Display I - analog

Herausgeber:

Inhalt:

Statt einer Einleitung: Eine Mediengeschichte des Displays

Intermedialität - Anmerkungen zum Stand der Diskussion

Abstracts:

Wie könnte man den Unterschied zwischen dem 'Medialen' und dem 'Display' bestimmen? Gibt es Eigenlogik des Displays?

This article is a preliminary investigation toward a historical phenomenology of the screen. Huhtamos treatment of the topic is based on one main premise: in spite of their ubiquity, screens have a history, which should be traced. Although there has been work done on specific areas (for example Siegfried Zielinski's research on the relationship between cinema and television and Lev Manovich's studies on the archaeology of the computer screen) the general history remains largely unwritten. However, simply writing a chronicle of different kinds of screens would not make much sense.

The ultimate goal is the history of "screen practice(s)", to adopt a concept used by Charles Musser in his studies of early and pre-cinema. Such a history should comprise not only the evolution of different kinds of screens and the interconnections between them, but also account for their uses as part of different media apparata and within changing cultural, social and economic settings. This article provides a first step toward such a synthesis by identifying and discussing some of the key ingredients of such a history. The basic questions are simple, but the answers are difficult: how were our 20th century notions of the screen anticipated in earlier times? What connections, if any, are there between these "screens" from different times and places? As should be clear by now, this article does not look for an immutable "essence" of the screen; if the screen has an essence, it lies only in the sum total of all the historical manifestations of different screen practices, not beyond them like some Platonic idea.

The paper explores the wide range of today's urban screens not only as the interface between media offerings and recipient, but also the potentials of urban screen displays to transform or even construct public and semi-public space. It offers case studies in what is called media geography pursued as a 'hermeneutic of space' (prolonging and reformulating a tradition of spatial readings of the classical metropolis by Kracauer and Benjamin). The paper interprets the case of part-time branded space at Berlin?s Brandenburg gate which was covered by a Telekom Megaposter showing the Brandenburg Gate as portal for the White House on the occasion of US-president Bush?s visit to Germany in 2002. Other cases are: Public viewing arenas during the Soccer World Cup 2006 as event-space created by LED-Display; information screens in public transportation; but also interactive urban screens like the famous 'Blinkenlights' project at the front of the #Haus des Lehrers' at Berlin#s Alexanderplatz or the 'Urban Diary' project opening up some kind of speaker's corner in public cellspace. The paper ends with an exploration of our private 'home territories' (David Morley) transformed by the latest demands for home theatre television screens and Ambilight TV.

The potential of urban screens is here explored from a point of view of the day after tomorrow. My interest concerns the imaginary urban space once large sized media façades will not be regarded as medial platforms, as non-spaces in the sense of media as a means for effective communication as we know it. At one time, media façades will have become infrastructure of our urban surrounds, and will be animated differently than with screening commercials or temporary media art installations. The potential of media façades, so we like to imagine, is by no means exhausted (nor even appropriately characterised) through allowing us to increase the efficiency of ways of communicating that are familiar to us now. Or at least, their potential is not characterised in these terms any more adequately than the potential of any other urban peculiarity would be. On the long run, media façades will not be experienced as add-ons to our public spaces, as surplus devices. They will one day become infrastructure of our very surrounds just like street lightening; many-story buildings or large-sized rear view windows have come to be. And just like any of these, media façades will introduce new ways of being, new social habits. They will stimulate us to integrate new ways of engaging with our surroundings; they will inspire us to develop new habits to accommodate in. Discovering the potential of outdoor screens for urban society leads us foremost to reconsider the meaning of media. In the case of architectural media façades, media literally and physically create a difference. They introduce a differentiation; they separate into inside and outside, and through that, they create a relation that can be experienced in many different ways. These are crucial attributes to media per se.

This essay addresses the question of the display within the field of contemporary art. Instead of focusing on the representations which can be perceived at the faceplate of a monitor or luminescent screen, the term ?display? is here defined as the three-dimensional conditions of television and video images. In contrast to the canvasses of traditional oil painting or of the cinematic screen, here the display cases or display windows, the networks of objects and materials, are relevant for the artworks under discussion. Therefore, the methodological starting point is ? coming form the art historical perspective of an Iconography of Materials ? the ?materiality of communication? as mediator of meaning. The paper analyses different strategies which artists employ to comment on the object of the display and its history. Thus, not the negation, but the manipulation and appropriation of existent presentation and perception structures is of political relevance here.

Starting with Pipilotti Rist, who in 2000 interacted with the Astrovision-display of NBC and Panasonic at the Times Square in New York, the essay looks at the work of Nam June Paik. At an early point in the 1960s, Paik manipulated the TV scan-line of television sets. By obtaining disturbed images in low quality, he connected his art to earlier phases of television and above all to the Second World War. At the same time, his displays are transformed into psychedelic light machines that could be actively manipulated by the audience.

Tony Oursler took this approach of mobilisation further: In an installation at the Madison Square Park in New York in 2000, he projected digitalised images into an artificial cloud. The visitors could interact with the gentle breath of this ghostlike appearance. Oursler searched as well for revolutionary energies in not only the latest technology, but also in the outmoded and timeworn: By referring to an experiment of Francis Hauksbee dating from 1706, this installation also comments on the archaeology of television.

These artful experiments with mass media make apparent that the display does not have a stable identity, but has always been a ceaselessly changing and reorganising constellation of electronic energy, technical appliances, of institutions and their perception. The Media art under discussion stands not for fixation and control in the technological society, but for fluidity and mobility, a practice of a possible shifting and transferring of molecules, and, above all, the might of the metamorphosis: the promise of a becoming of yet unknown images beyond stable boundaries.

Die Display der Massenmedien vervielfältigen sich gegenwärtig explosionsartig. Dabei werden sowohl heterogene Bildformate (16:9 / HDTV) als auch unterschiedliche Pragmatiken (tragbares Fernsehen vs. home cinema) etabliert. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die Fußballweltmeisterschaft weit über die bloße Werbung für neue Fernsehgeräte einen operationalen Status für diese Vervielfältigung der Displays besitzt: Das Aufmerksamkeit bindende Sportereignis schafft einerseits ein gemeinsames Gravitationsfeld für die auseinander driftenden Darstellungsformen, andererseits verleiht es den heterogenen und zum Teil gegensätzlichen Wahrnehmungsformen je spezifische Plausibilität.