new media cultures

"Eye Of The Law"

2006-12-24T11:30:32+01:00

up to 300 cameras see us everyday, they monitor our every move. interactions with people, visits to cash machines, even who we are calling on our mobiles.

where did these ideas come from? what do they mean?

it's seemingly all about our freedom. by having our every move monitored it is some how protecting and maintaining our quality of life and therefore, our freedom. this relates to the idea of knowledge being power, therefore to know eveything is to have complete power. this in turn relates to Marx ideals of people thinking they're free. free to live anywhere and do anything, however it will always be within chains, or within the "eye of the law".

in the nineteenth century when photography was born, it was used to record crime scenes so police no longer had to rely upon witnesses and interpreted drawings. the idea of looking down on the body/scene could be similar to the idea of "a view from heaven". perhaps from there on there becomes an obsession with looking down on people, on everything, and again, gaining the power of knowledge.

good examples of this are Baudrillard, Paris. he created wider streets for better quality of life, but perhaps also it made it easier to monitor and control people. it regulated social behaviour, much like the regulating of daylight hours act. it was originally brought in so that the more daylight we had, the more working hours there woud be. pub opening hours were also restricted, which primarily set out to regulate how much alcohol people consumed,and by making an eleven o'clock deadline also meant that hopefully, people would have enough time to sober up for work the next day.
this links well with more recent idea of monitoring the work place. this is suppossed to be for workers safety, but it mostly generates competative behaviours between workers trying to perform better than one another.

take Los Angeles for another example, the LAPD run the city like a military mission. they have special "bum proof" benches within the city, designed to be deliberatley uncomfortable, only really good for sitting on for short periods of time and definately not for lying on! even going as far as not having any public toilets and only having them within already manned buildings, where "bums" would probably never gain entry.

overall, i've viewed CCTV and the monitoring of people as a negative thing, however, in terms of crime prevention, observation has been responsible for helping to catch huge numbers of criminals, so for that reason alone it is important to recognise both it's positives and negatives of this new type of culture.

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Digital Aesthetics

2006-12-23T23:52:05+01:00

in this lecture we looked at photography mainly and the ways in which the adoption of new technologies and the development of the digital has created new possibilities for photography.

there is now much debate surrounding the authenticity of many images, and the nature of any intervention from the author/photographer. images cease to be a stable and accurate representation of reality due to things such as photo-shop, and other digital programmes.
the sophistication of such things means an image can be manipulated and distorted without it ever being obvious to the human eye.

are we now entering a "post-photographic" world?

with mass ownership of digital cameras, even the hit and miss nature of the snap shot is disappearig and being replaced with a disposable culture, where an image anything other than "perfect" is thrown away.

are we now faced with a false representation of reality? will digital artists develop a new aesthetic, or will we never be able to distinguish the reworked form the real?

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Trouble, trouble!!!

2006-12-23T23:39:17+01:00

this entry comes to you much later than i anticipated, and is now going to be more similar to a rant than my orignal material. i have had so much trouble getting to grips with this blog site, and can only apologise for this delay, and can quite honestly only blame myself.

I AM A SELF CONFESSED TECHNOLOGY-PHOBIC!

i wanted to write about how rubbish i am at using technology as i feel it links in well with some of the issues i've looked at whilst doing this New Media Cultures module. i have stated in my very own work how reliant people have, and will increasingly more, become upon technology, and the "so-called" simplicity and ease of which we can use it. well,im afraid i am going back on my word.

when setting up my blog page i somehow managed to type the wrong email address in my profile. so when the site was trying to send me a confirming email i was unable to reply, as i did not officially exist! this then led me to accidently (don't ask me how!) create a completely new blog site, with a completely new name.
so as you can probably tell, i don't know now if im coming or going!

sometimes i feel much like an old woman, who is struggling to keep up with advances in technology, and feel it could perhaps be my hard yet useless efforts at trying to catch up which will send me grey before my time......im 21 for goodness sake!

so although it states all my blogs have been posted on the 23rd dec. i can asure you that is simply because i copied and pasted(yes,i can just about manage to do that!) from my original blog pages to these ones...although it did take me ages to figure out what to do for the best!

thanks for listening to my rant, and hope you have a merry xmas.

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Post Human Technology

2006-12-23T23:22:32+01:00

The Post Human Technological
by katiemcgreevy @ 19 Nov. 2006 - 18:00:29
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?

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Videodrome - Cronenburg 1982

2006-12-23T23:19:26+01:00

Videodrome
by katiemcgreevy @ 06 Nov. 2006 - 20:19:21
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."

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What is New Media Culture?

2006-12-23T23:17:09+01:00

what is new mew media culture?
by katiemcgreevy @ 02 Nov. 2006 - 20:30:26
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.

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