Design and Media Art Media Histories Class Assignment - Essay Example

Design and Media Art Question One Shooting a film, particularly one with sound, provides an unimaginable spectacle that has evolved with industrialization. Mechanical reproduction has changed the audience’s perception and reaction to art (Benjamin 1). The use of lighting equipment, cameras and the staff form a process that gives the audience a revolutionized viewpoint like he had his eyes on a matching line with the camera’s lens. This also marks the advancement from scenes on stage to scenes in the studio. An analysis of the Western capitalist societies and their changes was developed by a German-American group of theorists known as the Frankfurt School (Adorno 43). They were among the earliest producers of accounts in social theories on the significance of mass communication and culture in social domination and reproduction (Buck-Morss 12). They also generated the initial models of critical studies analyzing the procedures of cultural production and the reception of the audience. The studio audience is aware of the position from which the act may not be detected immediately as illusionary, but such a chance is not there for a scene of a movie in the process of being shot. It possesses the illusionary nature of a second degree that results from cutting. The mechanical equipment provided by industrialization has infiltrated deeply enough into reality such that its pure aspect is released from the foreign essence of the equipment through the shooting procedure. The combination of emotional and visual enjoyment characterizes the progressive reaction of the audience. The feature of equipment free reality became the optimum level of artifice. Immediate reality became a priced element as technology advanced. In the 1930s, a critical approach was developed by the Frankfurt school towards communication and cultural studies. It combined textual analysis and analysis of ideological and social effects. To this end, they came up with the phrase culture industry to refer to the industrialization process of culture produced in mass as well as the commercial necessity that propelled the system. Theorists who criticized mass mediated cultural works in the perspective of industrial production claimed they portrayed similar features as all other mass produced products. However, the culture industries of the Frankfurt school held a specific role of providing ideologically legitimate theories of the capitalist societies’ existence and integrating art into its people’s lifestyles (Buck-Morss 16). With industrialization bringing forth more versatile cameras, the difference between the works of a painter and a cameraman were also understood on different levels. While there exists a natural distance between a painter’s work and reality, a cameraman can penetrate scenes more deeply. The painter’s product may be termed as a total product, while the cameraman’s is made up of multiple segments amassed through a new law. Therefore, after industrialization, present day man finds the reality represented by film superior to that portrayed by a painter. The detailed penetration of reality mechanical equipment is capable of achieving offers the reality in an aspect that contemporary man feels entitled to demand from artwork (Hopkinson 27). As the Frankfurt school promoted the mass and homogeneous production of media through its culture industry model, more models were developed including those by Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch (Fabian and Adam 19). However, the culture industry articulated the significant social roles media culture played by providing a commercially and technically advanced model. It played a key role in ideological reproduction and how it is perceived today to serve the needs of individuals and corporate interests. Question Two Although the camera obscura’s characteristics were observed in the Western world and China in the 16th century, the electronic and printed forms of images produced by cameras became a common and widely used way of arousing emotions and communicating information from the 19th and 20th centuries (Chambers 9). This followed the 18th century discovery that exposing silver halides to light caused it to darken. This communications means was initially promoted by the fact that it appealed to the middle class by the ease with which it created pictures of their wealth and themselves. It also met the need for precise representation, which was gaining popularity among the materialistic societies after the Renaissance. Most of its earliest subjects included topographical views, portraits and remakes of architectural structures. The secular societies saw the art as the coming into being of an interest they held for long in optical phenomena. This media gained more ground and stability when efforts were driven up to unify the separate 16th and 18th century knowledge for practicable reasons and use light to produce images (Hopkinson 83). The result was discoveries in France and England at around the same time, with the United States and the rest of Europe having their interests aroused. Two key systems were then invented to make pictures by using the way chemicals react to light (Chambers 41). They were the calotype and daguerreotype. The daguerreotype method produced a reversed image on a copper plate coated with silver. Depending on the way it was struck by light, the image bore both positive and negative characteristics of a picture, but was a genuine and highly defined representation of its subject. On the other hand, the calotype method first produced a negative image, in reverse, followed by a positive which returned the image to its proper position and tonal character (Chambers 43). This was done on paper, unlike a silver coated copper plate of the daguerreotype method. The daguerreotype received a boost from the French government when they started indemnifying the inventors so that the process may be availed to all, with the exception of users from Britain, who were required to buy a franchise first. The method grew both in use and popularity, with more than 9000 manuals on the process’ instructions were sold in three months. The United States embraced the process with particular enthusiasm partly because they did not previously have strong traditions in art and, it was also in accordance with their present functional perceptions of pictorial images (Fabian & Adam 36). The long exposure durations needed in the process allowed it to capture only stationery objects. This was overcome by use of better visual elements and effective chemicals, developed by daguerreotypists in the United States and Europe in 1851. At the same time, towards the end of the 1840s, the calotype method was improved by Gustave and Blanquart-Evrad by changing the chemical substances used to enhance tone and prevent fading. It received further developments, popularity and stability when Le Gray achieved more sharpness by waxing the paper negative prior to sensitization. These developments on the two processes lay the foundations for photography by a French artist named Hercules Florence in 1833, although it was not worked on again till 1973. An experiment in 1839 gave rise to the process of direct positive, accomplished by the darkening of a sheet of paper chemically and letting light act on it as bleach (Hopkinson 84). Question Three In the contexts the two writers have presented their arguments, the two points of view may not be reconciled. As Laura Mulvey argues, cinema gives rise to questions regarding the unconscious manner of seeing and pleasure contained in looking. She describes the pleasure of perceiving someone else as an erotic object as formations and mechanisms played on by cinema (Mulvey 843). Using a woman’s image as a raw and passive material for the active stare by a man adds a layer in the representation structure. It is specifically designed in the preferred cinematic nature of illusionary narrative films (Chambers 2). She further argues that it is only in film form that realities that are not fundamental to film may end up in perfectly awesome contradiction (Mulvey 843). This is made possible by the possibility presented by cinema of diverting the prominence of the look. According to her, this is what differentiates film from the reality of theatre or shows like strip tease. Cinema goes beyond creating the appeal and potentiality of a woman to be looked at; it even builds the way she will be looked at by preparing the audience’s minds and expectations. It is through such methods that cinema builds on its voyeuristic potentials, which are not real feelings of pleasure because they have been produced to create illusions to the measure of the audience’s desires. These illusions are categorized into three different formative ways. They include the way and angle the camera shoots from, the perceptions and reactions of the audience and the way the characters interact with each other in their portrayal of the illusion. However, the conventions of storytelling types of films suppress the first two aspects while significantly magnifying the third. This bears the conscious intention of eradicating the intrusive presence of the camera that creates a disconnecting awareness among the audience. Now, therefore, this creates another of Laura’s strongest points because, without the first two aspects, which are the way the camera shoots, and the audience’s perceptions and reactions, fictional cinema cannot attain truth, obviousness and reality (Mulvey 843). On the other hand, arguing in an opposite direction, Andre Bazin insists that the photographic nature of cinema is the fundamental factor that lends it its realism (Braudy and Cohen 426). He provides that all the director of a film needs to do to achieve a transparent space is to add dramatic opaqueness to his decor and reflect its natural realism at the same time. His statement that the illusions and fantasies of photography bear the essence of realism sharply contrast with those of Laura Mulvey (843) that is photography and illusions that kill realism. He upholds that illusion in cinema has its foundation in the inseparable realism of what is filmed and shown. So long as the artificial world of cinema and the real world share common notions of realism that the audience can identify with, then photography and cinema will have captured the real moment (Braudy and Cohen 426). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. Print. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2000. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1935. Web. . Braudy, Leo & Marshall Cohen.. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory readings. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Print. Chambers, William. Basics of Communication and Coding. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print. Fabian, Rainer, and Hans Christian Adam. Masters of Early Travel Photography. New York. Routledge, 1983. Print. Hopkinson, Tom. Treasures of the Royal Photographic Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Read More