Lecture Notes: Media Specificity

Definition: Material or technical means of expression

The physical nature of any given thing and its relationship to the environment determines the way it works or operates

Tufte argues Powerpoints framework inherently makes it difficult to communicate with an audience with the bullet point delivery

Encourages speakers to create slides with quick fire bullet points and incomplete lists with bullets

Our medium specificity is that we are biological creatures. Organic in nature, we have a close genetic connection to the animal world. 

Tools are the extension of our human body. e.g. telescopes and glasses, microscopes and magnifying glasses. All use our body as the main source

The first hearing products actually took the form of our body and looked like giant ears

New technologies tend to mimic old technologies, sometime for aesthetic reasons?

Medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt - Noel Carroll 2008

E.g. when in prison negative sanctions introduced to encourage normative behaviour

'An artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic proporties of its own medium' - Lessing 1776

Medium/media specifity is a term used in aesthetics and art criticism

medium specifity can be used as an aesthetic judgement tool, it can be used to ask the question "Does this work fulfil the promise contained in the medium used to bring the artwork into existence?"

Micheal Fried 1966 essay "Art and Objecthood" is a criticism on minimal art for producing work that takes Greenbergs plea for purity too far. For producing effects that do not derive from the work itself, but instead are dependent on the viewers' relationship with the object

"the negation of art" Fried 1967

'The medium is the massage' is a typo that was kept

We reshape ourselves through technology, our surroundings and the people we meet

Marshall McLuhan

Our social patterns are shaped by media: e.g. newspaper/walkman/mobile phone/cinema etc

"Electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social independence and every aspect of our social lives" MM

"The alphabet created forgetfulness" - Socrates

We even change the structure of our room to face the TV

Technology as media extensions:

• Footprints
• Painting
• Writing
• Photography
• Silent film
• Sound photography
• CD
• DVD
• MP3
• TV
• Computers
• Audio Cassettes
• Magnetic tape

In the 20's 10-inch 78rpm Shellac gramophone disc became the most popular recording medium

95% of popular songs still fit the 3 minute idea that was born in the 20s because of technological limitations

Songs have full length - and 'radio edits' which are cut to around 3 minutes for maximum effect and no 'played out long' sections

medium specificity has had a profound effect on photography. early photography struggled to find it's own place and market in the world, compared to it's competitors like paintings

Art photographers such as Stieglitz, Weston and Strand argued that in order for photogrpahy to be successful it should work with and to the strength of it's own capabilities. So photography moved away from trying to emulate paintings in the 19th century

Even photographic lens are formed and shaped around the eye. Another example of man-made objects almost being an extension of the human body

"Hendrix played so effortlessly, it appeared to be a part of his body" - Jimi Hendrix by Sharon Larence P. xii

The Wizard of Oz (1939) Kansas is in B&W and OZ is in Technicolour

Battleship Potemkin - Eisenstein

Citizen Kane - Wells

What Dreams May Come - starring Robin Williams

Highly saturated colour pallette, almost like a painting. When action is supposed to take place in someones painting it's highly saturated, once it's back in the 'real-world' it switches back to a normal Kodak stock

The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach

Comics all have similar characteristics, gutters, panels, individual panels, speech bubbles, thought bubbles, 

layout and format

in graphics, format often rules: AI, GIFS, JPEGS, etc

Format - Ambrose & Harris

The design grid is a ghost of Guttenberg from 1439

paper sizes / stock etc all define how we physically interact with the media

THE FUTURE?

Technological advancements and convergence, is beginning to define the way societies interact and organise themselves.