'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

Medium practices

In this essay I develop a topic addressed in my book, Film Art Phenomena: the question of medium specificity. Rosalind Krauss's essay 'Art In the Age of the Post-Medium Condition' has catalysed a move away from medium specificity to hybridity. I propose that questions of medium cannot be ignored, since they carry their own history and give rise to specific formal traits and possibilities. The research involves close critical analysis of four moving image works that have not previously been written about: two made with film, and one each with computer and mobile phone. The analyses are conducted by reference to my ideas about how technological peculiarities inform and inflect practice: I see the work's material composition, its form and final meaning as intricately bound up with each other. Film, video and the computer give rise to specific forms of moving image, partly because artists exploit a medium’s peculiarities, and because certain media lend themselves to some methodologies and not others. I do not seek hard distinctions between these media, but discuss them in terms of predispositions. For example, I discuss a 16mm cine film in which the shifting visibility of grain raises ideas around movement and stillness. The aim is to develop a definition of medium specificity, in relation to the moving image, that is not essentialist in the way previous versions were criticised for being, that is, based on ideas of "material substrate" (Wollen). I argue that film is a medium of stages, in contrast to the modern tapeless camcorder, in which all functions of recording, storage, playback and even editing are contained in a single device. Supported by a travel grant, I presented a version of this essay at the International Conference of Experimental Media Congress, Toronto, in April 2011, along with a selection of works: http://www.experimentalcongress.org/full-schedule

A Diachronic, Scale-Flexible, Relational, Perspectival Operation: In Defense of (Always-Reforming) Medium Specificity

At least since Friedrich Kittler declared fiber-optic cable the “end of media,” there has been an idea in cinema and media studies that as all media become digital, the concept of medium specificity makes less and less sense. Meanwhile, many wonder if our field is coherent, as media scholars turn their attention to such objects as dust, cities, and whales. I argue that digital convergence makes medium specificity more rather than less vital, though in a reformed formulation. While our far-flung objects cannot cohere our discipline, a use of medium specificity as a diachronic, scale-flexible, relational, perspectival operation can

Remember the medium! : film, medium specificity, and response-dependence

Medium specificity is a theory, or rather a cluster of arguments, in aesthetics that rests on the idea that media are the physical material that makes up artworks, and that this material contains specific and unique features capable of 1) differentiating media from one another, and 2) determining the aesthetic potential and goals of each medium. As such, medium specificity is essential for aestheticians interested in matters of aesthetic ontology and value. However, as Noël Carroll has vehemently and convincingly argued, the theory of medium specificity is inherently flawed and its many applications in art history ill-motivated. Famously, he concluded that we should ‘forget the medium’ entirely. In this thesis, I reject his conclusion and argue that reconstructing a theory of medium specificity, while taking Carroll’s objections into account, is possible. To do so, I offer a reconceptualization of the main theoretical components of medium specificity and ground this new theory in empirical research. I first redefine the medium not as the physical material that makes up artworks but as sets of practices – not the material itself but how one uses the material. I then show that what makes media specific and unique is not certain physical features, but the human responses, which can be empirically investigated, to the combination of practices that constitute media. This relation is one of response-dependence, albeit of a novel kind, which I develop by appealing to social metaphysics. The resulting theory is more complex but also much more flexible and fine-grained than the original and provides insight into a variety of current aesthetic theories

Medium-specificity and sociality in expanded cinema re-enactment.

In this short paper, I introduce the work of the artist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, which re-enacts Expanded Cinema artworks from the 1960s and 70s. I make a connection between sociality (which binds together artists in collectives and screening "clubs") and the issue of medium-specificity. Re-enacting Expanded Cinema, I suggest, gently probes at the intersection of medium-specificity and sociality. This practice asks questions about the material qualities of film, video and performance, and the particular relations these media carry across time and culture

Aca-Media Podcast Episode 70: Jordan Sjol on Medium Specificity

If you’re feeling sluggish from the holiday season, press play on this rich conversation between Jonathan Nichols-Pethick and Jordan Sjol to get your brain sparked and ready for a new year of smart conversations about media. The two DePauw colleagues talk about Sjol’s JCMS article, “A Diachronic, Scale-Flexible, Relational, Perspectival Operation: In Defense of (Always-Reforming) Medium Specificity” (don’t worry, they break it down word-by-word), as well as the recent feature film that Sjol co-wrote, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Then Chris and Michael chat about how to name a department and how not to title a podcast

Cinematic

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term “cinematic” principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut’s claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesi

Narratology Between Transmediality and Medium-Specificity

Jan-Noël Thon: Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lin-coln / London: University of Nebraska Press 2016 (= Frontiers of Narrative Series). 558 pp. USD 60.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-7720-

The Politics of Medium Specificity

Ryan will share some ideas that stemmed from his PhD research, focussing in particular on the (often reviled) notion of “medium specificity”. In the history of art criticism, medium specificity came to symbolise the hard edge of modernist formalism and gave rise to reactionary projects such as contemporary art’s “postmedium condition”. Ryan is interested in reconceiving the notion of medium specificity through its radical expansion, steering it away from its formalist origins to understand artistic and cultural forms as mediums of production in the context of a global capitalist present. He invites you all to read and respond to a rough draft of a paper-in-progress, in which he attempts to outline a “politics of medium specificity”