Content Assumptions and Duration

Content composed for media is often tailored to the assumptions that creators make about its core attributes.  Although this point seems fairly obvious today, it is still powerful.  There is a beautiful feedback loop where the assumptions we glean from society about how a technology works eventually influence how the technology does work by associating it with specific attributes of cultural production. In his chapter "Stillness" in Photography and Cinema, Campany refers to this phenomenon.  "The film image certainly has duration and thus movement at a mental level.  Yet, when we think of the film image moving, it is also because it has tended, conventionally, to select subject mater that moves and can be seen moving (24)."

Echoes of this theme can be heard within various writing on Media Specificity by early to contemporary media scholars.  For many artists also, thinking about Media Specific content is one way to maximize the creative output of a platform.  However, Campany's quote illustrates the danger of assuming a technologies attributes.  The rush to put one's mark on new technological real-estate may forever alter how it is developed.  What new ways of viewing and producing culture may have been erased from the blueprints of our technology?  In this case, some of the essential questions a historian/artist needs to ask are: what is the linage of this platform, how was its identity set?  By investigating this, the artist might strike up new angles for cultural production.  

Another interesting aspect of Campany is his implicit and explicit attention to duration.  Recently, I've become interested in the patterns of how we judge quality.  I'm beginning to think that perimeters of duration could be one of the attributes that impacts quality judgements: particularly in relation to structure.  The structure of a work could be intimately tied to its duration.  This is particularly useful as a way to compare disparate works in digital/kinetic texts.  How do duration and structure intersect to make a "compelling" digital work?  I want to consider what the salient features of dynamic text removed from the printed page are.  I think a key to identifying salient features (thus, hopefully what makes a strong text), is this notion of duration.  Hybrid text can have any number of axis of duration operating on them and through them at any one time.  The context of the text usually provides clues as to what axis the author intends (or does not intend) to be most prominent.  For example, a text in three-d with multiple dimensions could have the following (including many others!): 

duration of reading: 

A. how long it takes the reader to resolve how it operates as a sign system: the decoding

  A1. semantically/syntactically

  A2. denotative and connotative meaning

B. The duration of its proportion to space

C. Duration of movement

D. Duration of time as it is mapped according to the roles of the "world"  in Z axis relation to the body.