The 21st Century Medium

(screenshot from wefeelfine.org -- see below)

Last week I attended a lecture given by Susan Napier, a Professor of Japanese culture from Tufts University.  She had an interesting claim: that animation is the medium of the twenty-first century.  Granted, Napier's scholarly immersion in Japanese anime gives her a somewhat biased view of the contemporary media landscape (I seem to be using the phrase "contemporary media landscape" more and more here.  I miss my Media Theory seminar.).  All the same, her lecture raised an interesting topic.  Napier claimed that because the "invisibility of new technologies makes them less susceptible to [visual] representation",  a medium other than film is required to explore those technologies and the culture they are shaping.  This, she said, is because film is "inherently representational" (i.e., to "make" a film, special effects and cg inserts aside, actors and objects must be placed in front of a camera -- the projection is photochemical record of the positions and movements of the objects it depicts).

In Napier's view, animation's ability to defy physics (at it's most basic, Wiley Coyote falling to the bottom of a canyon, becoming a pancake, and springing back up again to his usual shape) and its propensity for depicting the fantastical, hallucinogenic, or oneiric make it the more appropriate medium.  Having seen Paprika (anime), a film that explores the blurring borders between reality, dream, and the digital universe, I can understand some of what Napier is talking about (and highly recommend the film -- it's excellent).

I'm not sure I agree with Napier, although, being an anime fan, I wouldn't mind if animation became a little more popular.  I think what makes our time so distinctive is its sheer variety of media.  And the digital, of course, is the new prevailing influence on all types of art.

Time and time again, our era is referred to as the "information age".  It is interesting to see how contemporary art handles the concept of information.  Take a look, for instance, at We Feel Fine.  We Feel Fine crawls through blogs across the web and extracts any sentence it encounters that includes the phrase "I feel".  It also captures related data about the blogger -- region, gender, age group, date, and even the weather in the time/location of the post.  The results are then displayed on the website in a variety of artsy montages.  The end product is art that aspires to universal emotion.  The site's founders write: 

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

 The information-gathering properties of the web promote a new kind of art, of which content assembling sites like We Feel Fine are examples.  This is the art of collective authorship, the art of the zeitgeist.  It is an accumulative art, formed by lives in sum, shaped by people engaged simply in the acts of living and expressing.  And this "art" is not limited to overtly artistic endeavors.  Sites like YouTube and Flickr, though not themselves "art projects", have an expressive power greater than the sum of the individual pieces uploaded to them.

And now, in the off chance We Feel Fine scans my blog, I would like to contribute my bit, however mundane, to the whirlwind of collective expression:

I feel like having a pint of chocolate ice cream -- don't you?