Preparatory Text - Adlikno: the Media Archive (17th September)

Topics

• Writing in the Media
  • The symbol as the writer’s master plan
  • Media text creating its parallel space (Alternate media?)
  • Renewal of space
  • The material as produce
  • What are UTOs, exactly?

• Vague Media
  • Are vague media similar to satellite-ish media?
  • The mortar that glues alien and human together?

• The Extramedial
  • The spectre between media and outside it

Discussion

The symbol becomes the messenger when words pose as king, that the ruler is indeed part of the symbols' hegemony. Writing for media no longer includes the multimedia as its proper approach, with the increasing technofetischism in contemporary culture the focus has been set toward the meaning of the messages we send through systems which tell others' truths and likes. What does it mean to send a private message when the media you carefully form your virtuality with has been carefully cared and formed by others in order to carry out your message. We remain trapped within these structures, and it is up to us to try and shine a light on it. With media being that with which we communicate we may never break free as the ego seeks release for this feverish realization. We are not within the Matrix, we are outside it stretched thin along the media landscape. Not being able to participate fully in the machine-landscape of communication technologies, instead we observe. As we look inside we are unknowingly surrounded by the extramedial, following our messages like spectres; untouchable and ubiquitous. In the extramedial sense the vague media is the closest to achieving a meta-media character as its purpose not only seems to work as media static, the background noise of interesting media, but fills in the gaps between intersecting media as the mortar between bricks. It is part of the alien inspiration leading to metamorphosis. It might very well be an attempt at media trying to express the extramedial.

Vague media permits the noisy human to co-mingle the noisy alien that always surrounds us. With its vague birth and "death" vague media could almost be called the extramedial of the media sphere. It's part of a sensation which is making attempt at existing, and only that. Its perceived irresponsibility towards its actions could mirror its nature, to merely exist without any strings. Then again, vague media is part of the media landscape. It isn't ubiquitous in the sense that extramedial negative reality occurs between every communication, no real 'heterotopia' as Foucault would put it as it itself mediates its messages and through its messages contains the extramedial. Vague media is a node in a network. A extramedial sensation, perhaps, in a networked world? A world where being connected is 'living', and dying is losing all ties to its media peers. Perhaps the world is understood to be complex enough to host two dominant perceptions of reality. Our bodily auditory, visual, ambulatory and tactile senses (containing the extramedial) and our extrabodily electronic senses which are more extendable but perhaps systematically less controllable in that the media we use has been created and cared for by teams of designers with their own- and more generalized ideas about how media should be used, perceived, experienced and created. I am not saying media is affecting us to a large degree individually; but in a mediated society we may be collectively socialized by technology. Media society can, after all be seen as a global collective activity.