MediaArtHistories Archive

Another site to explore might be MAHArchive (MediaArtHistories Archive):

Welcome to the digital repository of scholarship examining the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology! Our collections are currently being fleshed out and added to.

Archive Goals :: world wide access – create a place for classic texts, cross-pollinated, cutting-edge scholarship – items submitted and regulated by authors – rich metadata.

MAHArchive connects disciplines which devote research efforts to Media Art, from art history, through film, theater, media and cultural studies, to psychology, informatics, and anthropology, just to name a few.

Articles to be found on this website include for example Peter Weibel’s ‘The Allusive Eye. Illusion, Anti-Illusion, Allusion’ intro, which in a few lines outlines the 60s (70s)
development from illusion to antillusion. Basically – even though without mentioning – it sums up a short ride from the ‘65 MOMA exhibition ‘The responsive eye’ to the Whitney’s ‘Anti-Illusion‘.	see also Schirn in 2007

... The 1960s thus formed a watershed between the epoch and practice of illusion and the epoch and practice of anti-illusion. In the 1970s, the art of anti-illusion came to an end in the public consciousness, for in the 1980s the painting of illusion ruled the roost. Under the pressure of the mass media, which had developed into the central site for the generation of illusion, the avant-garde favored all the more vehemently destruction, deconstruction and anti-illusion, the exit from the picture. With the return of figurative and expressive painting, illusion too returned to the realm of art. ....
(read entire pdf)

The screen is not a simple rectangle but rather the homothetic surface of the viewfinder of his camera. It is the very opposite of a frame. The screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves hidden. � Andr� Bazin, "The French Renoir"