Media/Interface

Media/Interface
Bin Wang

The world is subjective, but not objective. Obviously the world in the human being’s eyes is totally different with the one in animals’ eyes. The world is also different in different people’s eyes. I think it is not important what the difference we can see through camera and stereoscope, because what the world really is is less important than how we see and understand it.
When we see something behind a fence or a panel with holes, we can see clearly what we want to see, however, if we use a camera, it will focus on the fence or panel automatically. The most important function of our eyes is that they can choose and adjust. So does our brain. As Schiavo’s article mentioned, “the fact that shifting ideological and philosophical meanings were not wholly constrained by or contained in the structure of the medium makes us turn for explanation to culture.”, medium are only tools through which we could see and understand the world better.

The articles talked about everything but architecture. It forces me to ask, “What’s the relation between media and architecture”. J.Z.Young put it, “all of man’s artifacts-whether language, or laws, or ideas and hypotheses, or tools, or clothing, or computers-are extensions of the physical human body or the mind.” In other words, the development of medium is the development of human body. Everything we invented is part of our body. Architecture should not be an exception.

The contradiction is that after we invented and built something, including architecture, they also became part of the world. Hence medium, built with the intension to understand, also become the things that need to be understood. Probably this is the real meaning of “media”.