ranging from sight gag, to the fantastic, to R&D’s objective correlative. feel free to add more…
from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902, dir. Edwin S. Porter, Edison Studios):
from Videodrome (1983, dir. David Cronenberg)
from Sony, flexible OLED:
I’m rereading Lev Manovich’s wonderful The Language of New Media, and have come up against a wall. In a section on “navigable space,” Manovich writes that the phenomenon of navigability is not merely “a particular kind of interface to a database,” but “a cultural form in its own right” (252).
Manovich admits that the representation of space is basically the fundamental axiom of all western art, he argues that with the advent of computing, space itself becomes a “media type.”
For the first time, space becomes a media type. Just as other media types–audio, video, stills, and text–it can now be instantly transmitted, stored, and retrieved; compressed, reformatted, streamed, filtered, computed, programmed, and interacted with. In other words, all operations that are possible with media as a result of its conversion to computer data can also now apply to representations of 3D space. (252)
This just sends the mind reeling. Can’t basically anything be converted into computer data? Images of Mars are sent back from a fleet of satellites in orbit in the form of digital code. These images can be stored, retrieved, interacted with, etc., in especially fantastic ways with Google Maps, as I posted about before. But does this make Mars itself a medium or a “media type”? Or this just something else to post under the category of space as a media type. And, by “media type” does Manovich simply mean medium, as in one of the new media he seeks to define in his book?
What about an objects themselves, independent of the spatial field in which they are placed? Look at Shapeways, a website where people can upload designs of 3D objects, and have a company produce them using 3D printers. This object, uploaded in the form of an AutoCad file or something similar, is originally computer data (not converted into such), and it can be stored, retrieved, and when actually printed or made real, can be interacted with. But does this digital reproducibility of objects make the category of objects–any and all objects–a “media type”?
