it's just my imagination running away with me...

The Language of the new media
Lev Manovich
Intro to chapter 2 [cont]

Still thinking about the new and old medias, I’ve been wondering about Manovich’s statement that the user is imprisoned in front of the screen. There’s only one position they can have at a time. That made me think of the works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the very beginning of the 20th century when they invented Cubism. Cubism intended to show fragments of objects seen from different view points. I guess there are some similarities between Cubism and the 360° views available in some electronics’ websites. The sense of depth or tri-dimensionality is present in the products available in 360°, in a very clear way. In Cubism, however, if the canvas was the computer screen, I’d say that the computer’s system had “frozen” and that the screen was showing different views of a rotating object.

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There is one thing that has been on my mind for weeks now. I can’t stop thinking about the screen and how it was inspired by the canvas in a way. From the painted canvas and the screen I began to think about the stage. The stage environment, plays and other kinds of entertainment were a very popular subject matter when mass produced posters came up (with lithography – yes – I know that thanks to Liz and her History of GrD classes). This means that artists somehow wanted to immortalize scenes and personalities. It was real life versus painted memories. Anyway, my point is that thinking about artists depicting a stage in a canvas or paper, kind of tells me that stage-canvas/screen have some sort of relation.

The canvas was the place to see what you might have not had the chance to see in person.
The canvas was the concrete object that could connect the audience and the artist’s mind.
The canvas carried a message, an expression and was the reflection of the culture during a certain period.
The canvas “showed” who the artist was.

The reason I’ve been wondering about it is specifically a concert and a play. The first is Pink Floyd’s Pulse and the other is the Cats, the musical. Pink Floyd’s concert has always impressed me in many ways, but I can’t stop thinking about the flying pig, which fluctuates over the audience while Pink Floyd is playing. Cats is amazing because when you least expect, the dancers/actors appear in the middle of the audience and begin to stare at people’s face, mimicking real cats [and I tell you, it’s pretty weird to have a stranger looking at you that way]. In both cases the artists are not limited to the stage space, which I’ve been comparing to a screen. They invade the space where “users” are, just as VR does. It's like things and people are able to finally transpass the screen into the real world, just like in the movie the purple rose of cairo, where the good guy leaves the screen to meet the good girl. In the case of Pink Floyd and Cats suddenly what was imprisoned in a flatter space [the stage], which resembles a movie screen [format], becomes much more tri-dimensional because depth has increased dramatically.

Do you think it’s a crazy comparison?

[Well, I think that this whole stage/screen thing began when someone offered me to buy a raffle for a 52” television with a home theater. I guess the thought of having that “monster” in my room made me think that it would be almost as if I was in the audience of a show. I’d certainly “teleletransport” myself to the stadium/theater/whatever with that giant right in front of my face.]

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