Tl;dr history rolls on until it stops.

Media arts develops as a recognized art practice in the 70s. It was primarily a response to the integration of electronic media with film. It examined the materiality of film and experimented with video, electronic sound, and so on. It worked alongside traditional art media. Then the softwarization of analog media occurred at the end of the 20th century and the internet arrived as a public media platform. This altered most existing non-performing arts in short order (followed by the rest). Media arts in particular expanded to include digital art practices but digital arts also emerged separately from non-media arts Art. And they had different emphases coming from different contexts and histories but now the result was much more overlap between media arts and traditional art departments, which has continued with the expansion of digital media and culture.

That was like turn of the century stuff. The transition from 16mm to digital video and Final Cut or from a paint brush to Illustrator was completed 15 years ago. We still teach painting and 16mm, but that’s a different topic. And we have faculty that specialize in non-digital media. We also still teach Shakespeare and Socrates. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t. That’s a different topic. When I look at the history of my own department and the end of the “Buffalo Heads” era in the early 90s, one interpretation is that the media study concept was subsumed by the softwarization of culture. But DMS weren’t alone in that by far. Things change, and the digital arts still cause cultural and aesthetic challenges for the arts.

Movements like media arts, practice-based research arise in the 90s alongside softwarization. Part of what they implicitly recognize is that digital art is fundamentally more infrastructural and thus institutional than pre-digital media arts. It requires servers and tech support. It requires the internet. It was also a move for recognition within the conventions of academia as a research practice with peer-reviewed scholarship that takes a variety of forms including artistic practice itself. My outside perspective on media arts practice-based research is that it has a strong activist, social impact component. This also is different from the previous experimental media arts which were more counter-cultural and anti-institutional. A different politics for a different time I suppose. (Again, not to say that both aren’t still practiced.) And all of this is quite different from “arts-based research,” which, for its detractors, might be viewed as putting art “in the service of.” But I’m not here for that disagreement. Just laying out the land.

One obvious observation about artists is that they are generally defined by their medium. The experimental tradition in media arts included a real focus on medium specificity, as with Brakhage, but this is an element of every art practice. These activities have been going on for millennia for the most part. But what happens to filmmaking when we think of it as the same way the we view painting? What happens to digital artists when their work undergoes another softwarization?

AI’s impact on media arts will be significantly bigger than that of softwarization in the 90s. The Thermopylae reference isn’t just about “finding a hill to die on.” Think about the digital backlot approach to the production of 300 and how if that film were made more recently, it might have used the StageCraft technology behind Mandalorian and such. What happens when you add in AI? We’ll find out, no doubt.

Here’s one example. Translation. People choose subtitles over dubbing largely because the voices and the lip sync business suck. But if you can use AI to use the actor’s voice and edit the film so that the lips move correctly, then you can market your film in new ways. You can definitely experiment with that as a media artist, but none of the tools you have ever used will help you. This is significant adaptation. More than trading in a brush for a mouse.

As long as there are humans, there will be human expression, and as long as there is human expression there will be art. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that… provisionally, to be nice. What that means for academic disciplines in the arts I’m not sure. But I am particularly interested to see what will happen to those artists who have defined their careers around experimenting with the leading edge of media technologies and production when they discover that their definition of media isn’t flexible enough to move into generative AI. Instead they find themselves like artists, committed to a historical medium specificity. How will filmmakers, digital artists, and other media artists operate when they no longer represent cutting edge experiment? I think we’re going to find out. And we’ll also find out what happens when artists with decades of expertise in these media try to move.

Pyrrhic victories for all my friends!