Discerning Subject in Spacetime

Although perception is always subjective, here the awareness comes forth as technologically mediated, "coloured by technological lenses".

"We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the synthesis, but the body ..."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception


A spectator looking at an artwork becomes simultaneously exposed to it. Within the new media this exposure may deepen into immersion, as the audio-visual scene also surrounds the spectator with moving sounds and images. Through this the mechanism of perception is brought to a new level, where the attention of the spectator becomes enhanced, exceeding the natural perception. Here the relationship between the artist and the spectator can also be more equal: the spectator is allowed to immerse into the realm of the artwork.


We no longer wish to relate with the autonomous subject, artist who would draw from his/her interiority a fully finished art-object to present to the spectators. "It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity ... or yet again, to put it
'out of play.'" Maurice Merleau-Ponty, idem.



Being located on the converge between art and science, new media art is privileged to map out the myriad of possibilities for points of concurrence. This convergence also benefits both of these worlds as the artists of new media constantly employ and develop new tools and philosophies in order to realize as well as convey the unforeseen, and as such accelerate the fine-tuning of technological development together with the experience of the spectator within the art of the present.


Today the majority of the artworks within the new media are either fully digitally modeled or the audiovisual material has been treated in a way that would have not been possible without the digital means. In order to bring forth a more complete spectrum of the happenings of the current new media, we should also include some more traditional film or video works, where the attention deals more with the experiments of the narrative form than experimenting with the new technologies. We could also include the angle of participatory new media where the interaction with the artwork becomes further enhanced. "I start from unified experience and from there acquire, in a secondary way, consciousness of a unifying activity when, taking up an analytical attitude, I break up perception into qualities and sensations, and when, in order to recapture on the basis of these the object into which I was in the first place blindly thrown, I am obliged to suppose an act of synthesis which is merely the counterpart of my analysis." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, idem.

The fashion of how to tell a good story may have found new formalities and as such developed new techniques for telling, but the stories are only complete when the audience brings the virtual world into the actual one, combining their own reality with the one perceived from the audio-visual screen.

To read more, visit Storytelling in the Digital Era