Dear Matthias,
I read your notes with interest and gained new insight.
I am not sure that your reference to musical genres can be carried through. Musical genres and actually what one defines as being a "genre" seem to be quite different from how "new media art" is used or defined. Especially since as you point out that for you (as for me) "new" is a relative term. And genres do not like relativity ... new media cannot be a genre unless one uses New Media Art in the capitalized way, which does not look like it likes relativity but it is quite strict about what can put put under its umbrella or not. And certainly it's not the terms which are strict but the people using the terms. For the sake of clarity of understanding and discussion, this strictness is desired. But for the sake of including and excluding on the level of power, I do not like capitalization. (I am not saying you do - but I observe quite a bit that terms are quite often occupied and used as slaves.)
So I will from now on stay away here from the further discussion along these lines, but I will keep reading.
As last thought I would like to repeat that electricity as a form of energy that allows to go beyond the physical limitation of a human body to create events for seeing and hearing is indeed the defining (not deviding) fissure to "old media". (I would love to talk about this, but doing so in the context of discussing terminology is not the right place for this.) And that indeed the link between formal logic and electricity in the form of computer technology has created a totally new paradigm of tool (instrument, if you like), which is not geared - as all "old tools" - towards changing a given state of a material directly (like a hammer or a car or a bomb or a shaver or a violin), but which needs a "translation" (mapping, digital-analog conversion to control "old tools" etc.) so that our senses may perceive an aspect of its internal working, so indeed we can create meaning. (The states of transistors in a computer are meaningless unless they get transposed into the time of our senses - to see if a logic circuit in a computer works, you have to slow it down, so you can see something like etters on a paper, traces on an oscilloscope etc., pixles on a monitor.)
If ":new" defines a change to something previous, then "new" cannot exist without that comparison. Actually the comparison makes it "new". And once the comparison is not needed any more, "new" becomes "old". So in the end, the talk about new media cannot exist without the talk about old media. And indeed we can discover new aspects (ideas, eprspectives, experiences) in old works. And each time we look or listen to something old and we are not able or do not discover something new, we might as well flush it. And each time we see or hear something new which has no connection to what we know as old, we cannot connect and cannot discover the new.
Johannes Goebel
(Matthias - would you be so kind and send me your personal email address - I would like to write also a personal note to you on a different matter - [log in to unmask] )
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