Notion Of Medium Research Articles

Contradiction Medium and the Existence Question

The process of human understanding of the world starts from viewing complex chaos, proceeding to monism followed by the contradiction theory, and finally returning to complexity theory, but without giving up the pursuit of monism. Lao-Tzu and Heraclitus put forward their own theories of unity of opposites at almost the same time. The thought of unity of opposites has long been contained in the theory of yin and yang and the Book of Changes. In the ontology of information evolution, existence and nonexistence (you and wu in Chinese) can also be roughly interpreted as a contradictory relationship. Existence and nonexistence are two opposing worlds. Our understanding of existence needs medium. We can only indirectly grasp the current meaning of existence after the transmission of multilayer mediums and the distortion and loss of information. Aristotle mentioned the notion of medium, but the real world cannot be explained by his ideas. All transformational processes of existence rely on medium. The transformation process of existence and nonexistence is different from the transformation process in the domain of existence. There is no need to rely on medium.

A note on Ludwig von Bertalanffy and the form problem of life

AbstractThe paper looks at two early books written and edited, respectively, by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, both published in 1928. They share an interest in the individuality of individual things and living beings and thus are both skeptical of a general substance able to explain existence and life. The first book is Bertalanffy's Critical Theory of Form Formation; the second, a small collection of texts written by Nicholas von Cusa and preceded by an introduction by Bertalanffy, which is as admiring of the Cardinal and Bishops diplomatic life as it is impressed by his philosophy containing many ideas which only later, and differently, became prominent by writers like Leibniz, Pascal, or Luther. Von Bertalanffy calls von Cusa the first philosopher with a notion of infinity, which proves to be pertinent both theologically and mathematically. The paper discusses the problem of the individuality of individual living beings within the context of the so‐called philosophy of organism, in which Plato is fascinated by the question of how organisms manage to distinguish themselves from a surrounding they at the same time depend on. The paper introduces Fritz Heider's notion of medium and George Spencer‐Brown's notion of form to show how a possible calculus of indications doubling as operations of reflexive negation relate to a medium of life which consists, among other things, of decaying forms of life.

Language medium and a high-stakes test: Language ideology and coaching centers in North India

AbstractThe Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) offers its set of examinations in a “medium”, whether in a language recognized by the Constitution of India or in English. The notion of medium in the examination borrows from the notion of medium in schooling where it refers to the primary language of pedagogy. Although not all students who have studied in a particular medium in school and university go on to attempt the UPSC examinations in the same medium, most do. This article reports on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in coaching centers in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar and in the city of Varanasi. It traces some of the ways in which people hold ideologies about the significance of studying in one medium or another. Much ideological reflection, for example, was oriented to the fierce protesting that broke out in various locations in Delhi during the summer of 2014, just before my fieldwork. The protests were focused on changes made to the UPSC examination in 2011 which initiated increasingly poor results among Hindi-medium aspirants. The article also answers the call of scholars to consider institutional practices – especially as they change – alongside ideological reflections because, in the case of coaching centers, practice and ideology are not aligned.

Workshop: Making Beyond the Post-Medium Condition

Current trends within Art create tensions in educational institutions between historical forces, logistical challenges, traditional codes of practice, budgetary limitations and inherited objects. The following performative study examines the artists’ relationship to medium within this complicated environment. The material emerges from workshops carried out with students in art school spaces across Britain; conceptual workshops that consider the current status of technical workshops in this awkward territory where industrial, craft, and avant-garde modes of making overlap. Through engagement with tools found within Art institutions -some abandoned, some unfamiliar, some ubiquitous- it attempts to visualise aspects of the myriad perceptions that the current student/future artist has of the notion of medium. Referring to the condition described by Rosalind Krauss that emerged from the cross-pollination of medium-specific disciplines in Art and its education in the late 20th century, a ‘post-medium’ approach is adopted to discover new potential of tools. While acknowledging the dominant legacy of the Bauhaus, there is a questioning here of how we consider material practice, and its mastery, after conceptualism, after institutional critique, and after the tech revolution that has divorced many modes of making from material engagement. The study’s own methodology is itself under analysis; an improvised mode of making that draws on theory, performance, conversation, image and sound manipulation, appropriation, collage and documentary. It is part of a body of work that attempts to confront the future of supporting material practice in Art School beyond the Post-Medium Condition.

Marshall McLuhan: The Possibility of Re-Reading His Notion of Medium

After describing the origins of media ecology and the role of Marshall McLuhan in that theoretical constitution process, this article addresses McLuhan’s perspective on technology and media. In this context, the article warns that the impossibility of reading McLuhan stems from segregating technique and culture. This is impossible because there is a need to think about the extension of his idea of medium. The article proposes a conversation between McLuhan’s contributions and the works of thinkers like Don Ihde and Martin Heidegger, and ends with a final discussion on the meaning of concept of medium.

Meta/dia two different approaches to the medial

ABSTRACTIn media philosophy since Benjamin, the concept of ‘medium’ is conceived in terms of translation or transport. In a similar vein, Christoph Tholen has brought the literal sense of metaphor as metapherein into focus. In this paper, I argue that Tholen’s approach misses the ‘meta’ (‘middle’ or ‘beyond’) of metaphor, corresponding to the Latin trans. This is contrasted with the Greek dia that allows the development of a performative notion of medium, which orients itself at material practices of transition.

The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and the Geopolitics of Medium Specificity

The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and the Geopolitics of Medium Specificity Weihong Bao (bio) As media proliferate, mutate, and commingle at accelerated and unprecedented speed and scale today, the identity of cinema haunts us, perhaps more than other moments in history, with an intensified urgency on which hinges the stakes of the field, its legitimacy, and its ongoing legacy. This has stimulated a resurgent interest in the question of the medium, whether in terms of its persistent or changing specificity or its ongoing interaction with other media, with their mutual transmutation or convergence to the point of their obsolescence, pushing us to claims of the post-medium age paradoxically caught in the storm of New Media. While the question of the medium continues to concern us, even in gestures of its disavowal and overcoming, rarely have these discussions gone beyond the dominant focus of Europe and North America, both in terms of the scope of historical and contemporary instances and critical conceptions. What if we shift our viewfinder slightly off center while tracking into the thickness of history? Will the notion of medium and medium specificity still matter and, if so, in what ways? What were the alternative notions and conceptions that arose in other cultural contexts? How do these discussions help us rethink our current debates and assumptions? To look beyond the dominant focus on American and European film theory is not simply a matter of geographical relocation. Rather, it necessarily engages the question of “where is film theory?” with “what constitutes the object as such?” and calls our attention to the interdependence between these two sets of inquiries.1 By looking beyond the dominant center, we are forced to question the very parameters and institutions of film theory; in effect, we are also asked [End Page 350] to look beyond the more familiar settings and rethink the boundaries between film theory and film history, film criticism and film practice, and film history and media history. In the following, I will conduct a small case study by tracing the question of the cinematic medium in twentieth century China to explore the methodological issues we encounter when we move our attention to film theories elsewhere. My particular interest is to step back from a materialist ontology of medium and medium specificity to ask instead what cultural and political discourses such ontological accounts participate in, and what alternative notions played equally important roles in understandings of medium and medium specificity. I will situate this inquiry more specifically in the historical debates on film and theater in several key moments in twentieth century China from the 1920s to the 1950s. As the shifting medium boundary between film and theater mobilized a historical problematic in constituting cinema and its political stakes at different moments in China, the border between theory and practice also became increasingly porous. These designations, I show, are not isolated contemplations, but are deeply embedded in transnational circulation of knowledge, along with a growing sensitivity to the changing mediality of film and theater with regard to media technology and aesthetic, and their social and political attunement. Just as we look toward the periphery to redefine the center of film theory, in China as well as in a number of countries, the discourse of cinema’s medium specificity has largely evolved around working out its distinctions against its dominant other, theater. As cinema’s own status shifted from an emerging new medium to an established commercial institution to a problematic foreigner in modern China, cinema’s distinctions were articulated in relation to theater in various ways that give us a glimpse into the cultural and political investment in notions of the medium that have always been with us but which we choose to circumvent in favor of examining these notions’ material trappings and philosophical underpinnings. These discussions not only concern the medium others of cinema, more specifically, theater and its changing identities, but the geopolitical permutations that recast the dynamic between the two media. How the discourse of medium specificity became entwined with geopolitics, which eventually points to the geopolitics of film theory, is what I would like to pursue in this paper. Departing from Theater: Cinema as an Emerging Medium...

The Be-ing of Objects

The paper is a reading of Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Even) by means of Ranulph Glanville's notions of black box, cybernetic control and objects as well as by George Spencer-Brown's notion of form and Fritz Heider's notion of medium. In fact, as Heidegger was among those who emphasized systems thinking as the epitome of modern thinking, did in his lecture on Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom a most thorough reading of this thinking, and considered cybernetics the very fulfilment of modern science it is interesting to know whether second-order cybernetics, as it was not known to Heidegger and as it delves into an understanding of inevitable complexity and foundational ignorance, falls within that verdict mere modernity or goes beyond it. If modern science in its rational understanding considers its subjects to be objects sitting still while being observed, then indeed second-order cybernetics is different. It looks into the observer's interactions with black boxes, radically uncertain of where to expect operations of a self, but certain that we cannot restrict it to human consciousness.

Artistic Re-Appropriation and Reconfiguration of the Medium’s Milieu

Drawing upon Bernard Stiegler’s and Jacques Rancière’s conceptions of medium as a milieu this article seeks to address the question of the political aspects of the aesthetic in relation to the notion of medium. Based on the analysis of this theoretical question the article interprets and discusses artistic endeavors to re-appropriate and reconfigure conservative symbolic orders and media milieus that have become dissociated in relation to works of art by Alfredo Jaar and Thomas Hirschhorn.

The People's Mic as a Medium in Its Own Right: A Pharmacological Reading

The People's Mic—a collective amplification of individual voices in public gatherings—has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement. Because those who join the Microphone in call and response occupy simultaneously the position of medium and that of addressee, the Mic allows us to return to an ancient notion of medium as a middle ground that is associated with the public and the common. Extending a pharmacological trajectory in media theory that goes from Jacques Derrida to Neil Postman to Bernard Stiegler, the article argues that the embodied, slow-paced and choral nature of the Mic can be seen as an antidote to the speedy and fragmentary nature of online communication. In other words, even though the People's Mic does not require any technological prosthesis, its use has been popularized in a post-technological society—a society whose communication patterns are informed by information technologies even when they are not directly relying on them. In the second part, the article draws on Michel Foucault's writings on the ambivalent relationship between free speech and democracy in ancient Greece, to argue that the People's Mic allows participants to reflect on the conditions of possibility of democratic communication—of communication in an open, unscripted environment. It concludes that the challenge for contemporary media theory and media activism is to understand how media that are dependent on the messages they convey can generate their own metalanguages so as to have an impact on the information technologies that enable them.

Co to jest medium?

At the beginning the author expresses his opinion that there is a national confusion which nowadays prevails about the nation of medium. His explications, in which he reminds his readers about the indirectness of media communication, are of historical character and expose numerous examples of notional abuse. One of the these states that without defining, in the broadest possible way, the notion of medium, which is a crucial one for media studies, it appears tha any systematic scientific reflection is impossible. As a remedy for the notional confusion, acceptance of the realistic definition of medium which was worked out by Werner Faulstich and based on the theoretical concept of Urlich Saxer („media are systems which solve problems”) is suggested. Therefore, that definition, four dimensions of which define the bases of empirical media studies, means the symbolic „patricide” of the main founder of modern media studies Marshall McLuhan and makes empirical, functional history and theory of the media possible.