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Antonio Somaini, ‘The surface becomes a part of the atmosphere’: light as medium in László Moholy-Nagy’s aesthetics of dematerialization, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 288–295, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa027
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Extract
The current interest in the environmental and ecological dimension of media invites us to reconsider the history of the very concept of ‘medium’. If approached through an archaeological perspective that analyses the interactions between discursive formations and artistic practices, such history appears to be characterized by the presence of multiple, intersecting genealogical lines. Among them – alongside discourses and practices in which ‘medium’ and ‘media’ are mainly conceived in technical and communicational terms – we find the longue durée of a tradition in which the concept of ‘medium’ was used in order to name the sensible environment, the surrounding atmosphere, the milieu or Umwelt in which human and non-human sensory experience takes place. German media scholars such as Stefan Hoffmann and Dieter Mersch, in books that deal in different ways with the history of the concept of medium, have described this particular interpretation of the medium as sensible environment as aisthetisch (aisthetic): that is, strictly correlated with a theory of aisthesis (perception) and its material and environmental conditions of possibility.1