disgruntled photographer, here…

I think it requires a lot of knowledge and talent to convert an image into a painting – for example: involving transformation of perspective, reworking of light, restoring information. Funny thing about art is that it need not be technical, nor creative. Art requires a balance between these two methods of creation. I just feel that both mediums -the camera and the painting were crucial to advancing the technology and was important especially in relation to keeping the art moving forward, BUT I feel that painting helped paved the way for the photograph/film/camera in search for what is true reality.

Okay -yes, Benjamin you are right, film/camera was a big step in the age of mechanical reproduction of art, but could you show just a little love for the painter?

Disgruntled artist, here…….

I do agree that podcasts cannot afford the same “relationship” with the author as a blog can because one subscribes to the feed and many times listens on an ipod or other device at a later time, completely separating himself from the dialogue of other listeners. Part of reading/participating on a blog is reading not only the post, but also the comments of the other readers and responding to all of it as a whole.

So to copyright something we have to give it a sense of permanency. This made me think of Foucault and his text on “What is an Author.” The seemingly endless complexities involved with bringing a video game to existence (i.e. software, hardware, etc) makes me question even the consideration of having a copyright for it. On the other hand, I do believe in having some kind of acknowledgment in place of being the first (maybe by date/time) to establish an original idea. Never the less I don’t believe in intellectual property though.

We look at a painting of mountains and trees and know that it’s a painting. It’s only a copy of the real things, but we look at the interpretation of the mountains and trees. Then again, we wouldn’t say the mountains and trees in the painting are the real mountain and trees. It’s not the original, but it’s original in its own place.

This could tie back to what we were talking about last week with determining who is the real person if we break someone down in Mars and rebuild that person on Earth. The “aura” of a person seems much like the “soul.” But I don’t know if this is applicable to an existence versus an art, or if there is a difference. When I think of the soul this way, the human and the copy of the human would both have their own time and space. I know we discussed which human would be the real human at the very instant of duplication, since over time the two humans would grow differently depending on their surroundings and experiences. If time and space that gives this aura to art, it seems reasonable to think of time and space giving the soul to a person.

Nichols reads like a student paper. He’s taking Benjamin’s argument, adding his metaphor (the computer and cybernetic systems as new ways of thinking about society), and pointing out how the metaphor works with/contradicts Benjamin. A lot of what Nichols and Benjamin talk about can relate to ‘Remediation’, particularly immediacy and hypermediacy.

“illusion-promotion spectacles and dubious speculations(p. 232, Benjamin). He goes on to talk about how the camera becomes a substitute for the eye that lures the audience into a film. Sounds pretty close to immediacy…unless you make it flashy, then it would clearly be hypermediacy. Benjamin has written about new media before we could consider the term as having existed, and Nichols work emphasizes Benjamin’s words. Though at times, it seems the focus is more on the technical upgrades to media and less on the theoretical side. Maybe that’s just me.