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Mediating Childhood Memories and Identity Through Lunch Bags

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Introduction

I was helping my parents move into their new house this summer when I found my favourite lunch bag from primary school. It was a small, green rectangular bag, patched with two cute cats playing the piano. Although the bag was covered with an unidentifiable stain, I refused to let my parents throw it out. The lunch bag reminds me of the best parts of my childhood with all the things it once held. I remember the sound of my Mother placing my lunchbox on the kitchen counter before the school bus arrived. I remember the soft clatter of glass containers and metal utensils as I walked down the school hallways. Finally, I distinctly remember unpacking my lunch as the bell rang. Every hearty meal leaving me full and content. To me, salvaging this stained artifact was not at all gross, but rather a symbol of surviving years warm home cooked meals. 

Mediation

For more than a decade, my childhood lunch bag was a significant part of a daily ritual of nourishment and affection. It is an object that mediates between the self and the social world, serving as a middle ground for the private space of my home and the public sphere of my school. To reflect on the words of Sherry Turkle, she writes that theory enables us to “explore how everyday objects become part of our inner life” (Turkle). By taking a moment to appreciate how we use these mundane objects, we extend the reach of our sympathies for the memories, the people around us, and the world within it. Moving to Canada alone from Vietnam marked the moment I began packing my own lunches for the first time. Although the food in my new glass container was edible, and occasionally tasty, it was never the same without my Mother’s special touch. I realized that it is more than just about sustenance. A meal is a medium through which care, culture, and identity are communicated. We associate food with different cultures, nutrition, health, community, human rights, and so much more. As someone who has migrated a lot, I have always struggled to fully identify with my Vietnamese culture and heritage. Hence, this lunch bag is a testament to my belonging in all the places I have lived in as a child, when I was completely clueless to the gravity of any societal pressures to fit in. The rediscovery of this beautiful object of great sentimental value reminds me of the intimacy of past homes, friendships, and worries that are no longer in my life. 

Media Theory

Looking at my lunch bag through a media theory lens, I find that it echoes Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about objects being more just a vessel but the message itself. I vividly recall being in middle school, waiting for my friends to pick up their lunch bags off the shelves at the cafeteria table. I watched the abundance of colorful lunch bags go by, each a unique pattern and shape with the familiar names of my pupils scribbled in ink. The lunch bags are full of personality, their visibility communicating care, tradition, continuity, but also internationality. As I look at my own lunch bag now, I realize just how much objects can communicate, not through words but through materials, textures, and smells. Beyond just communication, the lunch bag can also be linked to Michel Foucault’s theory of the disciplinary society, which discusses how ordinary objects have the power to inscribe social norms into our bodies. Additionally, Bernadette Wegenstein’s chapter explores how the body as a medium of expression, through practices like dieting, can also shape how culture is lived and performed (Wegenstein). The lunch bags in the school cafeteria disciplines appetite and behaviour, as it is where we all learned the socially acceptable ways of eating, making social interactions, and what to subconsciously mask or perform. 

Conclusion

To my peers reading this who may also be navigating hybrid identities, I hope my exploration of childhood lunch bags speaks to a shared experience of mediation. Objects from the past are evocative, and often serve as important reminders that making peace with our identity does not only happen through language or policy, but it can happen through small, material gestures. I do not need to know the root cause of the bag’s stains and loose threads to admire its ability to translate love into something edible, something visible. That visibility is doing what Turkle says evocative objects do, “bringing philosophy down to earth” (Turkle). As the lunch bag mediates between theory and lived experience, it becomes a marker of difference, my personal signal of foreignness, and ultimately embodies the distance between my Mother’s kitchen at home and my rental space in Vancouver.

How about you? What do you carry with you when you move between worlds?

References

Turkle, Sherry. “What Makes an Object Evocative?” Evocative Objects, by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 19–34.

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The Window as An Evocative Object

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Introduction

The setting sun slowly hiding behind distant mountains, groups of students walking between classes, the whistle of wind and the rumble of thunder – these are all sights and sounds accessible through my bedroom window. An object integral to architectural design, windows are embedded within the walls of almost every building, bridging the gap between interior spaces and the outer world. They allow for both the acts of looking outwards and looking inwards, offering a view of reality that is separate from one’s current situation. 

Windows have always been a significant part of my life, taking up space on the walls of my bedrooms, from the one in which I spent my childhood, to the ones in my different living situations during university life. They offer a view into the natural world that lies beyond the internal space that exists physically within my room and cognitively within my mind. Despite the ever-changing scenery, my bedroom window remains still and unmoving, acting as a constant that is always there. 

To understand more about the affordances of windows and what they can mediate, I turn to some relevant media theorists who were discussed in class. 

Objects of transition and shifting meanings

Sherry Turkle describes how the meaning of evocative objects “shifts with time, place, and differences among individuals” – a sentiment I find particularly relevant to windows (307). Sunlight streaming through a window could make it an object associated with positivity, encouraging someone to go outside. Conversely, the scene of heavy rain gives the window a gloomy evocation that is in contrast with the safety and warmth within one’s home. These are associations that I personally make with such scenes, though someone with different experiences may perceive things differently. 

Despite not quite fitting Turkle’s discussion of transitional objects as small, handheld ones that remain the same over time and distance, I find that windows can be still considered an object of transition and passage. They stay with us as we grow into adulthood, always present regardless of location. The view from my childhood bedroom differs from my current one, but the window’s function of showing the outside world remains the same. Windows can also be transitional in how they are decorated and personalized. In my first year of university, I made a crochet garland for my dorm window and continued to hang it up on my new one after relocating. This item holds memories from the past, framing the outside world through a sentimental lens despite the view being different from before.     

Old dorm room window (left) and current dorm room window (right)

Objects of discipline

Turkle’s discussion of objects associated with discipline and desire also resonates with my experience with windows. Opening the blinds in the morning and closing them at night is a simple part of my daily routine that I pay no mind to, but can be considered an act of discipline that has ingrained itself within my life. Michelle Hlubinka expresses how her watch and datebook structure her life and keep her on schedule. These objects are described by Turkle as having the ability to take over one’s life and control their perceptions of time, and thus, actions (310). Indeed, my digital devices, and all their applications, perform functions like these, but my window always reaches me first. It acts as my primary indicator of time and weather before I check my phone. Windows engage my senses and tell me information about the world before I even consciously think about it. The pattering of rain on my windowsill enters my ears, so I pack an umbrella; the rays of morning sun hit my eyes as I lie in bed on my phone at 5AM, so I finally decide to go to sleep. Hence, the window subtly acts as an object of discipline that dictates daily actions.

Mediators of the senses 

Caroline Jones’s chapter on the senses brings up Plato’s allegory of the cave. It describes prisoners trapped within the depths of a dark cave, with their only perception of the world being through the sight of shadows instead of the real figures that cast them. The prisoners are victims of a “partial form of sight”, blinded to the true content of the media that the shadows mediate and only being able to derive individual interpretations about what they see (Jones 89).

Since windows allow light to shine into a room, informing its inhabitants of the outside world in a factual and realistic way, they can be seen as something opposite to the cave. However, I realised that windows also have their limitations, and the somewhat limited world that they depict could, conversely, be thought of as the deceptive shadows in Plato’s allegory. 

Windows, most of the time, only span certain parts of walls, each providing a specific view of the exterior. For instance, my room’s only window is west-facing, which allows me to see the sunset. However, this means I see sunlight later in the day than those with rooms opposite to mine since theirs face the sunrise, leading to me having a skewed perception of time when first waking up. I have also experienced hearing music from outside without being able to see its source, leading to me only being able to make assumptions about the source’s location and the people involved. Windows are like transparent barriers to the outside, letting us witness the world while physically isolating us from it. They allow us to see, hear and smell information, but not touch or taste anything; we cannot touch the grass we see from the view of a window, nor can we feel the rain on our skin.

Jones states that only by exiting the allegorical cave can one understand the full dimensions of things, “thereby also discovering what has been mediating reality”(89). Similarly, windows provide useful but limited views of the world, and only by going outside can one immerse themselves in the scene and find the sources that information is coming from. 

Conclusion

Drawing connections between windows and media theory made me realize just how significant of a role they play as mediators of senses, memories and so much more. They ground us in reality, tell us about the world and subtly guide our perceptions and actions. I have found that my time spent looking out of the window has gradually lessened as the time I spend looking at my digital devices has increased. Although these virtual screens act as windows into different worlds that bring new perspectives to my life, they can never act as a replacement for the physical, natural reality that I live in. Finally, we must be reminded that despite their affordances, the extent to which windows mediate information is limited, and gaining a deeper understanding of everything requires going outside to experience the world in its full scope. 

References

Caroline, Jones. “Senses.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 88–100. 

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE?” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 307–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025.

Written by Adela Lynge

Images by Adela Lynge

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Video Games as Evocative Objects

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Video games can evoke feelings of liberating escapism while shaping perceptions of real life. In her anthology, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Sherry Turkle demonstrates the ability of objects to facilitate transitional periods of life. Several chapters demonstrate how beloved objects can mediate coming-of-age experiences. When reflecting on my own belongings, I realized a Nintendo game titled, Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town, mediated my perceptions of adulthood. I perceive this cherished game as my own “evocative object”; as a young child, its virtual world evoked my excitement towards growing up. 

For my seventh birthday, my oldest sister gifted me a mysterious Macy’s box. Inside the box was my first video game console–a pink, hand-me-down GameBoy Advance. Inside the console was a game cartridge titled, Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town. As I flipped the console’s on-switch for the first time, a saturated, pixelated screen and a cheerful soundtrack greeted me. The game was a farming simulator, where the main character collects profits by selling dairy, poultry, crops, and foraged items across the quaint atmosphere of Mineral Town. While creating a profitable farm, the player can build relationships with NPC townspeople, get married, and start a family. The game never ends; however, one can presume that winning consists of bringing economic prosperity to the town and becoming a likeable figure among its citizens. At the young age of seven, I did not realize the game’s themes of coming-of-age, hard work, and social acceptance. Now, as a twenty-year-old reflecting on its narrative, I recognize its depiction of adulthood through the player’s journey of moving to a new town, meeting new people, and pursuing a risky career.

I played this game for hours on end, under the covers past bedtime, and during the morning before school; Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town not only catalyzed my love for video games, but mediated my expectations of adulthood. Through numerous hours of improving my farm and achieving a successful lifestyle for the in-game protagonist, the game subconsciously instilled the message that hard work results in joy and companionship. Additionally, the game introduced concepts of trade and capitalism to its child audience by framing a profitable lifestyle as the player’s ultimate goal. Within the game, the protagonist can earn the townspeople’s admiration by gifting them items and talking to them on a daily basis. This mechanic led my immature mind to think that in reality, showering individuals with their favoured items and repeatedly speaking to them would guarantee their loyalty. The addictive, interactive medium illustrated friendships as collectible prizes, rather than everchanging, complex relationships. Unknowingly, this piece of electronic media produced an unrealistic view of adult life as fun, easy, and exciting.

I believe this evocative object would belong in Turkle’s chapter, “Objects of Transition and Passage”. Turkle notes transitional objects “[mediate]” a child’s “growing recognition” of their independence (Winnicott qtd. in 314). Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town taught me such independence by forcing me to make responsible choices in a low-stakes environment. If I forgot to feed my livestock or water my crops, my profits could hinder. Then, I would have less money to purchase gifts for my in-game neighbours and I would lose their friendship; as a result, the game taught me accountability in a simulated setting. However, as I grew older, I lost interest in the game. I no longer needed it to simplify the concept of responsibility to me; instead, I practiced “real-life” responsibility through managing schoolwork, chores, and extracurricular pursuits. As I ventured into my teenage years, the game sat in my dusty drawer, supporting Turkle’s view that these objects of childhood development are “destined to be abandoned” (314). 

Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town as a Cyborg Object

Furthermore, this game acts as a “cyborg” object–an object which combines the “natural and the artificial” (Turkle 325).  An example of a “cyborg” object is Annalee Newitz’s beloved laptop in the chapter “My Laptop”. Newitz’s relationship with her laptop is deeply “intimate”; the inanimate device melds with her natural self causing her difficulty in distinguishing “where it leaves off and she begins” (Turkle 325). She exists as “one with her virtual persona” and views herself as the ‘“command line…of glowing green letters”’ on her screen (Turkle 325). Similarly to Newitz, I developed an emotional attachment to my virtual persona–the tiny, pixelated farmer on the screen of my GameBoy Advance. The more time I invested in my persona, the more she represented my hard work. As a result, my connection to her grew, similarly to the laptop’s “co-extensive” relationship with Newitz’s “self” (Turkle 325). Altogether, this avatar was not just an escape to a simplistic world where adulthood did not seem so frightening, but a representation of myself and the adult I aspired to be.


Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town’s Mediation of the Body

As Wegenstein states in Critical Terms for Media Studies, “‘the logic of the computer”’ has afforded humans the ability to exist as numerous “selves” (28). She notes that modern individuals experience satisfaction by constructing several virtual “personas” that contrast their real-life, “mundane” selves (Wegenstein 28). I experienced this phenomenon while developing my in-game persona; my avatar’s economic and social autonomy contrasted my supervised upbringing. Moreover, the amount of exciting tasks the game afforded my character differed greatly from my simple, repetitive childhood. Rather than being a supervised seven-year-old child, the game transformed myself into a farm-owner, creating a self-sufficient life.

Conclusion

Altogether, my virtual experiences afforded by Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town mediated my expectations of adult life. Through using this object as a form of escapism, I gained a deep emotional connection to this game that remains with me today. While glamourizing adulthood, this game played a role in my childhood development by introducing concepts of hard work and responsibility.   

Works Cited

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 19-34.

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE?” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 307–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Written by Emily Shin

Photos taken by Emily Shin

Critical Concept Explication, Other

The Real in the Virtual and the Virtual in Reality:

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Since the 19th century, there have been numerous attempts at what we now know as “virtual reality”, including the concept of the stereoscope, to the more modern “Sensorama” invented by Cinematographer Morton Heilig in the latter half of the 20th century. However, the age of VR only came into existence later, in the 2010s, with the commercialisation of VR headsets from Oculus and Hive. The concept of “virtual reality” aims to replicate a multi-sensory experience of reality through the projection of a 3D environment, paired with surround sound and, often, controllers that allow players to control the movements of their characters by moving around themselves. 

Thus, arises the question, to what extent is VR real and to what extent is our reality nowadays considered virtual? In accordance with the critical concept of “senses”, we will aim to make this question clear through the lens of critical media theory. 

Throughout the world’s historical development, Ancient Greek thinkers regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to truly understand reality, most famously, Plato, with his Allegory of the Cave. Where he presented a prisoner shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out.

In this sense, I propose a thought experiment to better explicate the implications of VR on our senses. Imagine a child, from the moment that it is born up to adulthood, has its head bound to a VR set and, as such, experiences reality through the mediation of the device. With its sense of hearing and sight greatly blinded to the truth of reality, as in the case of the prisoner in Plato’s cave. 

For this person, their perception of reality would be greatly shaped by their immediate experience via the headset, and thus, we must concede that the supposedly “virtual” would have to qualify as the “real” in this case, for this is the person’s only real experience of their world from a first-person perspective. Now, let us dive into a second experiment: what if we are in a simulation – as Descartes famously asked, how would we know on grounds of our senses that we are not in a dream? Then, would it not be logical to regard the world as we know it as something unreal and ultimately virtual? Through these thought experiments, it is thus reasonable to agree with Plato’s criticism of the dependency of the 5 senses to make sense of one’s reality, as we are easily deceived by them without the human faculty to reason. 

With technological advancements quickly growing, especially of VR headsets, the line between reality and virtuality is increasingly blurred day by day. Our sense of the world is greatly mediated and, in effect, somewhat virtual. According to Kittler’s technological determinism approach, which is also backed by Karl Marx’s argument. It is theorised that the media changes our senses. That is our personal interaction with the world, the ways our senses come into contact with the technology and political economies shape who we are.

In accordance with our main interest, VR can be seen to have greatly redefined and influenced our perception of the concept of reality and virtuality by blurring the line between them. Smartphones are also a more direct and immediate representation of this concept. In modern days, smartphone culture has literally rewired our brains biologically, as our eye pattern adapts to the constant scroll and scanning. The ways we perceive connections and communication have also changed. As we engage in social media culture, we are part of a virtual sphere of human interaction that is undeniably real, only that it is not physical. We are thus qualitatively changing into a species that now has technology – virtuality intertwined within its existence, and must also concede that our reality is also somewhat virtual.

In extending the many theories of senses into a media scape like virtual reality, the line between McLuhan and Kittler’s arguments is complicated. On one hand, VR creates a barrier within  Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the human body extends its senses through media. The notion that our senses can be extended through VR is a bit hard to support when considering that only our vision and often touch is supported into this medium. Additionally it’s hard to accept the surreality of it all, as mentioned earlier, it blurs our perception of reality, quite literally. 

Through our other theorist, Friedrich Kittler, we can consider VR a process of shaping our senses. For example, our vision, rather than VR extending it, the virtuality is changing what we understand as our senses, most effectively, our vision. As media shapes what we understand as sight, VR has dramatically warped this. Understanding through our experiences of combining the senses with sight to interact with our world, the communication of these functions has been fundamentally reshaped.

In conclusion, it is undeniable that the historical development of media has now led us to a present and future where virtuality finally dances with reality in a waltz; consider their performance our experience of life. Acknowledging the limitations of our senses and the endless possibilities that VR has to offer, the moment reality fails to catch up with its partner is when we, the audience, lose track of the dance. The waltz can be interpreted as a balance that must be maintained, as the audience may very well fail to properly appraise the solo performance that virtuality has to offer and thus, never be able to make sense of their lives. 

Nam Pham & Maxine Gray

Critical Concept Explication

Time & Space — A Critical Summary of the Concept in Media Realms

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The roles of time and space are present in almost all media, and the chapter asks the question: are space and time master, or meta media? Are they real and tangible? Or are they abstractions of reality? Through this blog article, we will be taking you into a dense critical summary of the idea’s development through important theorists in history and its importance in media studies.

Oh, and feel free to consult the original chapter if you’re more interested!

The Greeks considered time based art as more important, as seen in the daughters of the goddess of memory, which promoted music, history, dance, song, and more, all of which don’t have physical canvases or muses to exist, they only have the moment they are presented to exist. Lessing admits that there are elements of space in ‘time art’ and time in ‘space art’, however, Lessing is adamant that things like painting are mostly space and things like poetry are mostly time. He sees them as two friendly neighbours who respect each other and their spaces. Lessing also states that the superior art is ‘time art’ as it appeals more to the imagination. Kant believes ‘time art’ represents self expression and ‘space art’ is outward appearance, and Hagel believes the history of art shows the progression of material art to virtual art. Aristotle and Johnson argued that time elements of theatre, such as plot and emotion, were more important than spectacles, such as costumes and sets.

Frederick James argued that modernism was dominated by time because it used history and revolutionary change, while post modernism was dominated by focuses on loss of space, "the end of history", which jumped off of the ideas of Hegel and Francis Fukuyama. Fredrick Kittler argued the three most important media inventions were cinema, phonography, and the typewriter. He argued it helped us to analyze human perception in a new way, like how trying to match sound to footage in film is analyzing space and time in a new way. Kittler’s prognosis for the decoupling of man and machine/media and computers was using the objective and qualitative natures of space and time. Before, it was too hard to objectify space and time, but it is now way easier with the use of computers and more sophisticated tools that can be used to measure those aspects.

Blake saw time as the man and space as the woman, and Benjamin thought that all art strays further away from its true original aura when it is removed from the exact time and place it was made. There are some examples of this mindset today, particularly when it comes to content warnings or advisories that are placed in front of older media, typically due to off-colour depictions of slavery or other now-taboo subjects. Even when not thought of in relation to controversial subjects though, there are some effects that older audiences would’ve experienced that simply aren’t able to be replicated, like watching a movie about WWII after having been deployed.

Erwin Panofsky speaks of film as if it erased the borders that were believed to exist between space and time, as stated by Lessing. This does not mean that the existence of categories disappear, since they are still there to complement certain values associated with different artworks. Clement Greenberg dived deeper into the topics of Lessing, as Greenberg thought there was a purity that needed to be upheld with the forms of art. For example, painting and sculptures were deemed confusing during the dominance of literature in the 1700s since it was damaged by the "realistic in the service of literature". He thought that the fix for this was to banish illusion and imitation all together. Greenberg wanted to keep space and time in their metaphysical limits, he wanted visual arts like painting and sculpting to affect the viewer physically, bringing the art to immediate reception of senses and intellect.

Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel all perpetuated the idea that time was over space in many of their modern philosophical models. Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson viewed time as an experimental continuum and space as a discrete representation of an expanse of time. Bergson called the qualitative aspect of time as duration and the quantitative aspect of time two different distinct things, and suggested that between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of time there existed a "difference of kind" that is unviewable through the analysis of time as space. It can only be experienced and viewed by those with endowed consciousness which are human beings. It is like how despite the fact that we can measure how many seconds are passing during a pause in conversation, and we know how long a second is, we cannot measure when a silence becomes awkward. There are many moments in life when it comes to time that cannot be measured or ‘known’, but rather can only be experienced.

Husserl analyzed the givenness of the world to consciousness. His work focused on the goal of bringing things back to the conditions on which experiences are constituted. His work also focused on the reduction of the natural attitude to allow him to account for the constitution of the lived experience, and differentiated between the two modes of temporalization as retention and recollection.

The retention plus the immersion trail is what Gerard Granel considers the "large now". This is because the more moments that join the past, the more "nows” we are able to experience. To him, recollection is taking a now you experienced, going into the past, then bringing it back to the now to be experienced in a new light. This concept can be universally applied to everyone who has recollected something, as every time you remember something or tell someone a story, a detail gets left out or slightly altered, since the further away you get from the event the blurrier it becomes. The idea of re-experiencing a memory as a “new now” can also be compared to when individuals who have experienced a traumatic event are remembering it. To them, according to Granel, they are literally “re-living” through the experience.

Husserl didn’t speak much on space, except for the fact that for an object to exist in space, it needs to have an end date. Martin Heidegger continued the principle of time over space as he talked about the difference between the two modes of temporality for human beings, inauthentic and authentic time. Inauthentic is the time explained by clocks in specific units, and authentic time is the truth of the experience for a human being, similar to the concept of the “difference in kind” discussed by Bergsen.

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkhiemer worked on the critique of the culture industry and how it relates to the temporal dimension of media entertainment. They believed that the industry, such as cinema, needed a temporal factor inherently, which differs from the traditional workplace or other industries. This makes sense when you consider that movies have a set length, rely on editing to determine the pace of how a story is told, and so on. They also share the same priority of time over space.

Jacques Derrida’s work discussed the necessity of a non-origin for time and space and a purpose for our existence for us to find an inner sense of peace in a physical world. With that, we can have the power to stand against the power of space and time. Bernard Steigler brought this up in relation to media, suggesting that the giving of time and space is tied to the technologies that mediate the human experience. For example, Steigler suggests that the human experience and global views have become synchronized in a way, because of the cinema industry with things like broadcast real time television. There is a coalition between human time and media time, and with the rapid way that social media has taken over our lives and often dictates where we go, what we learn, and how we act, media time is often dominating control over human time.

This work is consulted on the chapter "Time & Space" from the book Critical Terms for Media Studies edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, published by The University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Blog post words by Oliver Cheung, Tyler Hannaford, Owen Menning, and Micah Sébastien Zhang. Cover image made by Micah Sébastien Zhang.

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Holding Memory

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Photo by me at the Laver Cup 2023 – making memories with friends

There’s a quiet intimacy in holding memory in your hands. My Fujifilm Instax camera has become a way for me to pause time, to transform fleeting moments with friends and family into fragile objects that I can touch, arrange, and carry. Unlike the endless scroll of images on a phone, each Instax print is deliberate. Film is limited (and a bit expensive), the picture develops slowly, and the print itself is singular. And by the time the image fully appears, the moment it records has already slipped into the past, leaving me with both proof and loss. This happened, and it’s gone.

I keep every print in a small photo album, a growing collection that has begun to feel like its own living archive. Flipping through its pages is different from scrolling through a phone gallery. Each print takes up space, carrying its own imperfections like a fingerprint smudge, a faded corner, a hint of overexposure. That’s why I think it’s an evocative object, one that teaches me how media hold onto time, how photos can mediate between presence and absence, and how the simplest object can become a way of thinking about what it means to remember.

To understand why these images feel so different from the thousands on my phone, I turn to media theory, which helps me see how the Instax mediates memory, materiality, and presence in ways that resist digital ephemerality.

Theory Part I – Objects & Materiality

Sherry Turkle writes that objects are “things we think with,” extensions of our inner lives that carry paradoxes into tangible form. My Instax camera has become exactly that. Every time I press the shutter, I’m reminded of what Turkle calls the way objects “extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within.” This camera collapses an instant into a card I can hold, an object that forces slowness and attention in a world of infinite scroll. In the quiet ritual of waiting for an image to appear, I feel what Turkle describes in her account of Seymour Papert’s childhood gears, the way falling in love with an object can also mean falling in love with an idea. For Papert, gears opened the door to mathematics. For me, Instax prints open the door to thinking about time and how memory is always both preserved and already slipping away. Each print becomes, in Turkle’s phrase, a “partnership” that helps me live with presence and absence layered in the same frame. To hold one is to realize, as Turkle suggests, that theory itself can become an evocative object and that even in the smallest square of film, theory is brought down to earth.

Bill Brown helps me see why this matters so much especially now. He says, “materiality has come to matter with new urgency,” because we live in an era where images and information are constantly dissolving into pixels and numbers. With that context, my Instax photos feel like small rebellions. Unlike the phone gallery, where thousands of pictures blur into the endless scroll, each Instax print insists on its body. It can bend, fade, and hold the trace of a thumbprint. These so-called imperfections, in my opinion, are what make it feel alive and what Brown might call the “materiality-effect,” the way an object persuades us of its reality. Sliding a print into my album makes me realize that remembering is tactile and fragile, always mediated by surfaces, fibers, and light. Brown notes that new media often provoke a melodrama of threatened materiality as though the physical world is vanishing into code. But the Instax resists that narrative. It’s stubbornly here. A one-of-one artifact you can’t swipe away or back up to the cloud. In a time when digital photographs circulate endlessly yet somehow lose weight with every reproduction, my Instax reasserts the stubborn truth that memory is also matter.

Theory Part II – Images & Memory

W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images live in contradiction. They are, he writes, both “there and not there”material objects you can hold and spectral apparitions that summon what is absent. My Instax photos embody this paradox in the most literal way. When I watch a white square slowly darken into an image, I feel that double moment Mitchell describes: the excitement of recognition as my friend’s face or a fragment of sunlight appears, paired with the sudden awareness that the moment itself has already slipped away. Each print, I feel, is like a ghost, present enough to touch yet haunted by absence. Unlike the thousands of phone photos that blur together into a continuous stream, an Instax photo freezes the contradiction in miniature. Again, the feeling that this happened, and it’s gone.

Bernard Stiegler gives me another way of understanding what’s at stake here. He distinguishes between anamnesis (the living act of remembering) and hypomnesis (the technical supports) like writing or photography that externalize memory. The Instax makes me aware of both at once. Taking the photo is an act of attention, of choosing and framing a moment, an embodied practice of remembering. But the print that emerges becomes hypomnesis, a technical memory that lives outside me, tucked into an album. Unlike the automatic flood of digital images, though, this process feels deliberate. I decide what to keep, how to arrange the pages, what story the album tells. In Stiegler’s terms, my Instax resists the “industrial exteriorization of memory” that digital platforms often produce, where algorithms and infinite storage do the remembering for us. Instead, my album feels like a collaboration between lived memory and technical support. It’s not infinite, not perfect, definitely not optimized, and that’s what makes it special.

Thinking About Memory Now

We live in a time when most of our memories are outsourced to clouds and algorithms, where platforms decide what resurfaces for us through “memories” notifications and automated feeds. The Instax, by contrast, resists that industrial exteriorization of memory. It asks me to be deliberate, to decide what is worth holding onto and to give memory a material home. In that sense, it’s nostalgic but critical as it makes visible the stakes of how media mediate our lives.

In a way, this is a return to photography’s origins. Early cameras required patience and darkrooms producing images slowly and with effort. It feels like a strange return, a twenty-first century camera that reintroduces limits and imperfection. Maybe that’s what makes the Instax an evocative object. It reminds me that media are central forces in how we experience time, relationships, and even ourselves. And in thinking about memory now, in this moment of digital abundance and digital forgetting, we can see more clearly why theory matters as it helps us make sense of the fragile, human ways we hold on.

References

Brown, B. (2005). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 49–63). University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). Image. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 85–98). University of Chicago

Stiegler, B. (2005). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Blog post by Maryam Abusamak

Critical Concept Explication

Do We Sense The World… Or Does it Sense Us?

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As we navigate the world, our perception is shaped through our touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.

But how do we understand these experiences and how does mediation play into this interaction?

In the chapter Senses, Caroline Jones explores two contrasting answers to this question. Through Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, we can begin to understand the complexities of how our senses interpret media and the surrounding world.

Starting with our first theorist, Kittler believes that our senses are radically shaped by the media around us. His idea is fairly synonymous with ideas about technological determinism. On the opposite end of the spectrum, McLuhan insists that human senses are grounded in the body and simply extend their reach through or using media. By dissecting these opposing ideas, Jones extends these ideas to explain how media and the senses interact.

Jones’s main argument is that the senses are not natural or unchanging, but are always shaped and reshaped by media. As she puts it: “The senses both constitute our ‘sense’ of unmediated knowledge and are the first medium with which consciousness must contend.” (p. 88) While Media delivers content to our existing senses, they actively reorganize how we experience the world through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Building on the work of the two earlier thinkers, Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, Kittler argued that media fundamentally produce and change the senses. We see this currently when smartphones reshape our attention span and even eye movement patterns from the constant flicking and scanning our eyes do, while also restructuring how we process information.

To compare, McLuhan argues that media are extensions of our senses. Take for instance, the telephone extends hearing, but our senses remain grounded in our body. Jones takes this further by showing that, across history, from ancient philosophy to modern capitalism, our senses have always been shaped by outside forces. For example, we have been conditioned to associate smell to the terms “Pine Forest” and “Country Fresh” to a clean, hygienic home.

As for vision, society has often treated sight as the most important path to truth. According to Jones, vision became privileged because philosophers, starting with Plato, saw it as the most objective sense that could reach truth from a distance. Over time, philosophy and art reinforced this by treating sight as the ‘pure’ path to knowledge, while pushing touch, taste, and smell aside as “too bodily” or “animal”.

But this ranking of sight above touch, smell, and taste is not natural because it’s something created by media and culture. Her main point is that the media are not solely neutral tools that show us the world. Instead, they actively change our senses, reshaping what we know is true and also how we actually experience reality through our bodies. And to study media, we need to perceive senses as the very ways of shaping our sense of reality.

Through the course of philosophy’s historical developments, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuations as to what counts as knowledge and the ways in which one may truly “know” something. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to gain a true sight of reality. to modern-day thinkers, most infamously Hume, who rejected the concept of “universal laws”, favouring sensory experience to understand the world.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato presented prisoners shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out. In this case, the eyes are seeing, yet the prisoner is effectively blind to the truth of reality. Their “senses” have effectively failed to distinguish between a representation of reality, its fabrication and reality itself.  Plato attributes this blindness to a lack of philosophical reasoning. Critiquing the dependency on the five senses to understand reality, and as a means to achieve true knowledge. He then proceeds to provide the remedy for this, in which the prisoner is required to be willing to be blinded once again, this time by the volitional blinding light of reality. Shown in the allegory as the eyes having to adjust to the bright sun after spending a whole life in the darkness of the cave. 

Fast-forwarding into the Enlightenment period, we have John Locke and, famously, David Hume, with his Problem of Induction, arguing that we can not know for sure that something has happened until it has happened; his idea of reality is one which can only be validated by our senses, such as the eyes or ears.

Hume argues that it is only a force of habit and custom that we assume to “know” things. For example, we do not have all the empirical data of history and the future to accurately claim that a sound is produced when we clap our hands. Human reasoning, consequently, is argued to be a cumulative process based on data from sensory experience, and this is the primary way in which we understand the world.

In concluding the chapter’s philosophical basis, Jones’ main idea that “our senses are not fixed” is strongly reinforced by a modern thinker, Karl Marx and his argument that the way our senses interact with technology and political economies form us as humans. This idea of technological determinism claims our senses are formed externally by the historical development of the world rather than internally within ourselves. Our senses are in a constant state of change and adaptation, in relation to our experience of the world.

Taking a step back to Hume, which considers media as a tool for gathering or promoting information for the senses, and is not only “the bridge in the middle” but also something that shapes and influences how people use and reconsider their senses and the world experienced through them. Media not only “outputs”, but also “inputs” through our senses. The chapter shifts our understanding of media as solely information we consume but also the force that transforms our human senses that we use to experience the world.

While the media shapes people’s perception of reality and the way we interpret our own senses, the media itself is also ever changing and replaced by new inventions and technologies. Our senses, when mediated, shift with it, and so does our conversation with the world around us. In such a context, the ability to independently think while understanding how our senses interact with media is the key of guiding us out of the cave.

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura

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What’s The INFO On Information?

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This chapter proves that information is never neutral or stable. It is a common denominator across multiple forms, and each form reveals how we understand systems, communication, and the meaning behind them. The chapter explores virtuality, language, entropy, noise, and feedback, which highlight that information, along with being stored, also reshapes the environments that carry it. Even though information sometimes fades or persists, most often, it transforms. Theories from Saussure, Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson prove that information is defined less by permanence and more by probability, relation, and adaptation. Information demonstrates itself to be both constrained and filled with endless possibilities, whether through the structural logic of language, the physical principles of entropy, or the creative possibilities of noise and feedback.

​​​​​​Information: Everywhere and Nowhere

We found that one of the most intriguing parts of the chapter on virtuality is the contrast in how information was stored in the past compared to today. Physical traces such as carvings and manuscripts have been left behind and have survived for centuries. Contrastingly, digital information is extremely fragile. For example, a file can be duplicated without limitation, but it can also disappear with a click or even a forgotten password. As such, information is both everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t necessarily have weight or size, yet it structures the way in which we perceive the world. This is where its power lies. Information can be re-coded or transformed to fit new contexts instantly. This reminds us of how much of what we create only exists temporarily; examples include Snapchat stories or disappearing messages. Blake’s idea of how these moments still carry meaning even if they don’t have a lasting trace can be applied here. What matters isn’t necessarily permanence but the way information can adapt and reshape systems.

Communication and Language

The most striking aspect of the “Language” chapter was the comparison between Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication and Saussure’s theory of language. Despite being completely different theories, they still both show that systems matter more than the individual messages. Meaning essentially appears from the structures that shape it. Shannon and Weaver’s model treats information in terms of probability. The focus is on how predictable or unpredictable a message is within the system. Saussure also makes a similar point, as speech only makes sense in the context of the larger structure of language. This is where words have value through their position in relation to each other. For example, in the text, English is mentioned as 50% statistically predictable. Even though redundancy would sound like a flaw, it is actually what makes communication work. If every word were unpredictable, we wouldn’t be able to follow along. Even though the system constrains us, this constraint is what gives meaning and clarity.

What is Entropy? How its Connected To Energy?

Looking at how information has a significant connection to physical systems, the theorist Ludwig Boltzmann demonstrated that entropy, which measures disorder, is a physical property of a system.  Over time, systems tend towards maximum entropy, which means more disorder and less usable energy. Ordered systems are low in entropy and contain more information and less unusable energy. Using the example of a scenario of finding a hot cup of coffee on a table in a cool room instead of the usual situation of finding a cup at room temperature to explain entropy. The hot coffee in the cold room is low-entropy because the coffee won’t stay hot for long, making it an unusual situation. In contrast, a cup at room temperature is a more probable and expected state.  Boltzmann wanted to define the entropy of a physical system as a function of possible energetic configurations, the number of different possible ways to distribute more configurations and produce a random high entropy.  Boltzmann quantification of the entropy law, creating the equation S = k log P, with S standing for the entropy and P being the number of different possibilities.

How We Use Entropy in Communication Systems

Looking further at the link with statistical mechanics, Shannon defined information as the mathematical inverse of probability. The more surprising it is, the more information it contains. For example, choosing from a binary set (yes/no, on/off) provides one bit of information, but not a lot, because the options at the source are very limited. In this way, the value of information is calculated: the more choices a sender has, the more information the message carries. In the approach to calculate the value of information, considering how many choices the sender has and how much information the message may contain, Shannon created a mathematical formulation of information H = –∑ pi log pi. Pi being the probability of choice, H is if the choice is predictable. Information theory explains how unlikely order shifts to probable disorder in physical systems, distinguishing between signals (useful) and noise (waste) in communication. In physical systems, thermodynamic entropy is the amount of energy unavailable for further work, or “wasted”. In communication systems, the informational entropy of a message measures the message probabilities from different perspectives

– The source: how many choices are possible

– The channel: the amount of signal transmitted versus the amount lost in noise

– The destination: how much uncertainty the message resolves for the receiver.

Through the development of reception theory, reader response theory and cognitive science, which have focused on how people interpret information through different ways of communication. 

Media Systems and Noise

The author, Bruce Clarke, positions media not as neutral tools for transmission but as dynamic systems embedded in material and environmental contexts. His liking for systems theory is evident in the way the chapter frames all meaningful communication as occurring within cycles of transmission and reception, where signals and noise are always present. Noise is defined as anything in a received message that was not originally sent. It was first treated as an obstacle to efficiency, described by Shannon as random interference that disrupts productivity. However, he and Weaver also recognized that noise introduces new probabilities into the system and can be understood as information itself. Gregory Bateson sharpened this point with his definition of information as “[…] a difference that makes a difference”(165). Noise unsettles transmitted messages, creating the potential for new forms and information to emerge.

Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as the study of messages and control highlights why noise matters. Both machines and biological organisms regulate themselves through circuits of transmission and feedback. Signals travelling through these circuits are never perfectly stable; real-world channels, be that nerves or telephone wires, always contain random fluctuations or noise. Just as thermodynamic systems lend themselves toward entropy, communication systems face the inevitability of noise. What begins as a problem of error or interruption can quickly become a creative opportunity: systems learn and evolve because they must adapt to noise.

This is most clearly visible in media arts. What engineers once feared as breakdowns or flaws often became the raw material for innovation. Musicians like Jimi Hendrix transformed screeching feedback into controlled musical enhancements, while tape manipulation and distortion gave artists like the Beatles new expressive vocabularies. In these cases, noise was not a loss but a generative supplement to the message. Visual media can carry similar outcomes: glitches in video or digital photography can become aesthetic choices, reframing errors as features. Media art reveals that meaning is often made through the manipulation of noise, not its elimination.

Early communication systems, such as the telegraph and telephone, prioritize noiseless transmission, aiming to reduce distortion, while inscription media such as the phonograph or photograph captured and preserved both signal and noise. Friedrich Kittler shows how these technologies disrupted the dominance of writing, which reduces speech to 26 symbols (letters) and filters out the messy world of accidental sound. In contrast, sound recording and photography preserved continuous reality, complete with its imperfections. This created a conceptual divide: symbolic systems that treat information as immaterial code, and material systems that capture the world’s natural, noisy textures. However, symbolic and material systems are never fully separate. Information only comes into being when it takes material form, whether in carved stone or cloud servers. The qualities of these materials determine what endures, what decays, and what remains accessible.

Noise is not the enemy of communication but a structural feature of it. Sometimes it destroys order, but just as often it enables creativity, adaptation, and novelty. Media systems are ecological: they consist of signals, noise, and the environments that sustain them. Recognizing this prepares us for the cybernetic concept of feedback, where noise and uncertainty are not filtered out but re-circulated through the system, enabling regulation, adaptation, and, at times, the discovery of entirely new patterns.

Introduction of Feedback in Information Systems

Information has shifted not just to store or transmit, but to be used to create a new function of feedback. Noting that information theories define information as a mathematically inverse function of the probability of a predictable message. Bateson stated that noise is the only possible source of new patterns or information, highlighting how noise always carries meaning, even if it seems meaningless to the audience. During the 1940s, as computers were being developed, feedback became a crucial part of control mechanisms. With certain sensors, both input and output can be managed by converting them into a circuit, creating a feedback loop that uses its own output as an input. This results in either negative feedback, which stabilizes order, or positive feedback, which leads to growth or disorder. Uncertainties about messages allowed noise to serve as a source of additional information, introducing unexpected patterns useful for creative or adaptive purposes. Feedback transforms transmission into a dynamic process that enables systems to self-regulate, discover new patterns, and produce art.

Key Takeaways

Media should be understood not merely as channels for transmitting information, but as dynamic systems in which signals and noise interact within material and environmental contexts. Clarke emphasizes that meaning arises from relationships within these systems, what Bateson calls the “context principle”, and that communication is impossible without context. Information is never neutral. It moves, transforms, and reshapes the systems it inhabits. Media are not just channels for messages but dynamic, ecological systems where signals and noise coexist, and new meaning emerges from the appearance of noise. Noise is not simply interference but a generative force that shapes, disrupts, and enriches meaning. By situating media within ecological systems, Clarke challenges the notion of isolated tools and instead presents them as active participants that both shape and are shaped by the information around them.

Work Cited

Title cover and Images created in Canva By Alisha and Sam

Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 157-171. Accessed 1 October 2025.


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Art and Reproducing the Human Experience

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How do we consider a piece to be a work of art? 

How do we differentiate between mass media and fine art? 

Is it the time and effort put into the piece? 

Is it the materials used? 

Or, is it the meanings and interpretations that surround the work? 

These are all questions American scholar Johanna Drucker tackles in her chapter from Critical Terms for Media Studies. 

Art has long been recognized as a concept that is difficult to define. We often hear the saying “art is subjective,” and that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” So, if the term “art” is so complex and personal, why attempt to define it at all? In an era of mass media and reproduction, it is important for us, as media studies students, to understand what makes art valuable.

The methods by which modern artists create are very distant from what was originally used to classify works as pieces of art. These previous conventions included: 

  1. Art as a Set of Practices and a Class of Objects 

Modern artists are no longer limiting themselves to traditional materials and methods once used to create art. Instead of using paint or clay to create a piece, artists are now incorporating digital media into their work. This means art can no longer be classified solely on the basis of its making. 

  1. Mass Media vs Fine Art

Before, there was a clear boundary between “fine art” and “mass media.” Now that we are living in an age where reproduction is limitless and our access to images is immediate, those lines have now become blurred. Iconography, themes, and technology that are largely associated with “popular culture” or “commercial media” have now made their way into contemporary art practices.

  1. The Idea of an “Artist”

In the past, the classical idea of an “artist” revolved around being some sort of genius. They were trained professionals with formal skills who adhered to traditional notions of beauty, harmony, and proportion. However, these skills are no longer required to be given the title of an “artist.” Present-day artists instead explore diverse media and forms, not needing conventional skills. 

  1.  The Role of Fine Art

Art no longer has to establish aspirations toward “higher” values (spiritual messages or moral grandeur). Now art is no longer conforming to fixed genres, just as it is no longer being crafted from elite materials. 

Drucker starts off the chapter with a quote by Charles Ogden from The Foundations of Aesthetics: “Art is the exploitation of the medium.” Beginning the chapter with this quote establishes the important role media plays when defining art. The definition of art, as Drucker suggests, is never going to be fixed; it will shift along with the media through which they are expressed.

History of the Term “Art”: 

In the foundational understanding of art, the medium allows for the very existence of art. 

Image credit

As the chapter unfolds, the author guides us through the evolution of the definition of “art” across different time periods. As art expanded beyond technical perfection to embrace ideas and personal expression, the meaning of its media expanded as well.

The Classical Period shows us an art form that was primarily associated with applied skill. At this stage, individual talent wasn’t connected to personal expression. Instead, form followed a strict sense of aesthetic, and we can see this clearly in the work of sculptors like Praxiteles in the 4th century BCE.

Moving into the Medieval Period, we see artistic skills applied to more specialized tasks – things like illumination, calligraphy, painting, drawing, and bookbinding. Importantly, art was not yet recognized as a separate domain in itself, but rather as a craft embedded in other practices.

The Renaissance is where the idea of the artist as a gifted individual really emerges. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, cemented the notion of the artist as a kind of genius. Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo embody this new artistic ideal, where personal vision and technical skill were celebrated together.

During the Romantic Period, the emphasis shifted toward imagination and emotion. William Blake, for instance, highlighted art’s power to open “doors of perception.” Art was no longer just about beauty or mastery – it became a way to challenge the rationality of the Enlightenment (Adorno, anyone?).

Finally, in the Modern and Postmodern periods, we see radical shifts in how art relates to media. Pablo Picasso disrupted traditional artistic representation with collage. Marcel Duchamp pushed even further with conceptual art, famously exhibiting a porcelain urinal as artwork. And Andy Warhol brought mass media and popular culture into frame, blurring the lines between high art and commercial imagery.

Through these shifts, the chapter shows how the definition of art and its relationship to media have continually evolved, reflecting broader cultural values and reshaping what we consider art to be.

Defining Art

As the chapter progresses, Drucker starts to formulate two key definitions of art, both of which directly correlate with the evolutions of art’s role, technical definition, and position of the artist themself. 

The first is art as autonomous, first introduced by philosophers of the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century- most notably, Walter Benjamin. His 1937 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, expands on this idea by introducing the concept of “aura,” a unique, unintelligible quality an original work holds, and cannot be replicated by mass media reproductions. This idea of aura was then expanded upon as a method of preserving older values through defamiliarization, the idea of not viewing a work through its original context, but informing a newer audience of the time and space it was conceptualized in. 

This theory was not only employed by Benjamin and his contemporaries such as Adorno and Horkheimer, but also by the cultural critic Clement Greenberg. In his essay, Avant Garde and Kitsch, he argued that fine art was to be used as a preservation of civilization in the fight against mass culture, insisting that the visual flatness of art was characteristic of its autonomy, in its ability to separate past capsules of time through art from ever evolving, ever shifting ideology.

Although Greenberg’s writings championed experimental fine art as the perfect cocktail of aesthetics and values to capture the present, his insistence of visuality was criticized as being despotic in its desire to critique ideological references and narrative qualities. Through this criticism, another definition was born- Art as conceptual, based not on formal principles and technicality, but on the individual ideas and concepts the artists employed. The origination of this school of thought can be traced back to Duchamp, in his work’s suggestion that art is not founded off of technical ability or formal principles, but off of conventions of thought and ideology. However, this definition started to go mainstream in the 50s and 60s, with artists and writers equally examining the concepts behind a piece as much as its material form. 

A quote that may encapsulate this definition best is Sol LeWitt’s, “An idea is a machine that makes art,” written in a 1967 essay, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Critic Lucy Lippard expanded on this further, observing the concepts of dematerialization within the art of the day- noting that artists were viewing material form as secondary to the work’s concept. Media that otherwise would not be used in a work started to be introduced in wanting to represent the artist’s ideas and concepts as purely as possible. Most audaciously- in the case of Yves Klein’s exhibition Void (1958), where he famously showed it was not the medium, but rather the lack thereof that made a piece luminous in its conceptuality- making it possible to enforce his ideas of direct, tangible presence and concept without the burden of medium.

This definition was not free without criticism, however. In one of her earliest works from 1966, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that modern art criticism was too focused with attempting to decode a work’s concepts, meaning, and ideas, sacrificing the fostering of direct, felt, sensuous experience in the attempt to make art decomposition an intellectual exercise of translation. But today, exemplified in contemporary art’s ideals of unorthodox media and materials, a colliding definition of fine art and mass production, and an emphasis on conceptual expression over strict formalism, the definition of art as conceptual lives on.

Takeaways 

The meaning of art and media will never be fixed; it shifts as culture evolves and as we, the audience, reshape what we consider “art.” 

In the modern and contemporary periods, our perception of media has moved on from being at the service of art to becoming the very subject and substance of artistic creations. In other words, instead of merely carrying the artist’s message, the medium began to gain recognition as an artistic presence in itself.

In the final pages of the chapter, Johanna invites us to reinterpret the chapter’s opening claim, “Art is the exploitation of the medium”. 

“‘Medium is a message.’ But it is the art coefficient that provokes wonder and seduces us into consideration of the way it inflects and shapes meaning”. By identifying art as the ‘coefficient’ of the medium rather than the central figure of the piece, the traditional hierarchy between art and medium is redefined. In this sense, art can be understood as a ‘meta-medium’: a tool that engages the audience and invites them to consider the potential and power of the medium itself.

Her final statement, “Art becomes a way of paying attention”, ties it all together beautifully. Art is now defined less by its materials or composition, and more by the way it is interpreted as being tangibly different from an everyday product of a different cultural industry, marked by its uniqueness to the artist and its context.Since our existence as humans is mediated by perception, shaped by personal and cultural backgrounds, art really is everywhere. It emerges whenever we choose to slow down, pay attention, and wherever we find beauty and meaning.

Sources:

Mitchell, W. J. T., Hansen, M. B. N., & Drucker, J. (2010). Art. In Critical terms for media studies. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226532660.001.0001

Critical Concept Explication

Materiality and the Resurgence of Physical Media

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By Bara and Allie

On the Author, Bill Brown

The author of our chapter, Bill Brown, is a critical theory scholar and professor of English language and literature. His major theoretical work is on Thing theory that makes a distinction between a thing and an object, and observes their roles in modern culture. In his book “A Sense of Things”, Brown focuses on how objects are represented in 19th century American literature. For his chapter on materiality, he focuses on the physicality of media and the effects of our conversion to the abstract.

On Materiality

Materiality, to put it simply, is not something easy to define concretely, but we can view it as a diverse spectrum. For example, to say your new sweater ‘lacks the materiality’ of your previous one, it doesn’t assert the sweater’s intangibility. More likely, we mean that the new sweater may be somewhat stiff and doesn’t smell like our laundry detergent, or is made of 100% wool, which is itchy and uncomfortable (that’s why we prefer a wool mix). 

Materiality is defined by far more than just the tangibility of an object – it is also about the physical qualities of this object, about how we experience it and life in general. We know life, says Bill Brown, only as it is mediated by the senses. This means life is in the smell of a freshly bought book, in your controller vibrating after you finish a level in Lego Star Wars, and in when you squat in front of a painting to see it at a different angle because now the light is different.

Digitization is in opposition to materiality by turning the tangible into the intangible. Some media theorists are concerned that the digitization of media can compromise its tangibility and therefore our physical experience of it. To help visualize, Bill Brown quotes Friedrich Kittler’s passage where he declares digitalization erases the differences between individual media, since inside the computer, everything is reduced to numbers. In his “The Last Mixtape”, Seth Long describes how the music industry went through the process of gradual digitization with the development of newer technologies. Later, he also recalls how the way people related to music fundamentally changed after the switch due to the difference in mediums’ affordabilities: physical media created challenges (in finding, curating, listening to music) that allowed for a deeper emotional relation to the process. Listening to music became less intentional, less personal, and less ritualistic once it became digital.

Why care?

Next time as you are creating or analysing media, ask yourself: If the medium is the message, how does the message change depending on the materiality of the media? How does the experience of reading a web-comic differ from reading a physical copy? Does digital media feel ‘less real’ due to its immateriality, or does the physical experience lure us away from objectivity?

The Conversion to the Digital

The chapter discusses the idea that the evolution of our material surroundings and the relationships we have with them have become less tangible; this is the “digital threat”, or the fear of “abstraction” in our modernizing age. 

As we have revolutionized technology, Colin Renfrew suggests there has been a separation of “communication and substance”, or rather, that our conversion towards the digital is making our world less tangible, and thereby, our associations to “meaning” are threatened. If you, for example, were to take a picture of your childhood stuffed animal, upload it to a program and model it exactly as it is in real life, there is no symbolic relationship between you and the object any longer, as it exists digitally. We can even understand “touch” as being a privileged way in which we as humans interact with the world around us. 

Will stripping our society away from its physical qualities not abstract our relationships, our culture, our lives? While these concerns are within our human nature, so are now our relationship with the intangible, be it Tamagochi or the Sewaddle I caught in Pokemon Go last week. Media evolves because of us, alongside us, and even evolves us back.

The author invokes the ideas of both Marx and Benjamin in order to explain; as human relationships have become increasingly complex with their interactions with media, the relationships between previously privileged elements such as “form” and “substance” have been abstracted. For example, systems of money have become increasingly distinct from their material forms. Photography has long been “divorcing form from matter”. To some, this sounds like an understandable threat. However, even Benjamin believed that these new technologies can enrich our perception and reveal to us truths hidden to the human eye. Even as most forms of media are being “homogenized” into the digital, this is an incredibly complex and interdependent relationship that means humans are evolving in a way, too. 

Body and Meaning 

In the closing section of “Materiality” from Critical Terms for Media Theory, Bill Brown turns to the body as the ultimate site where materiality asserts itself. Throughout the chapter, he stresses that materiality is what resists or exceeds meaning—the stubborn “stuff” that literary, cultural, and media theory often try to interpret away. By ending with the body, Brown emphasizes that it is not simply an object to be represented, but both a medium of representation and a lived, physical thing, which is explored deeper by our colleagues’ report on the Biomedia chapter. 

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Kant, Brown highlights the body as the very ground of perception, the pre-condition for experiencing and making sense of the world. This leads him to the idea of the human as a kind of network of information; the body provides the “framing function” that gives form to otherwise formless data. In this sense, the human body becomes the source for giving “body” to digital media. Information, whether sensory or computational, only becomes meaningful through embodied experience.

Yet Brown warns against reducing the body to mere signification. He points to how technology pervades embodiment, blurring any clear divide between body and media. You can think of a person using a smartphone’s health tracker; the body’s steps, heartbeat, and sleep patterns are turned into data, while the body itself is shaped by that data—prompted to walk more, rest differently, or change behaviors in other ways. Here, body and technology are inseparable, each creating meaning and as such, meaningful action, for the other.

The general idea, then, is that materiality is not opposed to meaning, but is that which 

meaning depends on and yet cannot fully contain. The body is transitional and evolving: it is both medium and a message, symbol and substance. Brown emphasizes that materiality is not simply “out there” as physical or tangible things, but is embedded in lived experiences that challenges and reshapes how we define media and media relationships.

Resurgence of Physical Media 

In recent years, public interest in physical media rose: you might have (or be) a friend collecting DVDs or burning your own CDs. One of my closest friends bought herself a Nintendo DS this summer, preferring it to the digital emulators. Businesses slowly but surely feel this tendency and acted accordingly: Sony has recently come out with a new Blu-Ray player – the first in over five years. 

“The Last Mixtape”, by Seth Long, describes the difference between physical media as ‘allowing for ownership’ and digital media as ‘allowing access’. When we as a society trusted digital subscriptions to provide us with media, we did not expect them to take our favourite movies down. But in these later years, more and more streaming services have failed to renew licensing agreements for many beloved movies: in fact, last month, iconic movies like The Notebook, Anchorman franchise and, worst of all, the Bee Movie, left Netflix. People are paying the same subscription price, but have access to content they don’t care about. In most of these cases, the solution for this would be to own the movie yourself. Having a DVD of your favourite movie is a tangible experience of ownership, while a Netflix subscription doesn’t provide the same level of accessibility anymore. 

Another factor in the rise of physical media is, of course, nostalgia. Early 2000s trends are all the rage again, bringing back skirts over jeans, butterfly clips and flipphones. When we dissect this fallback to trending fashion of the early millennium, we uncover that this style embodies a specific feeling, a set of approaches and attitudes of the times. This, of course, includes the now forgotten due to AI-powered oversaturation feeling of excitement over technology. Not technology like cybertruck, but tech focused on entertainment – like an iPod, a furby or… literally anything in clear plastic casing. In the early 2000s, media technologies were going through massive transformations, both exciting and physical: people bedazzled their flipphones and rented movies on DVDs for the weekends from the same places they borrowed cassettes from in the 90s. From these observations we can conclude that people who feel nostalgic about a certain time or period of their lives will seek the same feelings and experiences of interaction through physical media.

While digital media has a vast potential for user’s experience, tangible media will always be able to offer different affordances. The smell of a book you left notes in, the safety of spacious, but your own DVDs collection, the little imperfections of vinyl that make your ABBA sound a little different from your mom’s.

Similarly, businesses based on physical media continue to thrive thanks to the experiences unavailable to digital users. In their article “Death by streaming or vinyl revival?” Hracs and Jansson explore how independent record shops in Stockholm use the physicality of their spaces to their business advantage. These stores curate their collections, cultivate the in-store experience filled with meanings and rituals and create value through product rotation – something that would’ve been impossible to engage on the same level with in the digital realm. Hracs and Jansson emphasize: these stores are still open because of their mediums affordances, not despite them. 

If we know life by how it is mediated through our senses, a material media will be more memorable, more real, and even more lovable than its digital counterpart. 

So what?

Both physical and digital media and experiences have their own affordances, and it is important for us as media theorists to keep in mind the role of physical media, even (or especially) if their digital counterparts seem more convenient, more modern and more global. Material media is not dead, but an important tool that allows us to consider and critique the conversion of our world to the abstract, and understand how this affects our human experience. 

Keywords and Definitions

Abstraction: in the context of this article, abstraction refers to the idea that our relationship with media (such as communication technologies) has evolved to become less physical and tangible, and more so based on abstract understandings.

Dematerialization hypothesis: the idea that digital conversion is affecting the meaningful relationships between humans and tangible experiences. 

Hegemony of the digital: the conversion of medias into digital forms.

Materiality: … did you read the piece? We recommend the start, middle, and end.

Source Materials

 Brown, B. (2010). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for Media Studies (pp. 49-65). The University of Chicago Press.

Long, S. (2025). The last mixtape: Physical media and nostalgic cycles (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Hracs, B. J., & Jansson, J. (2017). Death by streaming or vinyl revival? Exploring the spatial dynamics and value-creating strategies of independent record shops in Stockholm. Journal of Consumer Culture, 20(4), 478-497. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517745703 (Original work published 2020)

Cover Image created by Bara, Written by Bara and Allie