Facing Digital Realities: Where Media Do Not Mix (original) (raw)
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Richard Wagner's Blueprint for Multimedia
Humanities and Technology Review, 2020
It’s no easy thing to write thoughtfully about the 19th century composer Richard Wagner without offending some people. To do so, one must acknowledge his antisemitism and set it aside to review his work as an artist, a theorist and a composer. In this essay, my hope is to address his ideas as a music and drama theorist with regard to what he called “The Art-Work of the Future.” At the heart of his theory was an abstract idea he described as “the total work of art,” which he identified as Gesamtkunstwerk. To achieve the “total work of art,” he suggested that the artist of the future would find a way to artfully blend what he described as the muses for “dance,” “music” and “poetry” to create a complete and total work of multimedia storytelling. Wagner published his thoughts on this idea back in 1849, which means, the concepts for multimedia storytelling have been around for over 170 years. In this essay, I address the blueprint for multimedia as prescribed by Richard Wagner and then review some of the recent experiments produced by legacy media during the last decade. Along the way, I make some observations about Wagner’s understanding of “dance,” “music” and “poetry” and close by offering some conclusions about where multimedia storytelling may be headed.
One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – as for instance text and sound – but between very different media aspects such as “sound” and “microphone” and “art”. On behalf of such an analysis the article claims that these art projects can be seen as an articulation of an auditory turn, in which sound no longer appears to be a transparent channel between us and the world, but rather a media conditioning that which is experienced.
Listening to the world. Sound, Media and Intermediality in Contemporary Sound Art
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2011
One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – a...
"Acoustic, Visual, and Aural Space: The Quest for Virtual Reality in Musical Reproduction"
Explorations in Media Ecology {EME}, 8(2), 2009
Ever since Edison’s invention of the phonograph, both recordists and listeners have sought a faithful reproduction of the original. But the identity of that “original” is problematic, since all reproduction depends upon playing a trick on the mind. With some notable exceptions, both studio and concert recordings are pastiches of individual tracks, whose aim is to trick the mind into perceiving the performers spread out in an aural space mapped out acoustically from an ideal perspective. But standard stereophonic systems are inherently incapable of putting the listeners in the virtual presence of the performers, since reverberation and other acoustic signatures of the performing environment all come from in front of listeners, rather than emerging from all sides. Digital surround sound aims at fulfilling the dream of recreating performances in a seamless aural space. Digitization has the promise of creating a virtual reality whose hyperrealism depends on manipulating the brain’s adaptive cognitive structures developed over millennia of evolutionary selection. The issues raised by this urge towards transparent reproducibility of the original performance can be explored by applying Walter Benjamin’s critique of the reduction of the “aura” of a work of art in mechanical reproduction. The nature of mobile listening systems subjects them to Benjamin’s critique of the inauthenticity of mechanical reproduction. However, the aims of “high-end” audio reveal the inherent visual bias of Benjamin’s aesthetic, which ignores G. E. Lessing’s distinction between the static and rhythmical arts. Rather than exemplifying a process of mechanical reproduction, the goal of high-end audio is to achieve electromechanical etherialization.
(Dis-)embodied Voices and Digital Liveness: Music Theatre in Lockdown
INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology 6: Music, Art and Humanities in the Time of Global Crisis, 2021
"20 Shots of Opera", released in December 2020, is a series of twenty short pieces of music theatre between five and eight minutes long. They were created and produced in just a few months. What makes the pieces special is that they were conceived to be produced under pandemic conditions and with purely an online reception in mind. This has affected details of the recording process as well as directorial concepts such as the use of animation or superimposition of pictures. This article will analyse how selected Shots engage with these conditions, look at different types of how the voices are used and assess the specific aesthetic circumstances of digital reception, as well as discussing other specific challenges and opportunities of creating music theatre in times of Covid-19.