Heritage and Digital
Macdonald introduces the concept of heritage and digital media within the domain of moving image design. ‘Heritage’ is defined as traditional, analogue and handmade practices that predate or overlap digital technology. ‘Digital’ is considered as a descrip
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Heritage and Digital
Abstract Macdonald introduces the concept of heritage and digital media within the domain of moving image design. ‘Heritage’ is defined as traditional, analogue and handmade practices that predate or overlap digital technology. ‘Digital’ is considered as a description of the means of production and also a medium of communication. A theoretical overview is provided to position the book in relation to Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard amongst others. Using the writing of typographer Eric Gill, who abhorred the idea of combining craft and machine-made design, Macdonald argues that a hybrid approach can revitalize film and graphic heritage crafts that might atrophy and die if they were not combined in digital media practices. Keywords Digital • Heritage • Craft • Hybridisation Writing in 1936 typographer Eric Gill (1988) saw handcrafted design and mechanised design as two opposing worlds. Could Gill’s view be applied to analogue and digital practices? There are, then, two worlds & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. (Gill 1988: 16)
© The Author(s) 2016 I. Macdonald, Hybrid Practices in Moving Image Design, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41375-4_2
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Rather than rely on an argument based on nostalgia, why, should and how can heritage practices associated with analogue production be maintained and further developed? Has ‘the age of the specialist been replaced by the age of the dedicated generalist’ (Greiman 1990: 57)? Graphic designer April Greiman challenged the convention that dualities are opposed, and instead they offer interdependent possibilities to ‘evoke emotional response’ (Greiman 1990: 45). Philosophers such as Paul Virilio (2000), Jean Baudrillard (2009) and Friedrich Kittler (1999), and media theorists such as Oliver Grau (2003), Lev Manovich (2001) and Charlie Gere (2006) have argued that digital is the dominant media. In art and design education, Davies and Worrall refer to an ‘emerging ICT orthodoxy…in our schools’ (Davies and Worrall 2003: 91), and it could be argued, in our universities as well. There is a need to provide insights into this medium, ‘with its growing societal and artistic importance, and the new status of the image under the hegemony of the digital’ (Grau 2003: 8). An examination of the mediated world is as urgent as ever, not least because our relationship with technology has changed significantly with the advent of worldwide digital communications (Turkle 1995; Kittler 1999; Manovich 2001). Virilio (2000) argues that our whole perspective on the world is increasingly mediated through digital technology at an accelerating pace. Charlie Gere is concerned with the role art might play in a mediated world where ‘the increasing speed and complexity of contemporary technology is the cause of both euphoria and anxiety’ (Gere 2006: 1). The close relationship that art has with machines, and technology in general, spans many epochs, from antiquity to the
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