that will also be around are those of hypermediacy, immediacy, and remediation taken from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's book "Remediation", as well as notions of de-centereing, re-centering, and the creation of subject, from Petran Kockelkoren's book "Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre".

This is a new topic for me, and a very stimulating one. My course colleague Bernd Kottier is doing a blog about the same topic!

First post!

In this blog, I will talk about blogs as a mediating technology and try to address some of its cultural effects.

To do that, my first question is, what exactly is a blog? To make sense of the ever-growing number and variety of blogs popping up, I try to stick to what's common among all blogs. A blog exists within the wider digital media, but it imposes a specific form of layout. The layout consists in the linear ordering of user-generated or gathered content, in the form of 'posts', where the most recent posts are usually displayed first.

I think the true 'essence' of the blog media lies in this form of structuring information.


For more on blogs see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog