Tereza Wagner wrote: "Do people young or old are expected to experience they creativity when zapping? Don't you think that at the end all these hundred of channels are much of the same?"
This is directly related to what do we mean by creativity, innovation, cultural and artistic expressions… For some societies, art is expressed in forms of cultural and collective behaviors… and sometimes the terms creativity and innovation are used for the same meaning... But for our discussion, I can understand by creativity any new form of art. And innovation is more the way of customizing the creativity. For instance, new media art is an art form by itself since many qualities are now possible, and they were not before the invention of the computer. But this or that new media artwork are all different kinds of innovations, because they are all laid within the new media's new language. Creativity is tackled by (and embodied in) innovation. In this sense, yes people who zap are not creating new art forms (as video art), but on the other hand they are innovating the TV perception, since no one wrote the fragmented sequence for them, they did it by
zapping. Of course, this experience is more a personal and private one rather then an experience of an editing that was conceived to share with spectators. This would mean to me - after Tereza's question above - that people are not expected to experience any creativity by zapping, but the way they are doing it is innovating the broadcasting mechanism itself, and affecting the artistic expression that often questions the standards, the way people behave.
In the ever-changing screen, the broadcasting companies started to seek ways to get their programs to reach these active viewers who continue to avoid bad content and search for a good one. In addition to rerunning a program up to five times a day in order to satisfy all viewers who might live in different time zones, broadcasting companies fully invested in the loop phenomenon, i.e. continuously showing the same movie in loop mode. Thus, each time the citizen clicks on a certain channel, he will get a fragment of the movie he is supposed to see from the beginning till the end in the traditional movie-viewing manner, just like in movie theaters. Nowadays, zappers inadvertently view many fragments from this movie. Then, later on, they realize that it is in fact the same movie being shown over and over again on the same channel.
However, at least here in Lebanon, this does not incite them to ask any questions. To them, it is the cable guy who is running the same movie again and again and not the channel itself; they think this Lebanese guy ran out of movies or maybe does not know that he is showing the same movie. They might even call him and notify him about this technical problem in his cable connection. However, it might also happen that these citizens may not be bored by seeing this movie and actually enjoy it. They would not enjoy the movie itself, but rather the looped movie that it became. It is absolutely a new perception, a new meaning for images on the screen, because for the viewers, these are the forgotten moving images, or simply the only images that the cable guy has to offer. They are watching the movie to express their solidarity with him.
If new media indeed enhanced the "Movement, speed, transformation, etc.", Couchot and Hillaire state in their book "L'art numérique" that new media also brought something from scratch: the disconnection (and liberation) between the image and any physical contact that caused this image to exist; today image is rendered from script without the need of any physical impact neither a physical point of view. So new media is a new art form when the form of art can't happen otherwise.
But still Tereza's question about wether we can merge the tool with the art form is open…
Cheers,
Ricardo
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Footnote
---------------
Our topic for April 2009:
This running discussion deals with how (new) media can affect local behaviours related to creativity and innovation within a socio-political context, and what is the link between politic and the ways that users behave.
Questions that are raised include:
- Is (new) media a tool which reinforces people's creativity and how it is expressed in terms of social behaviour?
- What new media is entailing in connection to artistic expression? Is new media just a tool or an art form?
- How are democracy and social connectivity via new media related?
- Are global and local systems two separate entities, or is it about one place?
- What is the impact of the media content on identity in your socio-politic sphere?
- How is the economy affecting visual forms of communication?
- Do artworks emerge from a specific Intention or from media models constrained by business requirements?
- What new roles do virtual social networks adopt to maintain difficult relations?
________________________________
From: "Wagner, Teresa" <T.Wagner@unesco.org>
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Friday, April 3, 2009 7:01:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, AND THE BODY POLITIC
I've got your point; Zapping is a way to escape from real live, which is always good but not sufficient to escape from being bored. Do people young or old are expected to experience they creativity when zapping? Don't you think that at the end all these hundred of channels are much of the same?
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