Daniel Shteremberg's Reading Response "The Life and Death of Media"

            Bruce Sterling has an interesting concept of what it means to kill a medium. For him killing a medium is a simple as moving on to something better, stronger, faster, and more portable but I believe that this is evolution not death. Evolution is a necessity in the world which without we wouldn’t be here creating art we would most like be outside trying to survive. The reason we can create art is because we have evolved into a species that can spend our days creating and not having to worry about survival as much. The evolution in medium isn’t necessarily about survival but more about helping us get work and art done faster and better. Think about it as the evolution of painting techniques going all the way back to simple cave paintings that tell the stories of the artist to today’s photorealism and abstract drawings which have gotten better as time goes on. Does that mean that cave drawings are a dead medium just because we evolved into something better and more impressive?

            He mentions the evolution of cinema as death vacuum of media specifically calling Edison’s Kinetoscope which didn’t die because of what he says is contingency, it died because it obviously impractical. In order to fill any set Edison’s production company had to move the entire set instead of the camera because it was so massive that it was obvious that a lighter more portable option like the Lumiere brothers would beat it in competition. Another example he gives is the Incan records, which I will admit didn’t die because of it being inferior but instead died because the people using it weren’t as advanced as the invading forces. However, he mentions a lot of examples of what it was used for yet also mentions that no one can read them now, which makes me question how he knows what they were used for. Somehow he plays them as better than books and that might have been the case but it seems as though it is the same just with a different delivery of it, which no longer makes it dead but rather a pre-evolved form.

Lastly he talks about all the dead computers, mainframes, and operating systems that we have created and thusly killed, which again wasn’t death but evolution. In order for evolution to work there must be a lot of failures beforehand but that doesn’t mean it’s dead but just moved on to something better or something we think will be better, like the Apple Lisa which paved the way for the GUI operating systems we have today. Also unlike species evolution with media when it evolves it doesn’t mean its unusable artist go back to the pre-evolved version of media all the time in order to create new pieces and enthusiast love getting those “dead” media.