MEDIA CULTURE

by Robert Adrian X


Media culture is what those images are that flicker past our eyes from the 
magic window. Media culture is always present, always now. It is as though 
the TV screen was a kind of reading glass passing over an infinite field of 
events completely devoid of narrative sequence or time. Every image since 
the invention of photography (with its claim to authentic representation) 
is a part of this field and equally present, equally now --  like the 
ghosts of the long-dead actors -- Bogart, Chaplin, Pickford -- who populate 
our TV screens after midnight. Since Edison marketed his recording machine 
we have been haunted by the voices of the dead - or better, of the ancestors 
- who remain present in sound and image.
Media culture is virtual history - reassembled daily from the infinite 
reservoir of sounds and images, some a century, some an hour, some a second 
old. Media culture is a multiplicity of views of a single moment - the moment 
of recording, of capture by the recording medium. Past, present and future
collapse at the recorded moment into the radiation of light and sound.


Note:
It is less the "technical reproduction" of the artwork that is the issue 
in our time but the technical preservation of cultural icons. Technical 
recording devices are, in this sense,  the means to a collective memory ... 
The above text is a very short one about the compression of time and memory 
by technical recording devices. It is a slightly revised version of a text 
written for the "Zeitgleich" catalogue in 1994.