Introduction

An intense experience must be "forgotten," "censored," and reduced to a very cool state before it can be "learned" or assimilated.

—Marshall McLuhan, "Media Hot and Cold"

The question of the medium is today almost totally subsumed within discussions of the mass media. ¹ In this context, the medium is always regarded as plural and as a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in the industrialized world. The fact that the mass media constitute such a ubiquitous presence in contemporary life means the issue of medium, or media, is often thought to arise as a special issue with the advent of mass media. Yet the very issue of the medium became a central concern of modernist art practice almost a century and a half ago. The original impetus of this collection of essays was to reopen this long history of exploration and engagement. To that end, many of the essays collected here scrutinize the role of the medium in fields as diverse as modernist and contemporary art practice, the avant-garde tradition, photography, cinema, and architecture as well as in the more familiar contemporary guises of electronic media, television, and computer games.

The aim of this collection, therefore, is to explore what considerations such a diverse and long-standing commitment to media brought to our understanding of this pivotal issue. This diversity of approaches uncovers how familiar reflections of the medium remain: many of the essays in this collection touch on a continuing debate that oscillates between values of freedom and constraint. The medium is too often assumed to be a transparent phenomenon that simply transmits meaning from one place to another without delaying or transforming the intended meaning. In political discourse, transparency is an important issue because it goes together with accountability as a central tenet of democratic practice. Is it merely perverse, then, to stress "opacity" as an equally fundamental feature in examining the role of media? This collection of essays suggests not. The issue may be reworked to ask, Can one equate a democratic impetus with the inverse of transparency? Of particular interest here is the way the visual—in its many guises—constitutes a core feature of our media image of the world.

This collection asks, What is the status of the visual in these screen presentations? Is the mediated view of the world wholly dependent on specific ideas of what constitutes the visual—that is, the visual as direct and sensuously immediate? And what happens to the question of aura when the concept of media, of the medium, is extended and proliferates? The focus of these questions arose from a series of weekly seminars presented by Samuel Weber at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, while a QUT Visiting Fellow in July–August 1998. This fellowship was organized by Rod Wissler, director of the Centre for Innovation in the Arts, with the assistance of Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross. The seminars explored approaches to these questions from Plato and Aristotle to the contemporary media scene, and the series rounded off with a weekend symposium, "Medium Cool," August 22–23, 1998, from which the majority of these essays derive. The symposium sought to explore the theme of the medium to coincide with the focus of Weber's series of seminars at QUT. Of the essays presented in this special issue, those of Keith Broadfoot, Patrick Crogan, Catherine Liu, Rosemary Hawker, John Macarthur, and Lisa Trahair accord more or less with the papers presented at the QUT symposium. Others have changed or shifted substantially in that long interlude. The essays were not intended to engage directly with Weber's work on the theme of medium, but even with the addition of contributions from European and U.S. scholars, a surprising number of the texts in this collection did find impetus in Weber's explorations. Thus what was once an implicit engagement with Weber's ideas, particularly, mass mediaura, was developed into an explicit focus in drawing together a number of essays by scholars who engage...