Course MCM 0230: Digital Media

Florian Cramer’s article “What is post-digital?” resonated with me a lot. I plan to continue studying visual art in the future, and I have to admit that like the art students Cramer mentions, I feel very drawn to what Cramer calls old media (before his radical claim that there is no such thing as new and old media). A little over a year ago, some friends and I were inspired by the Dispose project (http://dispose.co/) to start using disposable cameras again to document our lives. Though I always purchased prints along with the CD that came with the developed film, several of my friends did not, so the physicality of using “real” film was partially lost — only noticeable in the graininess and odd light exposure. There is something about the delayed results that somehow makes the photos more meaningful. Perhaps because in the digital world everything is so fast paced. Though I do a bunch of filmmaking as well, I generally stay away from making other kinds of digital art because I appreciate the physicality of “old media.” I think that using the right tools and medium for your message — like the “roving typist” — has become a more widespread practice because we have begun to enter the post-digital era (in the “post-colonialist” sense that Cramer describes). As we become more used to “new media,” we become less mystified by it and can, therefore, judge more clearly whether it is a useful tool in the situation or not. I was intrigued by Cramer’s ideas about agency. I don’t know that feeling more agency when using “old media” is necessarily false agency because I think that the increased control of the individual maker doesn’t lie in the medium but in the visibility that the medium provides. New media is much more traceable and “observable” than old media — regardless of whether you want it to be. You can limit the exposure that a painting gets, but once you post something to Instagram, you can’t know who or how many people will see it.