Technological determinism and medium ontology in film and early video
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the unexplored relationship between film and early video. While video and film cultures of the sixties and seventies frequently sought to separate themselves, I consider the two mediums in constellation to reveal a series of tandem concerns and effects. In their investigation of liveness and self-awareness with the forms and operations of video, seminal artists Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan displayed a formalism that was contemporaneously theorized in avant-garde film and minimalism. The early work of Nam June Paik shares with the structural films of Paul Sharits a fascination with technological dysfunction and obsolescence. Jud Yalkut's exemplary videofilms probe the boundary between film and video mediums to investigate a cultural preoccupation with authenticity in an environment increasingly mediated by electronic communications. In delineating these point of conjunction I make two arguments. First, I claim that this constellation of film and early video destabilizes traditional notions of an immanently defined medium, thereby making the film/video configuration a signal moment in the development of intermedia. By focusing on the shared operations and subject effects of film and early video rather than intrinsic qualities, I reconsider the medium as something contingently defined by its variable processes and results rather than its morphology. Contrary to some conceptualizations of intermedia as a fusion of mediums or a disregard for medium, the concurrence of film and video I research characterizes intermedia as a considered analysis of how differentiated mediums interact. To consider film and video together as intermedia is to recognize that while they both form and inform their objects in particular ways, their interaction reveals something unique about their effects that could not be ascertained by considering them separately. My second argument complicates the technological determinism that runs through these artists' work and has been used to criticize their practices. Immersed in the culture of McLuhan, information, and cybernetics, my artists often celebrated their technology as a powerful ameliorative to problems caused by the social, political, and economic order. For these artists, using and watching video was sufficient to alter and direct social and political processes. Though they never explicitly attack the socio-political order or structurally consider their technology's ties to the masters that developed and purposed the technology, they do refashion video with contrary intentions and ends. By drawing on film theory and considering film and video together as dominant cultural media that organize our perception and world, I show how the divergent practices of these artists meaningfully critique the socio-political order even as they work within the confines of that order.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Navarro, Rudolph |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
| Primary advisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Thesis advisor | Bukatman, Scott, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Mesch, Claudia |
| Advisor | Bukatman, Scott, 1957- |
| Advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Advisor | Mesch, Claudia |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rudolph Navarro. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Rudolph Navarro
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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