How we communicate with each other and the way that we preserve the information define who are we and help us understand our position in modern world which ultimately results in the way we design everything.

On “The Medium is the Message” we face with this question that what procedure has the social life gone through and what if the future direction of it?

it is important to remember two things about McLuhan and his teachings. First, the medium through which a message is experienced shapes the user’s perception of the message. Secondly, a medium can be the message itself if it is delivering content that would otherwise be impossible to access.

I think the idea of that the medium is the message is a little bit illogical. Although they have influence on each other but the presentation of the message is extremely important.

Over the past centuries, media have been developed through a wide variety of devices such as TV, Internet, Radio or … .Each of them have its own intrinsic characteristic independent from people who use them. The message transferred from each of this media is highly affected by that medium broadcasts it. McLuan has more considered the medium instead of its message.

Technology allows us to find our position in the world and it is a tool that can be used in so many different ways; sometimes can be good sometimes not. For example; a kind of virus which is really harmful for body and might causes serious problem such as disability or something like that can be used for producing Vaccines which rescues that body from illness.

Medium shapes and controls human associations and activities; the main purpose of the media is to change the perception and thought. Societies have been shaped and restructured more by the nature of the media which people use for communication than by the content of the communication.

In other words, the value of each medium is determined based on it’s usage.They make it easy for people to return to ancient world where the way of communication was more visual and face to face rather than using books or any other two dimensional things for gaining information. I mean the way how we get the news is different from the way our fathers used to get it on printing paper instead of watching it on the internet. We no doubt see that the quality of the delivered information is highly related to the source releasing it.

Benjamin (challenging but impressive in his writings ) was really obsessed with modernism and it’s effects on social community and work of art in particular. Films and photography play crucial rule in this movement. He writes that in this age the nature of the art has undergone a change which mechanization and emerge of technology should be blamed for the losing of aesthetic value in such productions. The ”Aura” in his view is what makes the art unique; the aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space. A reproduced artwork is never fully present, I think with this approach the real value of authenticity disappears in the original work of art when everything is reproduced. In his opinion, the loss of aura seems to have both positive and negative; promotion of the art is one of the consequences which was considered a positive effect of this movement is his opinion because the loss of the aura has the potential to open up the politicization of art.

In the ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin, the mechanical advancement in art and the result of the new product is discussed. Drawing and painting was a method used to record a specific subject at a specific time in place, and then the camera was invented and held the same purpose, but now, the process was insanely faster. This introduces the topic of speed as it relates to art, culture, and society. The invention of the camera [and film] not only speed up the act of documenting, but also allowed for speedy reproduction. The same goes with the invention of the video camera, the still camera could rapidly document still frames but now who human experiences could be documented and viewed by man. This separated the subject from the camera, the actor now performs for the camera and the camera performs for the masses which in some [arguable] way takes away from the artistic quality of the piece. This compares with the photograph separating the subject from its time and place. There is basically two types of art, that of which was intended to have a significance in cult value and that of which is intended to be put on display for the masses. The former used to be the main reason for creating art but with the development of the technology and ease of use, the function of art for entertainment began to increase eventually overtaking the cult’s premier seat.
McLuhan talks about what is recurrent in all these technologies, ie painting, photographing, and filming, and that is the communication of a content, a message, and each attempt at communication alters the original subject to a certain degree. The painting of the tree is now the artist’s interpretation of the tree, the photograph of the tree is the cropped region that the photographer saw, and the same goes with film. The development of transportation and cities underwent the same type of evolution which also had a great effect of speed in relation to society. The development of the train allowed people, products, and industry to spread out further and much faster than riding cross country on a buggy. This invention increased the rate at which cities evolved and the ability to communicate faster over very long distances. Next came the airplane that increased these same things even more. A several month long trek across the country was replaced by a several day long train ride which was replaced by a several hour plane ride.
As a philosophical conclusion, the products of modern technology are neither good nor bad, but it is how they are used that determine the value on a use by use basis.

In “The Media is the Message,” McLuhan implies that we should be wary of how we are interpreting new media.  It is not a new technology itself that makes our lives any better or any worse…it is what humans do with this new technology- how they choose to implement it that that has an effect.  I found the statement “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them” very interesting.  The idea that even things such as smallpox or firearms could theoretically be “good” if used in the “right” way.  Whether there is a “right” way to use certain things might be more of a moral question.  What is good and right for one individual might be the complete opposite for another. A more neutral example might be mobile phones.  The author might say that cell phone themselves are neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

The concept of “aura”- who/what has aura I found very interesting?  Can an aura be taken away, added, or altered?  Who determines these states of aura? Which forms of media allow for an aura and which do not?  Benjamin suggests that when an actor performs for a camera, the aura of the actor and the character he plays is lost to the audience.  If this is true (I’m not sure it is), then maybe another aura is created- that of the camera and the director behind it.  There is an art in capturing the performance of the actor – one form of art capturing another.

The “medium is the message” demonstrate how modern media reflect human senses. This interpretation gives us a new approach of reading the history. Considering tools as medium, let us understand the details of the family life style of an ancient family. It is an enjoyable way of thinking about history. On the other hand, Benjamin says: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”. Considering these two facts together, shows that this ability of reading the history through the medium is changing. If a sword of a soldier had been made by an ironsmith, now the rockets are being made by the technologies. The first one is about the taste and manner of the ironsmith and his time, but the second one is only talking about our time not the workers who are working in the manufactury. McLuhan emphasizes most on the importance of the medium than its content. In my opinion, medium has a second role in both aspects which was not formed in his age as powerful as today. This second role is the hidden action. When the medium’s message is different than its appearance. Because today’s mediums are more complex than before. When a lamp is talking about light and changing lifestyles through lighting, an energy efficient lamp is also talking about our contemporary crisis of energy. Consequently, nowadays, there is a complex graph of forces in both inventing and using a medium.

The readings bring up the question of “How do we think of a work of art when accompanied by mass production and cannot be defined as real anymore?”, “What is the place of aesthetic values of something which might be just an illusion?” However, the real question is,”How do we describe the real art and how do we distinguish reality from illusion?”

“If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

I hope that everyone accept my apology for putting this piece of media among all these texts. Though the scene described by Benjamin is very different of the scene Hokusai tried to illustrate, it can explain some of the conceptions I was reading in the two texts. First I have to clarify that the media above is a Japanese woodblock print you can find more information about here. In terms of Technology, developing such art works and the usage of papers, inks and cherry woodblocks is really noticeable.
The artist illustrates a scene and then he prepared some woodblocks so that the final work of art can be produced. Then a group of workers print a certain pieces of original work and after that the woodblocks were destroyed in order to limit the number of original copies. These “Ukiyo-e”s might be one of the first art reproduction forms. In this case no original piece exists however all the printed copies are considered as original. It seems that an essence of art work is transferred from artist through a woodblock. In this case the woodblock is a container of forms between artist and final art reproduction which I would like to call a medium, Even though the ordinary people as the viewers of this work of art are not aware of the role of the woodblock. This medium, as we saw in the “Media is Message” article, is a message itself for the content of Fuji Mountain view that was once shaped in artist’s mind and was even not a visual notion at first moments of artistic creation. More over the canvas on which the image was illustrated is itself another medium for the content which certainly more clear and recognizable for the audience.
Now after many years this work of art is re-produced and shared here. The certain fact is that no one of Hokusai’s team printed anything on a monitor. That’s why we can now think of a camera, internet and lots of other technical tools which help us have the canvas on top of this post. Even if the original copies of the work don’t meet the definition of art work reproduction published by Benjamin, I am sure that this one is a reproduced copy of the work in a new context. This is maybe content for the internet medium or a medium itself for other content.

“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”

Chuang Tzu quotes (The most significant of China’s early interpreters of Taoism, 389-286 BC)

First of all, the term “authenticity” attracted me, as Benjamin said, after finding the ability to reproduce art works, the importance of authenticity became more highlighted. I wonder if this term is still meaningful in these recent decades or not. What is authenticity now, does it deal with physical aspect of an art work? Of course not, because we are surrounded by the art works which does not exist in a physical form at all. Think about a movie as a favorite example of Benjamin.

Movies are generally in the form of information nowadays, maybe each time we watch one of them we are experiencing a very specific medium of them. Even we go forward to a point which the medium of an art work or any kind of other information is not important at all. Have you ever experienced the situation in which you cannot remember that where exactly you heard about a news report (message)?, whether you watched it in TV, it came by you via email or something in your smartphone or you heard from someone, etc. This is the effect of being surrounded by different source of media.

The human perspective toward any lone object just started to change maybe from the moment which he started to reproduce the art works. The way we look at different object are impressed by all innovation on technologies, meanings and concepts, I think we now have the ability to shift our observation between objective and subjective way of thinking or observing things. It goes without saying that the capability of art works to be reproduced tremendously revolutionized the definition of the art itself. However it is not a very important debate to clarify the definition of art than it was before.

All in all, it seems that the entwined relation between content, medium and message – which all of them can change place with each other by us shifting our way of thinking about them from subjective to objective attitude – is a newly discovered phenomena and we can defrag any content till reaching a very primitive data which may be even nonverbal.

Media is always related to the politic, so as art.

In the article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction it discusses when art becomes a reproductional propaganda such as Dadaism being an anti-aesthetic movement or how Fascism and Communism using art work as a tool to spread its value. And in The Medium is the Message it told us the content of any medium is another medium. I think they are both suggesting a concept: in this reproduction era, art is a kind of medium (and can be reproduce for a large amount quickly) which may includes information that the audience or common people may not notice the message which is hidden from the form of art performance.

The concept of hidden message presenting with art makes me thinking of those material such as posters on the streets, illustration in the newspaper and text book, images on the stamps, etc. in the North Korea, China and previous USSR. Those kind of “art work” are technically done with perfect skill, they are really nice pieces if you ignore the figures, the backgrounds and the ideologies they are implying.

I am not trying to be mean toward the obviously failed outdated socialism. In contrast, the similar thing is happening around us too. The pop-out advertisements in mobile phone apps, the deal suggestions in the margin of the browser, the commercials behind the homerun walls, the fancy brands on a gorgeous character in movies… Yes, we are living in a democratic realm, and instead of being brainwashed by government like those dictator countries, our dictator is big corporations. Ironically and apparently, the relationship in between big corporations and government is really well-connects.

Many interesting points in each article I was very interested in the different looks on arts and how the arts and manufacturing interacted and how manufacturing has made art less unique because it essentially takes art out of time. As was said on page 1 of the first article “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” This refers to the changes that could be made to art works over time from elemental damage or from the change of ownership. Photographs being altered over time or using different development procedures can change the uniqueness of the picture but may also bring out different aspects of the image that were not noticed before. This is a form of mechanical reproduction in a way because the production of a negative into a photograph using chemicals and a process that develops the negative into a picture is a mechanical means. The questioning of photography as art is a question we could discuss for a long long time I firmly believe that within reason most photography can be considered art, I wont get into my specific feelings they deal with field of view, fstop usage, framing of image and even more things I have learned from taking photographs. As for film or as I think would be modern films are not art they fall more in the realm of entertainment because they do not hold a deeper meaning (most of the time) or define a point in history or a culture they are mostly made to entertain and amaze. “The film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the interest of the masses through illusion — promoting spectacles and dubious speculations” a lot like a magician like was  presented to us in the reading. More of a reason I do not believe that film is not a true art form is that the director has the option at any time to stop the acting and re-shoot the scene with little tweaks. Stage acting has a level of complexity that the actor has to memorize and get it right or their interpretation of right.

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

Processing of data in the Fascist Sense. There is the idea that a work of art has always been able to be reproduced by men. At first through apprenticeships, fellowships and latter through mechanical means. The original work of art, because of its status as unique and unprecedented is considered to cast an aura; a spirit very much connected with its essence as a magical or religious artifact. However, it is precisely because of this aura that it is not free to be sold/purchased in a free way as much as copies or reproductions of its image are. “its uniqueness, that is its aura”. it is arguable however, that a masterful reproduction of an art piece, an excellent copy but a copy none the less because of its presence and the ignorance of the beholder that it is a copy becomes for all intents and purposes the original. the aura can be falsified? Art since the beginning has been an object meant to delight or communicate an idea with fellow individuals but also as a way to produce something very much spiritual. from the paintings in cave walls to the most ornamented religious images. Eventually, in the Fascist state, art is used primarily as propaganda. when the political party becomes as central in the life of an individual that completely replaces religion then the distinction between church and state is completely lost and they become one. art in politics, because of its aura reinforces this notion.

Mechanization of art => replication of the Aura => What is aura? => Aura as a religious or magical effect/representation => Aura used in politics (religion and state) => art and political propaganda ( ex. fascist regimes)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE