Harder, Deeper, Tougher: Toward a Genealogy of Deep Media.

Abstract

The art of deep media finds itself embedded in the strange logic of media systems for- mation in contemporary societies. Only two decades ago there were little doubt that the screen digital media gave us an inexorable dynamic of dematerialization and the strategies of the "visual turn". If earlier it was needed a separate material carrier (paper, typographic set) for a particular image in painting, photography, or even in music and literature, now all the images are digital and on the universal screen. The new media world seeks to get rid of the material world, "put" us on the screen hallucinogen. This conviction continues to motivate many of the adherents of “digitalization”. But already during the 2000s, “digital traitors” and adherents of hybrid strategies were opening us new horizons for materiality. Chimeras, wet media, techno-bio-creatures, DNA manipulations – it began to seem that artists understand all these things better than our scientists and engineers do. Has the next step into the solidity of the mineral kingdom and the deep world of geology become inevitable within the paradigm of a "material turn"? Perhaps we have simply underestimated the "mineral” and molecular roots of the digital world? Or are we rediscovering today a philosophy of nature? The most remote point of the deep media is the ancient natural philosophy which ex- plained from what point the materiality of nature can be formed in General as a media and, moreover,as a prerequisite for any media. In a less distant perspective, we have seen that modern technological "interactivity" (=new media) implies a deeper layer of ontological inter-activity linking technology with "ontological theater" as a form of becoming (as in Heraclitus). In addition, when we discussed the parameters of structure, effect, and discourse for any media, we found that deep media is characterized by reductionism in simplifying the structure and zeroing out the effect, but the critical potential of discourse in relation to new media capi-talism is quite decent (although it contradicts the principle of the celibate machine).