Research On Media Ecology's Art Communication Thoughts

In contemporary society,the relationship between art and communication becomes closer and closer.In this context,we should build art communication study with Chinese characteristics.Thereinto,absorbing the academic achievements from classical communication schools is a very important idea.As one of three communication schools,media ecology has many insights for art communication.In its communication study,for a long run art is a very important clue.Media ecologists treat arts as media,and their propositions,examples and even methods are related to arts,and they have mentioned many arts such as painting,literature,photography,cinema,television and new media art.Taking media ecology's research framework into consideration,its study on art communication could be divided into two different views: the static angle of view and the dynamic angle of view.From the analysis of static view,media ecology's art communication has three dimensions: the message nature of art media,the message environment of art media and the perceptual modes of art media.In terms of the first dimension,with the famous declarations such as “ the medium is the message” and “medium is metaphor”,media ecologists pay more attention to art's message dimension;discuss photography and cinema's message;reflect on art's “message” and “content” under the context of the classical art theory's argument between “form” and “content”.In terms of the second dimension,media ecologists believe that art like any other media has a special communication “environment”.So every kind of art can create a whole new environment.Compared with the dominant media environment such as verbal media,character-printing media and electronic-digital media,every artistic form can be treated as a specific medium.There is a dialectic relationship between them.On the one hand,the environment of dominant media influences on arts;on the other hand,arts reflect the dominant media.In relation to other media,art is special,because it's a kind of “counter-environment” that can find problems in dominant media environment and can foresee the tendency of human's media and culture.In terms of the third dimension,the purpose of discussing the first two dimensions is to reflect on media's influences on human's perceptual modes.According to “the medium is an extension of man ”,media ecologists reflect on art media's influences on human's perceptual modes.And from the view of “cool media” and “hot media”,different artistic forms have different perceptual preferences as well.From the analysis of dynamic view,on the one hand media ecologists discuss the relationship between arts and different media periods;on the other hand they reflect on the development of arts from the microscopical view of media evolution.From the first aspect,under the view of different media periods,media ecologists discuss questions such as the presentations of arts,the relationship between art communicator and art audience,the transformation of artistic perceptual modes.In terms of the presentations of arts,verbal media and character-printing media have different messages,so from the view such as plots or characters oral epic and traditional literature are different.In terms of the relationship between art communicator and art audience,the arts in verbal time have the characteristic of “interactivity” or the property of “participation”;but printing leads to a tendency in which the separation of art communicator and art audience becomes more and more obvious;however,the artists in the electronic-digital media environment renewed the attention on the importance of the participation of art audience.In the terms of the transformation of artistic perceptual modes,verbal media,character-printing media and electronic-digital media have different perceptual preferences,so their artistic forms have different influences on our “visual sense”,“auditory sense” and “haptic sense”.Form the second aspect,media ecologists reflect on the relationship between art development and media evolution.They propose two different models.The first is art development's “ecological mode”,the second is the “diachronic evolution mode ”.For the former,the art development can be seen in a ecosystem that including “enhancement”,“obsolescence”,“retrieval”,“reversal” four dimensions;for the latter,the theories of media evolution——such as “toy-mirror-art” and “anthropotropic” can be used to understand art development.Actually,media ecologists propose a new way to understand art development.The art communication study of media ecology is related to critical school,but different from empirical school.Its art communication study is not naive “media determinism”,but a “media based” study.Different from empirical school's quantitative research,media ecology complies with the method of microscopical mode recognition.Its purpose is to reflect on the microscopical effects of art media from the view of the human's society and culture.Obviously,media ecology belongs to humanities because of the collision and integration of its multi-humanism.However,there are some shortcomings in its art communication paradigm.From the view of its research idea,in order to emphasize the importance of media,it ignores other cultural elements that are also imperative to art communication.From the view of research method,media ecology's study doesn't have enough analysis for the art media's formal mechanism,because it pays too much attention to art's long term effect.Even through the art communication paradigm of media ecology is not perfect,it raises a right question and shows a possible path for further study,and also gives us theoretical guidance for the understanding of today's complicated art communication phenomena.