Media Specificity

Tools are an extension of our faculties

- We use microscopes to extend the physical capabilities of our eyes, machines to lift heavy objects and sensory devices to detect substances that we can't.

New technologies tend to mimic older versions

- The car, at first, was an engine strapped to a carriage

Medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt.

 

An artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.

  “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1776

 - Truth to materials

The medium becomes the media which is simply an extension of our own faculties