mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
5
(2002), Nr.1/March
Audiofile
Medienästhetik.
Abstract and bibliography of a lecture in interview form given for
"Philosophische Brocken", bi-weekly program, curated by Herbert
Hrachovec, Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the
In more
than the half of De Anima Aristotle is occupied with a theory of aisthesis, a
theory of sensation, perception. Besides the nutritive, the representative and
the cognitive souls the perceptive soul as a specific power is able to be
perceptive. Several remarks of Aristotle show that he recognized aesthetic
aspects of sensation: the aisthemata (the word built in analogy to
phantasmata), the aesthetic object (for instance that of a drawing), the
"rapport" of harmony (for instance that of a certain sumphonia) and
the good feel accompanying perceptions. There is a notion of the medium, which
is the metaxu, the "in between", the intermediate (air, water). It
enables the separation of the aistheta and what receives them and insofar
allows for the development of sensory organs (being media as organs of mixture
for and of the body).
In the
course of human history there is a whole range of perception media (developing
for example with the replacement of air by glass) revealing that they can
ascend to excellent communication media. As Aristotle's account addresses the
"in between" of the medium, it does not include its features of the
"through" and the "around". Especially the
"around" has lately become a major medium experience within the
setting up of media atmospheres.
Concerning
aesthetics as part of philosophy, i. e. philosophy of art, Stanley Cavell and
Samuel Weber make us aware of basic difficulties of a philosophical aesthetics
in the age of the mass media, especially of television. Whereas Cavell in
watching television recognizes a completely new "aesthetic" attitude
(if aesthetic at all) that is that of monitoring and ponders the question how
to ascribe to it a new status of the work of art, Weber declares the end of art
because television displaces the confrontation with art fundamentally -
television annihilating the perceiving relation to the work of art and setting
up the monitor that radiates instead of what formerly auratic works of art had
to offer.
For the
most times aestheticians - Dewey being an exception - have neglected the notion
of medium in art. Nevertheless media in art have had their place in art history
long ago, for instance as the intermezzo in 17th and 18th century theatre and
opera. Therefore one of the aims of a contemporary aesthetics of the media is
to establich an aesthetics as a theory of media art. I propose to think of
three different ways of media art. Interactive media art still is the state of
art theory accounting for the immense technological powers of artistic media. Reflective
media art in its best solutions (Velazquez, Manet, Paik) focuses upon its
medium (media) to reveal the aesthetic powers by means of the art work. And the
media art with perhaps the greatest potentiality is the media art of
disturbance, originating with the aesthetic situation of the experiment of
sound proof spaces that Cage participated in.
anon.,
medium, in: The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Oxford-UK: Clarendon
1989, vol.9, pp.854-855
Aristoteles, Poetik, griechisch/deutsch,
übers. u. hg. v. Manfred Fuhrmann, = UB 7828, Stuttgart: Ph. Reclam jun. 1982
Aristoteles, Über die Seele, = Werke. Bd.13,
hg. v. Ernst Grumach, übers. v. Willy Theiler, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag 1959
Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte.
Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren, München: C. H. Beck 1995
Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter
der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in: ders., Gesammelte Schriften, Band I.2,
hg. v. Rolf Tiedemann u. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
1980, pp.471-508
Stanley Cavell, Das Medium und die Medien des
Films.
Stanley
Cavell, The Fact of Television, in: ders., Themes out of school,
Arthur C.
Danto, The End of Art, in: ders., The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,
John
Dewey, Art as Experience, New York-NY: Perigee/Putnam Publishing Group 1980
Brian Eno,
Ambient # 1. Music for Airports,
Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge
(1966), übers. v. Ulrich Köppen, = stw 96, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974
Michael
Fried, Introduction, in: Three American Painters. Kenneth Noland. Jules
Olitski. Frank Stella, Fogg Art Museum/Harvard University, 21 April -
Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns, 2 Bde., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981
Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik,
in: Bayerische Akademie der schönen Künste (Hg.), Die Künste im technischen
Zeitalter <Vortragsreihe vom 16. bis zum 20. November 1953 in der
Technischen Hochschule>, <2.Aufl.,> München: R. Oldenburg 1956,
pp.48-72
Peter Mahr, Medien, mixolydisch. Zur Ästhetik
bei Aristoteles, Baumgarten und Serres, in: schlamm & damm, trockenlegen
und vermischen, = sinn-haft_nr.12/2002, pp.18-26. (Same text without the two
corollaries about three kinds of mixture and a remark on Boussoulas's attempt
to establish an aesthetics of mixture in Plato has been rendered by sinn-haft
as http://www.sinn-haft.action.at/nr_12/nr12_mahr.html)
Peter Mahr, Medien, mixolydisch. Die Ästhetik
der Vermischung von Athen bis Detroit, lecture with discussion, March 1st,
2002, at: Depot. Kunst und Diskussion, Breitegasse 3, A-1070 Wien,
Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, = Mentor Book 2765, New
York/Ontario: Penguin Books o.J./1964
Ralf Schnell, Medienästhetik. Zu Geschichte
und Theorie audiovisueller Wahrnehmungsformen, Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler
2000
Jürgen Trinks, Faszination Fernsehen. die
Bedeutung des medialen Weltbezugs für den Menschen der Gegenwart, = Europäische
Hochschulschriften. Reihe 40: Kommunikationswissenschaft und Publizistik,
Bd.72, Frankfurt am Main ...: Peter Lang. Europäischer Verlag der
Wissenschaften 2000
Matthias Vogel, Medien der Vernunft. Eine Theorie
des Geistes und der Rationalität auf Grundlage einer Theorie der Medien, = stw
1556, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001
Samuel
Weber, Mass Mediauras. Form, Technics, Media, hg. v. Alan Cholodenko,
Stanford-CA:
Hans R. Zeller, Medienkomposition nach Cage,
in: Heinz-Klaus Metzger/Rainer Riehn (Hg.), Musik-Konzepte. Sonderband. John
Cage I, 2. Aufl., München: text + kritik 1978, pp.107-131
Peter Mahr © 2002
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