CORE CONCEPTS MCI – Alice de Gresti di San Leonardo
1. Modernism art: modernism use art to call attention to art, unlike the art of realism and naturalism.
In modernism, the limitation of the precedent period such as the flatness of the surfaces, the shape
of the support, and the proprieties of the pigment became positive factors.
2. Purity of art: purity meant self-definition. Art represents art and not reality. (Greenberg)
3. Intermedia: The term intermedia describes a combination of more media, for example, text and
image. Defining works that fall conceptually between media that are already known. With complex
problems, you need more complicated art, the best version of media is the media that are between
other media. Humans like more complex art because humans can relate to complex people. (Dick
Higgins).
4. Intermedia and mixed media: mix-media is a mix (for example newspaper, it can exist without
images), and intermedia in a new media is inseparable (comic book). (Higgins).
5. Post-medium world: The condition has no more borders, and media distinction, it can be used
with any technique.
6. Technical support: All traditional media are supported by a physical substance, the term
"technical support," in distinction, refers to contemporary commercial vehicles, such as cars or
television, which contemporary artists exploit, in recognition of the contemporary obsolescence of
the traditional mediums. (Rosalind Krause)
7. Rosalind Krause: Don’t support Greenberg’s ideas. ☹
8. Media Product: This term is used to denote the intermediate stage that enables the transfer of
cognitive import, or meaning, from a producer’s mind to a perceiver’s mind. Thus, a media
product is an extension of the mind in the context of inter-human communication, so it can be
physical or not. Media meanings are different depending on the culture. (Like a kiss) (Ellerstrom)
9. Media Modalities: This is a categorization of the basic qualities of a media product. There are
four categories: three pre-semiotic and one semiotic.
Pre-semiotic means that they cover traits that are involved in signification, but they are not
semiotic.
1. Material modality: all media products are solid or not solid, or organic or inorganic. Pixel non-
solid, solid is a painting.
2. Spatiotemporal: all the products are in the time and space, two or three-dimensional spatiality.
3. Sensorial modality: all the media products reach the mind through at least one sense.
4. Semiotic modality: it covers media traits concerning representation rather than mediation.
(Less palpable), an example is the sign of music can represent complex feelings and notional
structures, that are probably largely inaccessible to the symbolic sign of written text. Is the
meaning of the media products. (sign)
10. The combination of modes of the modalities: each media have a different combination of
modalities.
, 11. Types of Media Borders: A border is a categorization, there are two types of media borders, but
each media product is unique, every media has both types.
1. Basic media type: The classification of basic media types when you can analyze it with the
four modalities.
2. Qualified media type: Qualified media types include categories such as music, painting,
television programs, news articles, visual art, Morse messages, sign language, and email…
When you analyze the deeper meaning
3. Technical: the technical part (painting= the canvas, the paints, the brush)
12. Crossing Media Borders: Crossing media borders might be understood as the phenomenon that
one particular media product can be classified in different ways. This is possible because the
processes of qualifying media products are largely open-ended, overlapping, and changing.
13. Cross-modal: This term refers to the crossing of all forms of pre-semiotic modes. More
specifically, then, cross-modality should here be understood as cross-material (drawing of the
wind, therefore drawing physical but the wind is not), cross-spatiotemporal (the photo of a type
that moves the water, in the photo it is still but in reality it moves), and cross-sensorial (A music
score by Johann Sebastian Bach might serve as another example it is clear to see that it partly
makes its work with the aid of symbols: it is a two-dimensional and static representamen depicting
a temporal object, sounding music (which no doubt also has certain three-dimensional spatial
qualities). Likewise, a two-dimensional spatial but non-temporal representamen such as a chart
diagram may represent a temporal phenomenon such as increasing global temperature in the
atmosphere.
14. Theatre as the art of performance: Theatre is the only art capable of incorporating all others arts
without being dependent on one of these in order to be theatre. Visual and musical works of art
can exist or survive independently of the author, however, theatrical worlds of art remain connected
to the artist without whom theatre cannot exist, namely the physically present performer. The
performer and the spectator are physically present at the same time and space, unlike e films.
(Kattembelt)
15. Illusion of reality film vs theatre: Classical film narration conceals all aspects of the
cinematography to give optimal accessibility and transparency of the possible world that the film
represents. Nothing may disturb the illusion or rather the impression of reality. Even when the
represented world is obviously unreal, everything that happens is plausible. Nothing may remind
us of the fact that the film is just t film. Classical film narration defines the position of the spectator
as that of an invisible and anonymous witness. the device of the camera determines that all
spectators share exactly the same perspective, and so ignores the needs of those who might want a
different perspective, unlike theatre. Theatre, on the other hand, a live performance needs no
camera to create a possible world and takes place in the closed continuum of the here and now.
The restrictions of time and space in theatre are an advantage because the stage provides the
performer with an arena; that is to say, an empty space in which he can use unrestrictedly all his
expressive skills (Peter Brook 1986). As the only living and moving 'element' of the performance,
the performer has complete control over time. By playing, speaking, and acting, they can give
every desired meaning and interpretation to the space.
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