MULTI-BLOODY-MEDIA

Media.

New Media.

Interactive media.

Multi -bloody- media.

PRINT MEDIA

And I think we’ll all agree that even if we take print media

     [hold up graphis magazine]

Even really good print media.

     [flip through to a good page and a rip it out]

And stick it on the screen.

     [stick page on screen]

It’s not interactive media.

Even if we spin it around

     [spin it around your finger on the screen]

Fold it up, tear it into shreds and reassemble it

     [do that]

It’s still not interactive media.

But we can still learn a lot from those media, and we do.

HAND EXAMPLES

     [point finger at hand like rollover, then voodoo hand]

This is not interactive

     [make second hand come into space of pointing hand like 3d]

This is interactive

     [Clench hands, pull at each other, (?then cut a finger on each hand and rub blood on the other hands????- maybe too nutter) ]

That’s interactive.

But is that media?

THOUGHT AS MEDIA

Ok, the first media we were ever conscious of was thought. (You’re not allowed to argue with this premise now ’cause I only have 3 minutes. But grab me later and tell me off if you disagree)

When we first wrote that down with pictures and words, we added materiality to the medium of thought. Gave it tangible existence outside of our mind. Did a similar thing in a very different way with speech.

But rocks scratched rocks before we ever took rocks in our hands and scratches images into them. We grunted for centuries before we ever made intelligible sounds. The tools existed for a hell of a long time before we ever used those tools to create their special media with them.

So image added materiality to thought. Film added motion, and then sound, to static image and text. Interactive media adds interactivity to film, text and image.

But like I said, this

     [hand roll over other hand voodoo]

is not interactive. It’s reactive. And though we have the tools for interactivity at our disposal, we are for the most part, not creating truly interactive media.

Making interaction the defining criteria of a medium forces us to expand our awareness of what media is.

POSTMODERN SITUATIONISTS

Here’s where the postmodernists and situationists come in.

The situationists, in a nutshell, pointed out that our entire notion of reality is based on some fiction we have created. We define everything in the world and in ourselves against some spectacle our species has created.

I went to Africa. There were motorcycles all over the place. Men selling a French version of scrabble in the streets. Women selling rice and beans. I got in a truck, I rode up north, past mud huts and the Savannah, and I though, "Yeah, this is Africa. This is the real Africa."

But what I was really saying was "This is the Africa I saw in those national geographic magazines."

We base our notion of reality against a medium we have created. People kill each other over some imaginary figure we have created.

Society is a medium.

The postmodernists said the first step is to become aware of the medium. Then you subvert that medium, make it do something it wasn’t "intended" to do, something outside its current paradigm. Once you’ve subverted it, then you can start to understand how to fully use all aspects of medium. And then you can work outside of the medium, beyond that medium, and the process starts again.

That’s how rocks became writing implements. We subverted their "natural" paradigm.

So, Interactive Media.

We need to extend our understanding of interaction beyond reaction, and extend our understanding of media beyond the ones we generally reference, using the medium of society as an inspiration and examination point as well.

What happened here?

     [clench (bloody?) hands]

What made it interactive?

This hand didn’t just roll over the other hand and have it perform based on its movement. It got pulled on, and it pulled back. It got cut. This hand is now different than it was before that interaction. And you can be damn sure the next time it clenches hands it’s going to be approaching it differently, because last time it got cut. It’s not only changed on the outside, but its outlook has changed as a result of that interaction as well.

And this hand got cut too. This hand is different too.

     [hold up one hand]

Human.

     [hold up other hand]

Computer.

Interaction is a two way process.

We need to extend the timeframe so interaction changes not only the human but the computer side.

And just as we look at print media, at architecture, at music and film as we try to figure out jus what the hell this new media is, we need to look at society itself as a media.

Because the way the Internet works as a whole is like a living creature, like a living society. The veins may be wires and 1’s and 0’s, but the blood that courses through its veins is human thought.

Interaction needs life. Dead things don’t interact. They can react.

     [drop magazine on the floor]

     [kick it and watch it rise and fall with exxagerated head motions]

But they can’t interact.

We’ve got the rocks. We’re just not scratching them together to subvert it into a new media yet. But when we look at interactivity as it takes place around us in the medium of society, when we extend our understanding of what media is beyond the media we generally reference, then we’re getting towards interactive media.