Media Matrix and Creating Art
Just wanted to jot down a few thoughts that came to mind--I want to develop this later.
Prolegomenon:
In this heavily mediated world, we humans suffer from an almost imperceptible tendency to mentally re-cast experiences in terms of representations we have seen, heard, felt, that is to say, if we should experience a moment of triumph or angst, or even just a mundane instance, our mind translates this into, and fuses these immediate experiences with, previously internalized sensory experiences from movies, music, reality tv, regular tv, and, especially, commercials. I am not saying we are conscious of this, though sometimes we are. In some way, because of the media instruments that surround us and the access to an infinite number of mediated experiences, we have become a kind of reality tv star of our own lives, even if the cameras are not really around. But we come to behave as if they are, always posey.
(Maybe this is not so different from Shakespeare's classic lines about the theatricality of life: "all the world's a stage/and every many and woman a player", i think is how it goes. It is true that we are all given cultural, gendered, class-based scripts and that we invent new scripts to counteract or supplement these, according to our inclinations. So, Shakespeare knew that we are always performing, especially within social life. But I am thinking about how we conceive of ourselves as indvididuals, how we try to view ourselves from the perspective of a camera, from an outside, when we are "alone". In other words, Shakespeare is right about the theatrical stage that is Life and, now, in the 21st century, there is the added hyper-performativity enabled by the cultural phenomena of the selfie, the awareness of a pervasive celebrity culture where viral footage of any kind is necessary for celebrity survival, instagram, and so forth.)
So, if the ideas that life is hyper-mediated and that we "perform" with a double position from inside ourselves and an outside centered in an imaginary camera, and, more importantly, because of this sensorial saturation, immediate experiences are quickly channeled into previously acquired representations, then, to what extent can we ever depict an original moment, one not corrupted by a file from our mental media catalogues?
Most movies tend to be formulaic, which means they borrow from previous narratives, just like how the pure, undefiled beauty of a sunset, once experienced, can only be made sense of by sunsets seen in movies and commercials, which always present the most ideal sunsets. And even when an aesthetic product is deemed original, it is mostly the case that it is a refurbished version of an old classic or a synthesis of old and new---enough time has passed for a new generation that is unfamiliar with the old to appreciate the seemingly "new". In this manner, media informs and shapes our experiences (and recollection of experiences), the irony being that our media age confers a sense of individual power through the media instruments we manipulate and its fetishization of the invidual self, though we are in fact entrapt in a constantly spinning, sensorial web from which we can never emerge to tell pristine, personal stories---all the stories we tell are infused by the media matrix itself, as much as we want to believe in our own narrational agency.
This has grave implications for those who want to create, for if an artist's driving passion is to create new visions of the world and novel modes of experiencing this world, then a re-hash of the overflow of sensory-audio information is counter-productive . An artist must try to wage ruthless war against the medial onslaught in order to create a truly original vision. This doesn't mean that the vision will not partake of previous narratives or genres, only that if an authentic artistic vision is to be realized, then an internal space must be preserved for the generating of honest artistic fibre from which to create and then present their vision.
It seems to me that an inside must be guarded from a carnivorous outside. Prayer is one way, and, also, a rigorous, sacral protection of the artist's time in which no sensorial, medial outside is able to penetrate.
The point is that if we, as aesthetic consumers, are to feel the sudden, beautiful violence of experiencing a moment heretofore felt to be unexpressable--and yet there it is on page, screen, or ipod, against all odds and with the intense familiarity of being a depiction one has felt but never had the means of narrativizing---or the slow, elegant emergence of a dynamic you had witnessed in your parents or the siblings from down the block or between you and an ex, but that only up until now, when experiencing it through engagement with the art product, can you truly catch your breath and say, "Yeeaaah, that's what that was..."; if we are to feel any of this, the artist must renounce the world of sensation that is our world. In its stead, the artist must reflect in solitude, must spend the 40 days in the desert--in a sense, renounce the life of the reality tv star, to bring back something of substance.
Prolegomenon:
In this heavily mediated world, we humans suffer from an almost imperceptible tendency to mentally re-cast experiences in terms of representations we have seen, heard, felt, that is to say, if we should experience a moment of triumph or angst, or even just a mundane instance, our mind translates this into, and fuses these immediate experiences with, previously internalized sensory experiences from movies, music, reality tv, regular tv, and, especially, commercials. I am not saying we are conscious of this, though sometimes we are. In some way, because of the media instruments that surround us and the access to an infinite number of mediated experiences, we have become a kind of reality tv star of our own lives, even if the cameras are not really around. But we come to behave as if they are, always posey.
(Maybe this is not so different from Shakespeare's classic lines about the theatricality of life: "all the world's a stage/and every many and woman a player", i think is how it goes. It is true that we are all given cultural, gendered, class-based scripts and that we invent new scripts to counteract or supplement these, according to our inclinations. So, Shakespeare knew that we are always performing, especially within social life. But I am thinking about how we conceive of ourselves as indvididuals, how we try to view ourselves from the perspective of a camera, from an outside, when we are "alone". In other words, Shakespeare is right about the theatrical stage that is Life and, now, in the 21st century, there is the added hyper-performativity enabled by the cultural phenomena of the selfie, the awareness of a pervasive celebrity culture where viral footage of any kind is necessary for celebrity survival, instagram, and so forth.)
So, if the ideas that life is hyper-mediated and that we "perform" with a double position from inside ourselves and an outside centered in an imaginary camera, and, more importantly, because of this sensorial saturation, immediate experiences are quickly channeled into previously acquired representations, then, to what extent can we ever depict an original moment, one not corrupted by a file from our mental media catalogues?
Most movies tend to be formulaic, which means they borrow from previous narratives, just like how the pure, undefiled beauty of a sunset, once experienced, can only be made sense of by sunsets seen in movies and commercials, which always present the most ideal sunsets. And even when an aesthetic product is deemed original, it is mostly the case that it is a refurbished version of an old classic or a synthesis of old and new---enough time has passed for a new generation that is unfamiliar with the old to appreciate the seemingly "new". In this manner, media informs and shapes our experiences (and recollection of experiences), the irony being that our media age confers a sense of individual power through the media instruments we manipulate and its fetishization of the invidual self, though we are in fact entrapt in a constantly spinning, sensorial web from which we can never emerge to tell pristine, personal stories---all the stories we tell are infused by the media matrix itself, as much as we want to believe in our own narrational agency.
This has grave implications for those who want to create, for if an artist's driving passion is to create new visions of the world and novel modes of experiencing this world, then a re-hash of the overflow of sensory-audio information is counter-productive . An artist must try to wage ruthless war against the medial onslaught in order to create a truly original vision. This doesn't mean that the vision will not partake of previous narratives or genres, only that if an authentic artistic vision is to be realized, then an internal space must be preserved for the generating of honest artistic fibre from which to create and then present their vision.
It seems to me that an inside must be guarded from a carnivorous outside. Prayer is one way, and, also, a rigorous, sacral protection of the artist's time in which no sensorial, medial outside is able to penetrate.
The point is that if we, as aesthetic consumers, are to feel the sudden, beautiful violence of experiencing a moment heretofore felt to be unexpressable--and yet there it is on page, screen, or ipod, against all odds and with the intense familiarity of being a depiction one has felt but never had the means of narrativizing---or the slow, elegant emergence of a dynamic you had witnessed in your parents or the siblings from down the block or between you and an ex, but that only up until now, when experiencing it through engagement with the art product, can you truly catch your breath and say, "Yeeaaah, that's what that was..."; if we are to feel any of this, the artist must renounce the world of sensation that is our world. In its stead, the artist must reflect in solitude, must spend the 40 days in the desert--in a sense, renounce the life of the reality tv star, to bring back something of substance.