Archive for the 'new media' Category
Sound has an amorphous quality about it that when coupled with the word ‘art’ presents a very real and immediate problem in terms of presentation in a gallery space. In its pure, unfiltered form sound has no tangible boundaries. It just is. Means used to create, capture, and transmit it often become the unwitting focus in presentations of sound-based works. Installation art approaches can engage audiences in active participation with the listening elements of the work. Yet, often, in the journey from sound to sound art, visual representations become more the focus. How can we take attention away from the vehicles, trappings or visual representations of sound and place it back where it belongs?
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The theorist George Landow, writing on Hypertext, urges us to forget the usual conceptual elements which hold language together and, instead, use new substitutes ‘such as multilinearity, nodes, links, or networks.’ Elements of syntax - and, when, so, or - are now converted to a range of physical manoeuvres: mouse up, mouse over, mouse down etc. A click now links us to our mediated world.’ In this new world, the internet is often described as a virtual landscape without a horizon but, with the average lifespan of a website measured in months rather than years, in practice it has surprisingly many broken links/dead-ends. Although the web links us to snapshots of ‘history’ in unlimited supply, it has no memory - just a post saying ‘this page is no longer on this server…’
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Somewhat late in the day, in reference to an earlier post on Limited Language, “After Digital” [April 2005]…
The posting points to the assumption, which in some respects is fairly entrenched already, that we have the hang of digital media, we can sit down, put our feet up in front of the widescreen, its freeview box and broadband access, and work out what our options are. [In the last 12 months, broadband and blog sites have made one’s relationship with “the digital world out there” much more effortless - one quickly forgets how 56K dial-up used to limit one’s range. Graphic Design has once again become a hot discussion point - what’s it all about? - but the discourse is mostly refereed by those that were there the last time round. Here we go again.]
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