Author: Xin Li

My aesthetic practice is centered around the theme of romanticism – emphasizing the appreciation of nature, the importances of individual imagination and seeking for inspiration. The World for today is becoming more modernized, we are living in a modernized city that the big buildings surrounded us have shadowed our vision and started to disconnect our feeling and inspiration from nature. My work is an attempt to bridge the people’s feeling and nature, address the disconnection between people and the physical elements, including plants, animals, landscape and weather, that nature has provided for us.  

Being a media maker is the best way to carry out all of the ideas and put into practice; the combination of the work among moving images, animation and sounds provide a rich environment and a vivid visual effect to explore the connection between human and nature. I believe that inspiration from nature is the purest source of an idea. A journey in seeking for inspiration from nature is never an ending road, it is more important that the moments of the journey that senses and engages you both emotional and inspirational.

Electronic Panorama: Paris, Tokyo, Utrecht, Warszawa (1970)

Electronic Panorama is a noise-sound that consists of strange, dissonant amalgams and limpid purity of sound as defined in the book; the mix of different natural noises of dropping water, jingles, whistle and cricket sound. This sound art caught my attention because it offers the pure sound of nature. Although they are the electronic sounds created by machines, but it brings me to an environment of a deep forest inside a wooden house surrounded by nature, where the noises of the city are totally gone. Moreover, the increasing sound volume at the end created a pitch that reinforces the vibration and excitement from the noise.

Our human sensibilities need noise-sound; without the noise-sound, it can create a void(a space of emptiness), discomfort, and fear within us.  And the sound that we are not familiar with can also cause fear because noise-sound has the effect of creating an imagination in our brain and trying to distinguish what that noise is made out of or coming from. Therefore, I believe a creative sound art has the power of exploring human imagination.

The chapter shows that digital technologies have been widely used by artists to create different forms of media- from painting, drawing and sculpture to photograph and video. It is because this medium allows for multiple kinds of manipulation and a seamless combination of art forms. Digital technologies are not only for the use of art, it also contributes to many other aspects of our lives. For examples, a technique known as ‘morphing’ – the transformation of one object into another through imagery which is used by law-enforcement agencies to find missing persons or suspects.  Digital technologies also help business to better advertising their product by manipulation, compositing and collaging images in order to carry out a memorable advertisement that has certain language or message attached to catch customer’s eyes. Furth more on the chapter, digital technologies have also been used in the scientific field to explore and study nature and organism more closely. So I think that digital technologies are well beyond the tools for art, it has integrated into the needs of our daily lives and activities.

In the chapter one of the book, I learn that the definitions of new media can be very broad and have never been clear-cut. People might think that the stuffs produced by computer are the new media. For examples, Internet, Web sites, compute multimedia, computer games and etc.  But the author, Lev Manvoich, argues that would be too limiting, computer should not be the only way of distribution of media. Therefore, he tries to redefine the definitions of new media. He believes that new media should be based on the five principles, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. Manvoich’s theory on new media seems to be very solid and compelling due to the great use of the examples like World Wide Web, which we commonly use in our daily lives. At the end, he also compares and contrasts the differences between old media and new media. It really helps me to understand the key differences between them, as well as the effects of new media. For examples, he said that “New Media also allow us to create version of the same object that differ from each other in more substantial way.” I truly agree with him because a new media like web sites have millions or more of different looks or versions.  He also explains that “New media is interactive. In contrast to old media where the order of presentation is fixed, the user can now interact with a media object”. Therefore, I believe that the artists of new media have more room, freedom and choices to express their ideas and designs.

What is really made me interesting about the book are the title and the backward text, so in next paragraph, I will express my idea about the intension between them.

In the first few pages, McLuhan talks about how electric technology has changed and affected on every aspect of our lives. In this rapid changing technology age, social media has many channels to cast its information to people via television, movie, internet, radio and etc.  The content or the information for which it delivers is not important, McLuhan argues that the Medium, which means the method or the process of how information is distributed and received by people play a much more importance role and effect on us. He gave many examples about the effect of you, your family, your neighborhood, etc.  But I’m more curious about the effect of the medium, the title is “The Medium is the massage” because the medium plays a role of massaging our feeling and our sense of perception toward the information that we perceive. To illustrate this experience, McLuhan intentionally wrote some of the texts backwards, in this medium or method of reading the text, it makes me tired and very difficult to read these words, and I almost wanted to give up and not reading it. If the medium is very usually or well used everywhere, then we might not be paying too much attention to the content that we perceive.  Hence, McLuhan tries to emphasize the importance of the medium in the title of the book.