Media Aesthetics
April 25-27 2002
All experience of the arts naturally involves a medium. While the
phrase "media aesthetics" has, in recent years, often been associated
with the study of "new" media technologies, these associations nonetheless
draw on long scholarly traditions investigating how an artworkÕs vehicle
of communication conditions aesthetic experience by mediating between
producers and receivers. With more and more people in the United States
accessing information and entertainment through digital means, these
questions about the modes and effects of artistic media have acquired
new resonanceÑnot only for those in the academy, but for arts communities
more generally, as well as for advertisers and governmental policy makers.
Thinking about how best to define an "artistic medium," however, has
entailed much scholarly debate. AristotleÕs assessment of "medium" as
a "material cause" of art (stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words
for poetry and so forth) provides one way of approaching the term; more
recently, critics have reconceived the term "medium" as an "instrumental
cause" of art (the apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast
media, the internet). Still further debate arises around the question
of whether or not an "artistic" media can be distinguished in a rigorous
and systematic way from non-artistic media. What, for instance, is the
relation between artistic and non-artistic uses of photography? Of painting
or drawing? Of language?
Asking these questions forces scholars to question, on a very fundamental
level, commonly held assumptions about the stability of the human body
and the aesthetic object alike. Do human senses alter in response to
changes in the available media? Do we learn new ways of seeing and hearing
from inventions like drawing, painting, photography, the phonograph,
cinema, and video? What happens to objects when we adapt or "translate"
them into other media: written narratives into film narratives or architecture
into photography?
In the course of working through such investigations, our seminar
will range across historical eras and moments to consider aesthetic
objects of many kinds: film, painting, photography, opera, literature,
and others. We will both be asking questions about how the aesthetic
object is situated within cultural history, and be engaged in an analysis
of the sensory, cognitive, and emotional shaping of the aesthetic experience,
and how that shape is shaped by the medium in which it occurs.
Speakers for the seminar will include Philip Bohlman (Music, Committee
on Jewish Studies), James K. Chandler (English Language and Literature,
Committee on the History of Culture), Thomas Gunning (Art History, Cinema
and Media Studies), Eduardo Kac (Art
and Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), David J. Levin
(Germanic Studies, Committee on Cinema and Media Studies), Joel M. Snyder
(Art History, Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and Visual
Arts).
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University of Chicago