beautiful circuits

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A history of the idea of communication Rosalind Krauss "a voyage on the north sea:" art in the age of the post-medium condition Michael North, camera works: photography and the twentieth-century word Thomas Foster, The souls of cyberfolk: post humanism as vernacular theory Francis Frascina ed., Pollack and after: The critical debate (essays that deal with or argue against Clement Greenberg's notion of media specificity) p8-9 (m)ugh of the newness that is attributed to new media art and culture is understood to render obsolete the sense of modernism and medium specificity(modernism as medium specificity) championed most notably by Clement Greenberg. "It quickly emerged," writes Greenberg in his 1960s essay "modernist painting," "that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all hat was unique in the nature of its medium." Identifying modernism with a commitment to the physical constraints and artistic conventions of individual mediums- so that to engage with their materiality is not just to discover but to delimit their ideal realms of practice and technique-- Greenberg's arguments remain a point of departure fro many writers seeking to understand the forms of multimedia, or new media art that follow modernism proper. Thus when Rosalind Krauss suggests that we are now in a "post-medium condition," she all but admits the what she means to say is "post-Grenberg." And for Hansen, even this is not saying enough: Krauss's"reconceptualization of the medium" remains incapable of "grasping the aesthetic newness of new media art" because this art is designed to address the body "as a selective processor of information" whose "medial interfaces" displace and transform the very material limits of the art object with which traditional notions of the medium contend. New media art is defined by "its resistance to capture by now dated, historical forms of art and media criticism." The very notion of the "medium" and its aesthetic epistemology is no more bleeding edge than Betamax.