Week 4

Reading Response: Media, Reality, and Human

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 4.6, which states:

Principle 4.6: Use the computer as agent of transformation.

Ge introduced the comb filter as one of many programmable techniques to transform reality with the computer. These techniques of reality manipulation and rearrangement can create new artistic forms out of everyday materials. Everyone could build a whole new world of their own! I'm mesmerized by Paul Lansky's music as introduced in the book. He explored the space of reality transformation, and made something poetic out of mundane life.

As far as I know, every artistic form is developed with a certain set of reality transformations for a specific media. Writers, for instance, leverage various narrative techniques and writing styles seeking for the best expression of their idea. The story can have different development and be told in different ways. No matter how unconstrained it can be, the plot is always based on certain degree of real societal scenarios. Painters are in search for the same "sublime" with another set of skills and media. Realistic or impressionistic approaches, for example, can be identified in both artistic forms, but are accomplished in different ways that suit the corresponding forms/media. Literature is good at depicting certain characters and their mind flows from multiple angles and for a continuous span of time, while painting excels at instantaneous and holistic visual impact. Music, on the other hand, is an artistic medium that can transcend language and expresses emotions with time. Given their innate characteristics, each form can also be exploited in a unique way that no one has imagined before. Each artist has a unique perspective of the reality, thus the unique rearrangement of the reality that suits the media he/she chooses. That's how the personality of the artists come in and unite with the media.

Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase "the medium is the message" can also partially explain artistic/creative activities from the perspective of communication studies. Artistic creation, as a message from the artist, conveys his/her emotions or point of view via a carefully selected medium seeking for connections and empathy from others. The message is best expressed when the medium and the content are artfully combined, giving people the impression that there is no better way to say it. The medium becomes the message when it can be hardly distinguished from the content. This could, perhaps, serve as an answer to Max Mathew's challenge: to find the good sound generated by computers, we should search for the uniting point of transformational techniques and the message we want to convey. That is a practical art.

We can reach even further in our thought experiment: human beings are also the media of the nature, or, in the context of Daoism, the media of the Dao. There is a saying in Chinese, "成器", meaning literally "becoming the instrument", which is the highest compliment of a person being mature and excellent. Whose instrument the person is becoming? Brahms once wrote that his best pieces are written by holy spirits holding his hands. We could probably say that the "enlightenment" many religions seek for is this status when one is united with the supreme reality, becomes the perfect medium of the supreme reality, and conveys the message as if he/she is the supreme reality itself. Jesus was like this when he was preaching, and so was Buddha.