Page 212 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 212
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
space and the notion of knowledge itself, but at the same time, knowledge is
increasingly being produced and becomes available elsewhere as well. Still,
the University ultimately keeps being the instance of verification of knowl-
edge as well as museum and/or gallery functions as a safeguard that verifies
‘art,’ no matter where different artefacts happen to be shown or exhibited.
Therefore, the institution of the museum should be taken as a specific ma-
terialization of a metaphor of itself, which became universally recognised
through the course of time of modernism and even more emphatically in
the time-space of post-modernism.
The advent of digital technology has had a huge impact on a wide
range of conditions for production of visual representations in artistic and
all other known senses, commencing already at the time of “analogue” tel-
evision as a “mediatic flow” in Raymond Williams‘ (1974) words (see es-
pecially chapter four of his book). The impact of ICT on the form of writ-
ten documents, diverse genres, including aesthetically marked narratives,
necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between literature and mov-
ing pictures, now appearing in many other shapes and on other ubiquitous
screens than just on celluloid film and on silver screens in cinemas. How-
ever, one must take into account the fact that any thinking about this rela-
tionship already implies ongoing changes of both occurrences of culture:
literature and the media. In new settings of communication, some forms
and phenomena of (re)presentation with a vast number of combinations of
means of narration have yet to be recognized as a kind of, say, literature or
at least documents of reality within virtual reality and vice versa. As Mano-
vich observes in his last book, software is at the centre of these new real-
ities and, by virtue of being used by hundreds of millions of people, soft-
ware becomes “cultural software” (Manovich, 2013). What one should look
for, especially considering the field of literature and new very “democra-
tized” uses of moving pictures, are therefore not so much some very com-
plex phenomena of so-called computer art, but mass usage of interactive
media. Within them some forms of narrating, taking different views, com-
menting, expressing anxieties, accumulating memory, playing with identi-
ties, and disrupting many notions of objectivity are taking place. In tran-
scending the boundaries between text and pictures, and between static and
moving pictures, narration in the digital media results from de-montage of
reality, which becomes more real rather than a forever-lost “external reali-
ty” by virtue of the virtual.
210
space and the notion of knowledge itself, but at the same time, knowledge is
increasingly being produced and becomes available elsewhere as well. Still,
the University ultimately keeps being the instance of verification of knowl-
edge as well as museum and/or gallery functions as a safeguard that verifies
‘art,’ no matter where different artefacts happen to be shown or exhibited.
Therefore, the institution of the museum should be taken as a specific ma-
terialization of a metaphor of itself, which became universally recognised
through the course of time of modernism and even more emphatically in
the time-space of post-modernism.
The advent of digital technology has had a huge impact on a wide
range of conditions for production of visual representations in artistic and
all other known senses, commencing already at the time of “analogue” tel-
evision as a “mediatic flow” in Raymond Williams‘ (1974) words (see es-
pecially chapter four of his book). The impact of ICT on the form of writ-
ten documents, diverse genres, including aesthetically marked narratives,
necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between literature and mov-
ing pictures, now appearing in many other shapes and on other ubiquitous
screens than just on celluloid film and on silver screens in cinemas. How-
ever, one must take into account the fact that any thinking about this rela-
tionship already implies ongoing changes of both occurrences of culture:
literature and the media. In new settings of communication, some forms
and phenomena of (re)presentation with a vast number of combinations of
means of narration have yet to be recognized as a kind of, say, literature or
at least documents of reality within virtual reality and vice versa. As Mano-
vich observes in his last book, software is at the centre of these new real-
ities and, by virtue of being used by hundreds of millions of people, soft-
ware becomes “cultural software” (Manovich, 2013). What one should look
for, especially considering the field of literature and new very “democra-
tized” uses of moving pictures, are therefore not so much some very com-
plex phenomena of so-called computer art, but mass usage of interactive
media. Within them some forms of narrating, taking different views, com-
menting, expressing anxieties, accumulating memory, playing with identi-
ties, and disrupting many notions of objectivity are taking place. In tran-
scending the boundaries between text and pictures, and between static and
moving pictures, narration in the digital media results from de-montage of
reality, which becomes more real rather than a forever-lost “external reali-
ty” by virtue of the virtual.
210
