Digital Technology and Culture

A blog for students and friends of Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture Program

Information on Digital Media Worth Repeating

With so many new students in the Digital Technology & Culture Program this fall (by my count––40) it is probably a good idea to repeat a couple pieces of information about digital media that may help to make sense of this relatively new field . . .

Genres of Digital Media

Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media talks about 10 different types or what I refer to as "genres" of digital media. Since the book was published in 2001 and because Manovich hails from the very visual field of film studies, we involved in digital media in 2008 with no such training can expand this number to 13. Here they are:

websites
computer animation
computer games
digital cinema
digital video
virtual worlds
virtual reality
multimedia
interactive installations
human-computer interface
digital music
internet radio
digital photography

The last three are the additions, btw. And there should and will be more as we continue to develop new technologies.

Philosophical Underpinnings

Looking through what the various creators and critics of digital media have said about the field, one can easily conclude that there are specific and fundamental principles that lie at the heart of digital media. These principles set the field of digital media apart from many other fields and help to give it its uniqueness. Here are a few I have pulled together through the years and the citations from which I have drawn the information:

1. A computer is not a tool or prosthesis that helps us to accomplish something; rather, it is the medium in which we work. (Oliver Grau, New Media Art History, 2007 )

2. The medium affects the message. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967)

3. Text is any form of information by which we communicate an idea, feeling, or concept. (Mats Dahlstrom, “When Is a Text Text?,” 2002 )

4. Digital media are material texts. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

5. Criticism of digital media should be specific to digital media and relies on the sensory modalities of the body for that critique rather than abstract ideas or theories. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

6. The artifact of new media is just as important as the process it took to produce it. (Jan Van Looy & Jan Baetens, Close Reading New Media, 2003)

7. New media involves an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary study of art, science, and technology (Edward Shanken, "Introduction",Telematic Embrace, 2003 )

#7 takes me to an issue that has been scratching my brain––that is, the idea that digital media functions at the intersection of art, technology, and science. Personally, every time I read this in a book (most recently yesterday in Richard Colson’s The Fundamentals of Digital Art, which is a very good book, btw), I am bothered by the fact that these folks all write cogently and communicate clearly about digital media, making allusions, drawing upon metaphors, or using narratives to illustrate salient points about works that use allusions, metaphors, and narrative structure––and yet these artists and scholars do not acknowledge the influence of the Humanities in their own work or the works that they write about. Personally, I think it is time for us to see digital media as the intersection of art, technology, science AND THE HUMANITIES. Try to talk about Mark Amerika's Grammatron without utilizing some aspect of the literary. I dare you:)


I hope this information helps some of you in understanding a little better what you will learn in the DTC Program and provide a conceptual framework for the books you are reading and assignments you are undertaking in your courses.

--Dene Grigar

posted by: grigar at 14:29 | link | comments |

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