WEEK TWO: EXPANDED MEDIA AND MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY
This was my first class and I felt so lost but Dr Ceicle was kind to go through all that I missed out on. I got to understand that expanded media involves the idea and process of expanding media techniques. It also involves experimenting with forms of media and technology. It also fosters interactivity with media. I also understood media archaeology as the understating new or emerging media by studying old media. It could also mean drawing the relation between new and old media. In media archaeology, it is believed that no media is dead because most new media exist as a result of the techniques that were employed in developing old media.
WE were split into groups and in our group (group3) we got to know ourselves better and discuss on the project we wanted to carry out. We decided to work on something educational. We also concluded that we would all go to make research about things that students would find educative, we would create a group chat where we would talk more and share individual responsibilities to make the work a success.
WORKSHOP
Dr Ceicile showed us the interactive media platform we will be using for our project. I found it really confusing but she gave us links to tutorials to watch to understand it better. We also got to see some videos to have an idea of what to do. We also talked about the interface in our group and I got to understand it better.
In our group meeting, we decided to work on a DIY PROJECT to teach students how to make a diary, stamp carving, paper folding and calligraphy. We had 3 meetings in total and we concluded that we would have 3 minutes for each video, we had a rough sketch of how the project was going to be, the aesthetic for the project and our individual responsibilities. Everyone was cooperative and we were able to complete the project in time. The only challenge we had was we had so many options in terms of the videos to work on but we were able to set our differences aside and go for what we thought was best for the audience. In all, the teamwork was awesome.
READINGS FOR THE WEEK
ZOMBIE MEDIA
Zombie media addresses both living and dead media culture. It also involves according to Bruce Sterling, he investigation of dead media ‘’ to map out the forgotten, out of use, obsolete and declare dysfunctional technology in order to better understand the nature of media.
Abandoned media or electronic media is not only the excavation ground for media archaeology interest, it is also one of the biggest threat to ecology in terms of the various toxins they are leaking back to nature. Discarded media technology is never just discarded, it goes through recycling centres, dismantling centres in Aisa and markets in Nigeria. Media kills nature as living deads.
The article also suggested that media archaeology need to become more political and articulate in relation to design practices.It also need to develop other methodologies. Another stance of zombie media is the work of reappropriation (to allocate or assign something in a new and different way) through circuit bending and hardware hacking methodologies. This means to extend the archaeological interests into design issues by actively repurposing things considered dead. The famous black boxes of media culture characterised by iphones and ipads are one of the biggest political and ecological question facing media theories and practices.
One of the things I found most interesting in this study is the Five-point manifesto of Zombie media
- We oppose the idea od dead media. media never dies, It may disappear in a popular sense but it never dies, it decays, it rots, it reforms, it remixes and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. It either stays as a residue to the soil and in the air as concrete dead media or reappropriated through artistic methodologies
- We oppose planned obsolesce. Planned obsolesce maintains ecologically unsupportable death that is destroying our milieus of living
- We oppose a demutualization of media and the opening, understanding and hacking of concealed or black-boxed systems whether as consumer producers or historical archives.
- We propose that media archaeology be an artistic methodology that follows in the traditions of appropriation, collage and remixing of materials and archives. Media archaeology has been successful in excavating histories of dead media, forgotten ideas, sidekicks and minor narratives but it is time to develop it from a textual method into a material methodology that takes into the account the political economy of contemporary media culture.
- We propose that reuse is an important contemporary culture especially within the context of electronic waste. ‘If it snaps shut, it shall snap open’. We argue that open and remix culture should be extended to physical artefacts.
AESTHETICS OF INTERACTION IN DIGITAL ART
The Aesthetics of play
Play is defined as a boundary concept i.e a concept useful for defining the research question that pertains to s variety of disciplines and for identifying the characters that unite or differentiate the individual perspectives. Regarding the relationship between play and aesthetics, Haizing pointed out that play is characterised by the impulse to create an orderly form which animates the activity. He believed that this was the reason why play is often found to be beautiful. According to Scheurel, the real phenomenon of play was the playing itself, not the player or the context of the play but the fact that the play was accomplished.
The increasing rejection of object orientation in art, the dematerialization of the artwork and the growing consideration given the recipient in the concept of art led new parallel between art and play. The fundamental characteristics of play include:
- Play is characterized by the freedom of the activity and by its unproductiveness from real life
- Play does not have a predictable course or outcome and it is based on inner infinitude.
- It is based on ruled and it resides in an artificial realm
These characteristics mainly refer to rule-based games and thus addresses specific structures of play.
I fond this week‘s topic really fascinating and I would love to work on something related to media archaeology for my project.
