Overture, The Artwork of the Future, &Theater, Circus, Variety

 Overture

    For the first reading of the semester, I thought this beginning chapter was very interesting, especially as it built upon the article from Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think". It was very interesting to read about the origins of digital media as we know it today. I also learned that the integration of the digital into different forms of media first happened in the 1960s, with Billy Klüver's interactive artworks. While detailing the history of media and how it has evolved into how we use it today, the chapter also discusses our current media technologies, outlining five characteristics that make today's "new media" different from that of the past:

1. Integration - the combining of artistic forms & technology into a hybrid form of expression 
2. Interactivity - the ability of the user to manipulate & affect her experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media
3. Hypermedia - the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association. 
4. Immersion - the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional environment
5. Narrativity - aesthetic & formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation

The chapter states that these five combined characteristics create a definition of digital media that "pushes towards the technical and aesthetic frontiers of the form. 

The Artwork of the Future 

    In this chapter, Wagner outlines the different types of art and the meaning involved in each of them. He begins by describing Drama as the most important form of art, stating that it can only be at its best when it is involved in some way in all different forms of art. He goes on to describe Architecture and its role in Theater. He explains that Architecture's role is to build up the Theater, which in turn allows for the Scene to be built up in order to appease the audience's eye. He says that it is important that the Scene reflect life as it is, because within each frame the audience is seeing a representation of everyday life. 

    Wagner then writes about Landscape Painting as the next important form of art, stating that it is the artist's job to portray nature as he views it, and that he is free once his artwork is "completed and alive", and once he is absorbed in the work that he has done. He relates this artwork back to Drama, then writes that in order to become the Artistic Man, man has to become the Dancer, the Mime, and the Poet, in the Drama, and when he fulfills those roles, in the Theater, he will be free, as the artistic purpose has been truly realized. 

Theater, Circus, Variety

1.     Theater 

• differed from eyewitness report and other forms of storytelling through these elements: sound, color (light), motion, space, form (objects and persons) 
• futurists, expressionists, and dadaists came to conclusion that phonetic word relationships were more significant than other creative literary means 
• literary logical intent mattered less than the effect that came from the literature & words themselves
• Mechanized Eccentric - a concentration of stage action in its purest form