SMU Video Art Spring 2020

     I think the idea that stood out the most to me in this reading was the comparison between representation and presentation. It makes the idea of performance are more clear for me to undestand when I compare it to art that I'm already familiar with, and have studied more extensively photography, film, poetry etc. I'm able to more clearly comprehend why artists of those mediums make the decisions the do in order to represent something, and framing performance art in that context makes it easier for me to imagine what I would have to do to present  something, since I have the idea of re presentation as a sort of middle man. 

One specific point in the beginning of the reading that I don’t know if I agree with is that the concept of cool and hot media can extend to things like paper or stone as a substrate to write on.   I would argue that any physical writing surface would be the same temperature, and that rather the difference would be in digital text, which has the capacity for change by the user either by direct editing or interaction with the interface it is being read on.   Ultimately I find myself unable to trust the author as a source of information for the same reasons we discussed in class.   Some of the information on technology is dated, and the author is highly ethnocentric and racist.   As someone who also studies archaeology, I find myself simply fixating on the errors in his examples (ie. the Australian natives given steel axes, or the example in the film stating that the Greeks/Romans were the first society with a written language).   Not only is some of...

A cool medium l ike hieroglyphic or ideogramm ic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive med ium of the phonetic alphabet. A cool medium l ike hieroglyphic or ideogramm ic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive med ium of the phonetic alphabet.      I think the idea of "hot" and "cool" mediums offers a fun and new convention to subvert. The concept of a media's "temperature" as static is something I've seen toyed with a lot, and even more frequently now that we as a society are like obsessed with multimedia. Examples that immediately come to mind are automated phone conversations which turn something that is typically cool and high participation into something that requires significantly less participation on both sides. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have things like that Ne...

My thoughts for Media Hot and Cold by Marshal McLuhan were that the reading was a little confusing haha!! But my interpretation is that hot media has a person's complete senses engaged with the message. This type of media could be said to be like "spoon-feeding" the message right into the person's mouth. I guess you could think of hot media as like photography or radio because you are just using viewing or hearing the message but aren't actively communicating back in a sense. Cold media would have to be like a conversation on the phone because you are actively participating in order to gain full understanding of what is being provided. McLuhan talked about how hot and cold could refer to the left and right hemisphere of the brain. This could mean that we suggest one medium is on the hotter side while the other is cool.

Hello video artists, and welcome to the course blog for the Spring 2020 semester of Video Art at SMU. This will be where your responses to theoretical readings should be posted. All theoretical readings will be available on the Canvas page for this course as pdf files. Please post a substantive response to the readings. I am not interested in a summary or book report. Just tell me what it made you think about, how you felt, whether you agreed or disagreed. Also feel free to post pictures, videos, links, memes, articles on piracy, entrances to the deep web, and all the deep dark secrets of the universe as represented on the internets. Have fun, make art, be weird.