The Medium Alone is Not Enough: An Archaeology of Diffused Entities and Illusory Spaces

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

“In recent years, a material, elemental and environmental, approach to media

seem to be in the center of a whole series of developments in media theory,”1

Antonio Somaini pointed out wishing to indicate that media have to be considered

in their material embeddedness, in their environmental dimension, and not

exclusively as technical means. Starting from this assumption, the article analyses

different historical stages of the relationship between the materiality of the

medium and its representation. The transformative impact of old technology on

the medium starting with the experimental photography and film practices of the

1920s and 1930s toward performative film work of the 1970s, revealed a growing

fascination with surface projections and how they identify light as a medium that

form space. By contextualizing the problem of the medium (space, light and time)

within the history of surface projections, I explore how projections structure the

perception of space to argue that this insight can challenge the very notion of

materialism in relation to the medium. The aim is to demonstrate that medium’s

concern with the dissolution of its boundaries challenges the notion of materialism

and thus affect a deeper divide between materiality and representation. I will

conclude by demonstrating that this work paved a way to numerous innovative

architectural experiments in connection with surface materiality: from their

application in scenography to the modern surface condition of facades and

contemporary practices that concretise the surface tension of the media as the

training ground for spatial contemplation.