Dirt(y) media: Dirt in ecological media art practices

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110369
Author(s):  
Caleb Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Media Art ◽  
Physical Practice ◽  
International Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Media

While we may imagine that the unblemished surfaces of our shiny devices are free from the grime of the everyday – flawless and pure – we do not have to dig far below the surface to find that these technologies are anything but untainted and dirt-free. This realisation is at the heart of a shift in international media art towards materials based media. While there have been numerous books and papers describing a materials based media within the notion of ‘media ecologies’, there is more to be learnt from media art, an area that both critiques media and information, and which develops practices that engage in issues around the materiality of media technologies. This article will specifically address dirt through media ecologies by investigating how media artists have made their work literally dirty. The first section of the article critically addresses the notion of media as being material, as opposed to the imagined as pristine, pure and immaterial, and being so, is able to become dirty. The second section looks to a pre-history of dirt(y) media found in the work of artists Milan Knížák and Christian Marclay. The remainder of the article discusses a shift in the approach to contemporary media art that turns away from the digital studio towards a resolutely analogue and physical practice.

From Vertical Roll to .MOV File

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Annie Dell'Aria
Keyword(s):  
Single Channel ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Media Art ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Screen Media ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Bruce Nauman

In this article, I examine artworks from two periods in the history of media art—the 1970s and the 2010s—to demonstrate how changes in our haptic relationship to screen media shift the site of criticality in contemporary media art from disruption of electronic feedback toward an intensification and embrace of image flows that actively seek the viewer's touch and gesture. I situate video art within the shifting concept of flow in everyday media consumption, reading video art practices within a larger matrix of bodily and cultural engagement with screens. I locate touch and gesture as both themes in the content of single-channel works and components of the structure of video installation. Artists discussed include Camille Henrot, Joan Jonas, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bruce Nauman, and Hito Steyerl. My analysis bridges media theory and art history with close readings of salient works of art, connecting the structure of artworks employing haptic input to shifts in the broader media ecology and the dynamic interplay of touch, image, and power under our fingertips.

Shaping Interactive Media with the Sewing Machine

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Reimann
Keyword(s):  
Interactive Media ◽  
Media Art ◽  
Electronic Textiles ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Sewing Machine ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Smart Textile ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Flexible Applications

In the context of converging media technologies, the concept of mobile media embedded in wearable material was introduced. Wearable Computing, Fashionable Technology, and Smart Textile are being developed at the intersection of media, art, design, computer science, and engineering. However, in Germany, little research has been undertaken into Smart Textile in education1. Those activities are not realized at school in the context of artistic processes in general MINT2 education in classroom settings. In order to research the interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, hard and software tools, such as Arduino LilyPad, a programmable board designed for stitching into clothing and flexible applications are scrutinized. In the project, contemporary media art projects in the field of Fashionable Technology are explored to inspire interdisciplinary technology education. The project described in this paper engages girls in technology and engineering by integrating artistic processes as well as a more playcentric approach to technology and engineering education.

scholarly journals MEDIA ART IN MODERN SYNTHESIS OF ARTS IN ARCHITECTURE

2021 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Tetiana Rusevych ◽  
Hanna Zavadska
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Modern Synthesis ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Media Art ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact

The article substantiates the problem of synthesis of media art in the modern synthesis of arts in architecture, provides a definition of the term " Media Art" as a higher form of artistic development. Attention is paid to the analysis of recent research and publications devoted to the study of the artistic component of interactive design in the synthesis of the arts of architectural space, the influence of media technologies on the formation of the architectural image of art centers, describing trends in media technology in architecture. The purpose of the article is to consider the forms of media art, their role in the synthesis of arts in architecture. The article emphasizes the objects created and embodied in Ukraine, describes the synthesis of arts from the angle of influence of media art on human perception and outlines the prospects for development. The history of the synthesis of arts in architecture from ancient times, the development of the synthesis of arts in the Art Nouveau style, the preconditions for the emergence of media art are briefly described. The synthesis of media art and architecture, interaction with other arts, namely painting, sculpture, music and others is considered on the example of the multimedia center Atelier des Lumières – "Workshop of the World" in Paris, which specializes in digital art exhibitions; Ukraine WOW exhibition in Kyiv, which is equipped with various forms of media art; media facades in Kyiv; media cube on the facade of Chicago Central House, which is the first media sculpture in Europe. The definition of "media facades" is also given and the influence of media technologies on the emotional and psychological state of a person is considered. Examples of interaction of various forms of media art with architecture are given. The conclusions determine the role of media art in architecture, the impact of media technology on human psychology, outline the prospects for the development of media art in the modern synthesis of arts in architecture.

Shaping Interactive Media with the Sewing Machine

2012 ◽  
pp. 1342-1351
Author(s):  
Daniela Reimann
Keyword(s):  
Interactive Media ◽  
Media Art ◽  
Electronic Textiles ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Technology And Engineering Education ◽  
Smart Textile ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Flexible Applications

In the context of converging media technologies, the concept of mobile media embedded in wearable material was introduced. Wearable Computing, Fashionable Technology, and Smart Textile are being developed at the intersection of media, art, design, computer science, and engineering. However, in Germany, little research has been undertaken into Smart Textile in education1. Those activities are not realized at school in the context of artistic processes in general MINT2 education in classroom settings. In order to research the interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, hard and software tools, such as Arduino LilyPad, a programmable board designed for stitching into clothing and flexible applications are scrutinized. In the project, contemporary media art projects in the field of Fashionable Technology are explored to inspire interdisciplinary technology education. The project described in this paper engages girls in technology and engineering by integrating artistic processes as well as a more playcentric approach to technology and engineering education.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Literal Media Ecology: Crisis in the Conditions of Production

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 486-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett R. Caraway
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Energy Savings ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Environmental Responsibility ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Matter Energy

This article outlines a socio-political theory appropriate for the study of the ecological repercussions of contemporary media technologies. More specifically, this approach provides a means of assessing the material impacts of media technologies and the representations of capitalist ecological crises. This approach builds on the work of ecological economists, ecosocialist scholars, and Marx’s writings on the conditions of production to argue that capitalism necessarily results in ecological destabilization. Taking Apple’s 2016 Environmental Responsibility Report as a case study, the article uses the theory to analyze Apple’s responses to ecological crises. The article asserts that Apple’s reactions are emblematic of the capitalist compulsion for increasing rates of productivity. However, unless the matter/energy savings achieved through higher rates of productivity surpass the overall increase in the flow of matter/energy in production, ecological crises will continue. Ultimately, capital accumulation ensures continued ecological destabilization.

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