new media cultures

Technology used to be associated with things designed to make life easier, to help us accomplish our goals more easily and efficiently. These were anything from small prosthetics to larger devices which help us understand the world beyond our own.

We looked at two artists involved with the use of technology. They no longer look at how technology can be used to understand the universe and instead go post-planetary by aiming technology towards their own bodies. Technology of this kind starts to take on a performative quality.

"Notion of technology invading the body"
Stelarc

Stelarc, an Australian artist, radically rethinks what the body is and what it needs to do. He pushes it to the limits of endurance by creating prosthetics which he attaches to his own body to enhance his lifestyle and make him more functional.

"The first phase of technology contained the body, whereas now miniaturised technology can be implemented into the body. If the technology is small,the body acts as if it were not there, it becomes a component"

Another example we looked at was French artist Orlan who challenges the conventional idea of how the body is percieved. She uses technology intervention to transform her appearance, quite literally being operated on to gain the "perfect" face. The operation was filmed and played live to audiences in a gallery.
Orlan also considerss how the theatre in relation to surgery seem to sit hand in hand, with the very idea of an operating theatre for example.

Both these artists are not in my opinion trying to create a new ideal human, but are definately pushing the human to it's limits. In a society which now depends upon technology so heavily, will the human body be forced to change and progress to fit into a technology saturated environment?

Videodrome - Cronenburg 1982

The film explores some of the results of human interaction with technology.

We see the main character unable to distinguish between virtual reality and "reality" itself. We see his fantasies and apparent nightmares become real, and his life becomes very much like a film.

Jean Bauldrillard is quoted:

"that we live like they do in the movies - our lives are now nothing more than paradies of what we see projected on the myriad screens that surround us. We compare everything we do to the idealised portrayals with which we are presented."

within the first seminar the meaning of media as a word was discussed. among other definitions those of information exchange, communication and classification were prominent.
it was also discussed that "media" in many people's eyes, could be defined as something which was literally used to mediate, to stand between you and something else. for example,the physical form of a television, which itself gets in the way of real communication and relationships, therefore causing the loss of the fluid and responsive nature of real communication. much like a pod-cast!

perhaps then it would be fair to say that the media or medium used in communication can change the real message, or at least the very nature of it.
basically the term new media culture is complex, and we struggled to define it. when defining the term there was a feeling of wanting to look back and try to relate to it's origins. however, this module will probably see us looking more at the ways we,as a society, relate to one another and explore many new possibilities, rather than defining things and coming up with definates.
it is essentially a set of undefined words used to try to define something which itself is undefinable.