Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts
Introduction Liv Hausken All through the 20th century, there have been rich and complex interchanges between aesthetic practices and media technologies. Along with the arrival of mass media, new technological forms of culture were gradually added to the old typologies of the arts. Photography, film, television, and video increasingly ap- peared in the curricula of art schools and were given separate departments in art museums. With the introduction of digital media technologies in the 1980s and 1990s, the means of production, storage, and distribution of mass media changed, and eventually, so did its uses. As artists adopted the technologies of mass media, the economy of fine art (like the economy of limited editions) was confronted with the logics of mass production and mass distribution. Thus, when visiting a contemporary art museum one might find, for example, such conceptually con- tradictory displays as “DVD, edition of 3” (see for instance Lev Manovich 2000). The increasing centrality of digital tools and technologies in all sorts of social practices has changed the media as we have known it. These social, cul- tural and technological changes in everyday life have also influenced artistic forms, as well as modes of imagination, expression, and critique. In these complex interchanges between aesthetic practices and media technolo- gies, media aesthetics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of research between media studies and the aesthetic disciplines. This field grew out of earlier attempts at theorizing about the relations between aesthetics, technology and media, such as media philosophy (Friedrich Kittler), medium theory (Joshua Meyrowitz), mediol- ogy (Régis Debray) and critical theory (most notably Walter Benjamin), and is influenced by current, aesthetic theories of what has been termed “new media” (Mark Hansen) and “visual culture” (W.J.T.
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