Context
What is a medium? And what do we mean by the "specificity" of a medium? This project grew out of an assignment in "Visual Culture," and subsequently in "Theories of Media," two graduate/undergraduate lecture courses taught by W. J. T. Mitchell (in cooperation with a number of colleagues, including Miriam Hansen, Joel Snyder, and Terry Smith) over the last decade. The idea was simple: to create a taxonomy of media types, a graphic and discursive system for representing our tacit knowledge about the distinctions between media (differentiations such as storage and transmission; semiotic registers and sensory channels or "ratios," temporal/spatial modalities, etc). So, for any given array of media-say film, television, and photography-an array of distinctions based in material, sensory, and representational practices comes to mind. We know that these are different media, and that these differences make a difference in the way they affect us. The purpose of a media taxonomy, then, is the specifying of differences-it is, quite literally, the production of clear ideas about "species" of human artifacts and communication.
This initial form of this assignment was a spreadsheet format with a list of media types along one axis, and a list of differentiating criteria on the other. If painting, sculpture, photography, theater, telegraphy, telephony, and television were lined up on one axis, specifications of timespace dimensionality, moment of invention, material basis, author function, and social status might appear on the other axis. But in the 2003 Theories of Media class, a proposal came about for going beyond this simple two-dimensional model. It was suggested that we needed an n dimensional hyper-space of some sort to deal with the complexities of genealogical relations among media, the nesting of one medium inside another, and the ever-present issue of "intermedia" and "new media." More fundamentally, the students argued that a course in media theory had to address the way in which theoretical knowledge itself is mediated. They wanted to experiment with a richer graphic and discursive interface in order to map not only their tacit knowledge, the commonplaces about distinctions among media, but also to provide a mechanism for the discovery of new and surprising relationships. They also wanted to question the spatial, diagrammatic model of the "taxonomy" as such, with its built-in presumption that media are something like organisms. An equally strong model is offered by the notion of media "topography," in which media are constituted as environments or social spaces with more or less distinct borders, regions, and neighborhoods. Hence the final shape of the project as a "Media HyperAtlas: An Immersive Taxonomy," to reflect the dual identity of media as "species" and "spaces."
Our model follows from three years of considering media taxonomies, some of which may be viewed at: http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/taxonomy/. Media, in our schema, are assigned relative values denoting their position on an axis that represents a qualifying parameter of distinction, which can be any empirical or theoretical characteristic of a medium: its virtuality, its luminosity, its localization of the body in space, and so forth. Each media case is represented as the intersection of its values among specified axes, and thus plotted in imaginary space. The goal of the project, then, is to create a dynamic 3-D virtual environment that visualizes distinctions and relationships between media through such plottings. Our project consists of two components: (1) the dynamic visualization program, and (2) the hardware configuration that allows for its display.
Description
The Media HyperAtlas is a visualization program that maps data about media in a 3-D immersive environment. Each media case will have n dimensions, where n = number of differentiating criteria. The interface allows users to select three differentiating criteria from a list, and assign them as the x, y, and z axes. Criteria can also be combined into composite criteria. Because the number of criteria is an open set, there will be an infinite number of permutations for viewing the data.
Once plotted, specific media cases are represented in space spherical objects, which are hyperlinked to supporting content, e.g. textual elaborations for plottings, various multimedia content, and feedback forums. These interactive features invite explorations of case studies, encourage significant user participation, and create new spaces for critical exchange. As media cases populate the HyperAtlas, we expect to see constellations emerge, as well as "n-morphous" formations that can change shape, size, and density with additional plottings or reassignments of criteria. This flexibility of model-its capacity to reassign differentiating criteria to any of the x, y, and z axes—is a necessary response to the interdisciplinary nature of media theory, and present innovative ways of bringing together concepts commonly sequestered by disciplines. The interface will allow for rotation, zooming, and "fly-through" camera angles. These multiple viewing orientations engage our senses in new and stark ways, especially when presented in 3-D stereoscopic mode. Spatial relationships and their implications become more pronounced in the 3-D Geowall enviroment, and users not only view, but experience the data. Such presentations can render critical issues visible in ways that develop spatial thinking skills and help users articulate new theories of media and mediation.
The use of immersive spaces for teaching and researching media theory has not been adequately explored in the humanities. The HyperAtlas holds great potential for media theory pedagogy, with special application to the media aesthetics core, where it can be used to prime discussions about how to define media, how they function, how to analyze them, how to talk about their relationships, and so forth. The model can also be used as a tool for assignments, in which students submit media cases to be considered for incorporation, or in which students debate and refine plottings via feedback options in the interface.
This project builds on concepts developed by The Chicago School of Media Theory, a research collective comprised of faculty and students from the following departments: Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Computer Science, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, English, History, International Relations, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology. CSMT, which has over 30 members, will continue to generate data for the HyperAtlas in biweekly sessions. We will also be collaborating with research groups from Northwestern and the Zentrum fur Medien und Kultur in Karlsruhe, Germany. Considerations of the HyperAtlas will be a component of the CSMT Media Theory Conference (late 2004) and Eduardo de Almeida's Autumn 2004 course, The Posthuman Condition, thus ensuring opportunities for testing and demonstrations. CSMT maintains two of the supporting resources for this project, the Media Theory Keywords Glossary and the Media Taxonomy Models, both of which are currently in use here, as well as at institutions like Berkeley, Brown, Northwestern, and Toronto, to name a few. In addition to strengthening these established connections, the project can also forge new relationships with peer institutions. Currently we are collaborating with the Digital Media Lab (DML) to allow for online demonstration version of description of our project