[koofdoof]

Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were.

Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it move even further to meet people in their own homes.

These current patterns you are seeing are an extension of this, the relationship between art and viewer has inverted, art is now expected to come to us, the focus has moved to within ourselves.

Marshall McLuhan also expanded on this and the idea of technology as extensions of us with his work "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man" if you'd like to read more.

[mulberry_seas]

Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this? I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it."

But wasn't sure if this was exactly what you were referencing, or some other piece.

[koofdoof]

Yes, thats the piece I was referencing. There are some other relevant sections too:

"a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” "

"technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room"

The whole essay is great, I'd really recommend reading it and Benjamin's other works.

[mulberry_seas]

Excellent, thanks! I've been meaning to read it, this is a helpful nudge to get around to it.

[dredmorbius]

Late response, but: there are some interesting symmetries and contrasts in various informational concepts.

One is what you and Benjamin are highlighting: the distinction between message traveling to audience and audience traveling to message.

Generally a forum or theatre are both examples where an audience assembles to receive or view a message. Similarly for museums or in situ* attractions. It's possible to appreciate the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon in person only by visiting those places. Flagship performance venues such as La Scala, the Bayreuth Festival, Lincoln Center, or New York's Broadway also attract audiences from around the world.

A contrast is tours in which some object or performer(s) travel a circuit over which two or more audiences are assembled and performances take place. There's some localised travel, but in large part it is the message which travels to the audience. Classic film-based cinema scales this up further, with physical film spools touring through projection rooms, traditionally beginning in larger and wealthier markets before hitting secondary and rural ones (there was a time when films might open in New York and Los Angeles weeks, or months, before even large Midwest cities such as Chicago). Digital distribution has made simultaneous openings much more common.

Broadcast, cable, and Internet transmissions take this concept even further where a performance is delivered directly to the home, business, desk, or hands of the audience via radio, television, desktop computer, or mobile phone. And of course books and printed materials afforded a similar service centuries earlier (though the true fall in prices and rise in volume began only in the 19th century, and in many ways was a 20th century phenomenon).

Generalising:

- Networks distribute messages.

- Spaces (or venues) assemble audiences.

There are hybrid forms as well:

- Media Channels combine distribution with an assembled audience.

- Tours visit a series of audience across a travel path.

- Archives gather records to spaces which readers can visit and access large quantities of information at little marginal cost (effort, time, distance, energy).

<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/3aa6e840ac7a0139294f00...>

There's another symmetry I've noticed between records and signals generally:

- Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time subject to noise to a receiver potentially creating a new record.

- Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space subject to decay to a reader potentially creating a new signal.