1. Media Aesthetics
Robert Halsall

2. Outline A brief history of aesthetics
Media aesthetics and media theory:
Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Marshall McLuhan: ‘the medium is the message’
Media aesthetics and anaesthetics
Example: aesthetic analysis of 2 film sequences

3. History of aesthetics
The term ‘aesthetics’ only entered vocabulary in 18th century.
‘Aesthetics’ mainly a discourse of philosophers and art historians prior to 20th century.
20th century: technological development of media led media and cultural theorists to apply it to media.
Brief historical overview:

4. History of aesthetics
Derived from Ancient Greek: aisthetikos meaning relating to the senses.
Plato: regarded senses as inferior form of knowledge: beauty can aspire to truth: Phaedrus (370BC): (Socrates):
The senses can lead to truth (the divine) but mostly they lead to desire:
‘instead of being awed at the sight of her (beauty), he (the viewer) is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget’.
Plato mistrusts aesthetics because it does not give true knowledge.

5. History of aesthetics Aristotle
Aristotle: aisthesis : Aristotle did not share Plato’s mistrust of the senses:
In his De Anima we have a prototype media aesthetics: remarks on art, music, proportion, aesthetic well- being.
Aristotle believed that the senses can be educated through the achievement of balance and proportion between the senses.
Aristotle
Winged victory of Samothrace (2nd/3rd C BC): Louvre, Paris

6. History of aesthetics
1750: Baumgarten: Aesthetica: used the term ‘Ästhetik’ (German = aesthetics) to refer to making judgements of taste – largely about works of art.
1790: Kant: Critique of Judgement: philosophical discourse on the nature of judgements (of subjective pleasure) about aesthetic objects.
End of 18th C: The aesthetic established as autonomous realm (largely relating to works of art).

7. History of aesthetics Idealist and romantic aesthetics (19th Century)
Establishment of aesthetics as autonomous realm : ideals (moral, political) on to the aesthetic:
Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794): only through aesthetic education can human beings achieve balance between senses and reason (through the ‘play drive’).
Idealist and romantic aesthetics (19th Century)
Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer above the sea of fog (1818)

8. History of aesthetics
In late 19th/early 20th C: erosion of division between the autonomous aesthetic and everyday life.
(Modern) Artists use everyday objects as works of art.
Life itself becomes aestheticized (increase in fashion, commodity aesthetics).
Growth of technological media: it becomes possible to mechanically reproduce the work of art (pictures, film, music).
Beginnings of interest in media aesthetics (aesthetic properties of media).
Marcel Duchamp:
‘Fountain’ (1917)
Andy Warhol: ‘Brillo Box’ (1964)

9. Media aesthetics in media theory
20th C media aesthetics:
The drawing of attention to the aesthetic features of technological media.
2 key theorists: Walter Benjamin ( ) and Marshall McLuhan ( ).

10. Media aesthetics in media theory
Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936):
In the era before mechanical reproduction (film, mass-reproduced images, recorded music) the mode of reception of art works was that of aura – a kind of (religious) magic which required attention.
In the age of mechanical reproduction there is a loss of aura – image becomes reproducible and is received in the mode of distraction.
Consequences: mass consumption; loss of authenticity; democratisation of art consumption.

11. Media aesthetics in media theory
McLuhan: ‘the medium is the message’
Reverses the assumption that media are just neutral conveyors of messages.
The technological form of media imprints itself of the message: the message is the symbolic form of the medium itself.
Media are extensions of man (more senses engaged)
Different media have different degrees of engagement of the senses: ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media.
‘Hot’ media stimulate a single sense intensively, leave little room for receiver to bring something (e.g. imagination) to the medium.
‘Cool’ media require the receiver to ‘add’ something (imagination, use other senses) to make sense of message.

12. Media do not just extend but … (McLuhan)
Enhance
technology enhances some (sensory) capability of the person
Retrieve
Some earlier (sensory) capability that was lost
Make obsolete
Senses are pushed aside and made obsolescent
Reverse
If the characteristics of a medium is taken to extreme: a reversal of the original characteristics of the medium > aesthetic/anaesthetic

13. Media aesthetics and anaesthetics
‘Everything aesthetic is as such inevitably connected with anaesthetics. Selectivity is constitutive of the ability to perceive’. (Wolfgang Welsch: Aesthetics and Anaesthetics (1989), p.31/2)
‘The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single, isolated or “amputated” sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users’.
(McLuhan, The Gadget Lover. Narcissus as Narcosis, in Understanding Media, p.48, 51.)

14. Case study: The use of montage in film to create aesthetic effects
Montage = the editing together of sequences of short shots to achieve an aesthetic effect (political, symbolic) by the accumulation of individual shots.
Montage can link disparate objects, persons, and places: way of depicting modern life.
Example 1: Walter Ruttmann: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927.
Example 2: Ron Fricke: Samsara (2011)
Analyse the following short sequences.

15. Reading Plato: Phaedrus Aristotle: De Anima (On the Soul)
Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, Belknap Press 2008.

16. Reading Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media.
Wolfgang Welsch: Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics. For a New Form to the Discipline.
Films:
Walter Ruttmann: Berlin Symphony of a Great City: (whole film)
Ron Fricke: Samsara (2011): film website:
Herbert Zettl: Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics (Thomson, 2008)