Blog - Acknowledging the medium, but also its web of relations

I've talked about how hypermediacy confronts us with the medium, by acknowledging and addressing it. This was a trend that surfaced more clearly in modern art, in paintings as discussed in my previous post, but also in other forms of expression, such as in Dziga Vertov's movie 'Man with a movie camera'.

In the new digital media, it is not only the medium that surfaces and is brought to light, but the whole web of relations that makes the medium and the content possible. The piece of art within digital media is not an isolated piece that can be exhibited in a fictional museum of 'digital art', but is formed by the pre-existing content in an explicit way.

This could be compared to 'filmic quotes', where movies make allusions to older ones, such as when the film 'Metropolis' from 1927 quotes parts of the movie 'Cabiria' from 1914, making an analogy between the industrial mega-machine with the 'temple of Moloch'. However, the movie is still a 'stand-alone' piece, while digital art, specifically within the context of digital communication networks, only exists within the network. That is, if we forget that the movie also depends on a network to exist. The film only exists with projectors and spaces designed for its projection, which a Latourian conceptualization of actor-networks helps to illuminate.

I maintain, despite this, that hypermediacy goes one step further in digital expression media such as blogs. That is, because the external influences and references are explictly part of the content of a blog, not only implicitly as in the case of movies. The content is in part formed by windows to spatially and temporally distinct elements.