Core Post 1 : Immediacy for whom?

“The logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western representation, at least from the Renaissance until the coming of modernism, while hypermediacy has often had to content itself with a secondary, if nonetheless important, status.” (Bolter and Grusin).

Reading Bolter and Grusin (and Manovich), I couldn’t help but think back to Kerry James Marshall’s "7am, Sunday Morning”. The extra-large painting depicts what the artist describes as a normal morning scene, a scene he has come accustomed to in the many neighborhoods he has lived in. But, to this otherwise realist painting, the artist added what we can only describe as the glare of the sun as it would appear in a camera, combining the logics of painting to that of capture. This decision posits the artwork as one that questions the history of representation of black people in painting as well as  the representation of blackness in photography. Marshall’s whole career is built around these questions of representation and technologies, of history and presence. In another series, he painted portraits of his friends as royal subjects, only to find their facial features disappear because of the very nature of mixing black pigments into the canvas. For Marshall, of course, these technologies and tools, along with their socio-cultural norms, are always-already shaped by the biases of the people who designed them. With that in mind, I couldn’t help but find that Bolter and Grusin analysis glossed over important socio-political questions in order to develop playful concepts. I do have to admit that I loved (and still find it useful) Remediation when I first read it a few years ago, but it did age poorly in that manner.

I was happy to get to Stone’s piece and find some much needed criticism about the seemingly “neutral” nature of technology.