As a junior concentrating in Modern, Culture, and Media: Track 2 (formally known as Art-Semiotics) I am looking to take my passion for and knowledge of media and film production outside of the boundaries of the MCM department and into today’s global media environment. Since I arrived at Brown I have concentrated all of my energies into the study of media theories and networks. I came in as a photographer, but have been drawn to video production, especially video editing, while at Brown. Last year I studied with Christopher Witmore, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, about the place for video documentation of archaeological sites. That work produced a short film documenting an underwater archaeological dig in The Black Sea, Ukraine that I was a member of the following summer, as well as peripatetic video (http://proteus.brown.edu/witmore/2241 - a form of interactive, participatory video to be played on media tools such as an ipod in places such as archaeological sites) of Patrick Dougherty’s site specific sculpture on Brown’s campus. This year my work has been focused with International Relations Professor, Kay Warren, for her Violence and the Media course. My research with her has involved producing a short film for her course depicting Bill Nichol’s theories of documentary and collecting material off the web from sites such as YouTube to be used in the course. My personal video work is mostly experimental video and digital images focused around the semiotics of fashion, exhibition culture, and electronic music.

What I am most interested in looking at is how new media and its constant change and innovation with new technologies re-defines both the reception of and the production of media. Current media makers adapt quickly to cultural change, converging the latest trend into a formal structure like the evening news, and without notice the viewer easily receives this modified form of news. Such quick adaptations change the conventional practices of viewership and bring up questions of freedom and control. New media appears ubiquitous and free in that every user of technology is also a producer. However I would like to look at the military-entertainment-industrial complex that builds and runs those technologies. I think it is vitally important to take the now with all seriousness and look at our post-industrial society as it shapes us.

The complex and well-developed structure of current media makes the serious work of cultural critique rather difficult. I would like to look at media in the way that Roland Barthes in “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” looks at speech, as an irreversible act. Media is defined by the thought or object of its message and the style or form of how it presents itself. Once media is presented it is instantly seared into the minds of its audience, therefore media makers work “on the side of speech.” Media uses its power of persuasion to achieve personal aims and goals often within the corporate or political party it represents. Looking at the reception of current media, we can see that we enjoy our training in unawareness of the power mechanisms of media.

Yet there is a tool against such powerful systems: theory. Barthes explains that the theory of writing is able to break down the system of language through the dispersion of its elements. Theory takes apart a situated system with specific goals into a vast field of signs and referents. Here the intellectual or artists can represents theory through giving voice to the Other, the hidden or silent forces, within the system of language from the newly revealed multiple points of interest. The viewer can distinguish this central point and see the “plurality of interpretations” for every sign within the media system. To represent media through theory takes away our ingrained desire to float with media’s structure and instead breaks down media back to its sheer materiality. It is here discovering media’s framework that the fun begins and the “war of meanings” plays out. Barthes explains it is the artists or “workers of the intellect” who have the ability to “construct a revolutionary axiomatics in which the other can finally speak.” Within the codes and method of media, the artist can represent the silent, hidden resistances and slippages that evoke truth and empower change by disarming dominant power. I look forward to working with other students in this course to break apart the power mechanisms of media and give voice to those kept silent!