Medium vs. Message

Going back to the phrase "The medium is the message" coined by Marshall McLuhan, I made an experimental video entitled: The Medium vs. The Message. "The medium is the message" represents how a given medium can broadcast a more important message than the content itself. The medium embeds itself within the message, and creates a symbiotic relationship between the two. Therefore, If you don't understand the medium, you can't understand the message.

Example: If you were blind, and watched a television program, you're brain would only process the audio from the television set. Consequently, you would miss out on the visual and not understand the full message.

My video experiment shows how the medium can rebel against the message. The original video I selected shows an angry man smashing his office computer in a cubicle. The original message was comedic. So, I distorted the colours, chopped up the video and added ambient audio. I fucked with the medium to make the video take on a different message.

Original video here

Do the bright colours add happiness to the message? Does the hidden violin add an element of tragedy? Does the firetruck add an element of emergency? Does the repeated smashing make it center violence?

I don't know. That's the beauty of subjective ideas ladies and gentlemen.

Regards,

Jarrett

Vintage photographs and nostalgia.

I've been thinking about all the trips I've taken between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay. I've taken quite a few. I wonder what would the trip have been like twenty years ago?

Being a mixed media artist, this gets me thinking about old media. Nostalgia and old media. Say some one snapped a picture twenty years ago in the Winnipeg airport. Would they think that one day that photograph would be considered nostalgic? I think not. Like today, when we look at our old 35mm photos. At the moment we took them, we never thought that they would have a unique quality to them twenty years later. It sometimes happens that people are so stupefied by nostalgia they try to recreate the effect of old photos. I'm one of those people.

Marshall McLuhan was right when he said "The medium is the message". The medium not only broadcasts a message (the content of a photograph in my case). The medium embeds itself in the message it carries. This is why older photographs look so different. The medium broadcasts it's own technology, which, dates itself. And as time progresses the qualities of the medium changes the message.

What will the photographs twenty years from now look like? What will they think of our puny -- advanced technology? Will our photographs lose out on nostalgia? Will they desperately replicate the effect?

Original photo: Winnipeg Airport (2007)

Same photo: Nostalgiacized in gimp

Jarrett