“der Künstler produziert sicht -- the artist produces himself”

     (2012)  After almost eight decades of continuous media practice and scholarship, it seems we still find little ‘good-nature’ in televisual production, dissemination and reception.  Indeed, the familiar lament that our media are in decline continues to drone from most quarters.  Actually the opposite is true, but a very important question remains.  Why do we find so little ‘improvement’ in our media even after constant advancements in social and technological communication? 

      If most every student today is exposed to so-called ‘media literacy’ curricula, why do students, teachers and most everyone else on this planet behave like uncritical media ill-literates?  One method for evaluating this paradox is to adjust our scholarship.  Here, and throughout all Cultural Farming projects, a more potent and provocative media pedagogy takes hold: Mediaturgy.

     Mediaturgy, which springs in part from Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgical learning plays (Lehrstücke), is a practice-led methodology in contradistinction to toothless contemporary approaches to media ‘literacy’, and also to ubiquitous ‘mediamongerings’ disseminated daily throughout the entire communication spectrum.  Mediaturgy, in true epic media dialectic, is a public provocation for signaling that technological lust, surreal spectacle, runaway capitalism, narcissistic self-promotion, even academic gravitas, will never hold more civic authority than rational responsibility, reflexive curiosity and intellectual courage. 

     Hence, a robust theoretical notion like mediaturgy requires a dispersement of simple, lean, elegant and publicly available experimental methods which, once combined, oblige a deeply focused civic (re)action to normative production practices -- because good critical media making demands historical perspective, longitudinal commitment, experimental discernment, ethnographic archiving, ethical motivation, and dialogical craftsmanship.

    The aim of a Mediaturgy (Cultural Farming) is to help:

     1.  Render historical and theoretical perspectives of media production.

     2.  Invigorate (C)ritical civic-media production through theory and praxis.

     3.  Unveil media languages and techniques as manipulable fabrications.

     4.  Challenge oligarchic media-making dominance and power.

     5.  Inoculate against insidious media persuasion and cynical parody.

     6.  Promote civic access and responsibility throughout our media spectra.

     7.  Reciprocate mediamongering through experimental Symbolic Exchange.

     One of two introductory senses of mediaturgy relates to the internal structures of a media text and is concerned with the arrangement of internal elements by the media maker, for example, plot, construction of narrative, character, time-frame and screen action.  In parallel, mediaturgy can also refer to external elements relating to overall artistic concepts regarding editing, mise-en-scene, the politics of performance, and the measured manipulation of audience response through technology’s calculated murderous techniques. 

     But the key to mediaturgical sense lies in the (C)ritical concern with the actuation of media production during its mechanical, practical, creative and ethical formation.  For mediaturgy is a venture insisting that theory and practice must continuously reciprocate each other.  Both media and educational industries, however, need workable examples of just what an ‘informed reflexive criticism of TV’ might look like and how it might publicly operate.  Mediaturg.com thus should be seen as but one provocative “early warning system” experiment.  Indeed, refunctional (de)mystification is an autodidactic tool most any citizen can and should readily employ.

     Still this is no small task, for a mediaturg must also employ a formidable armory of intellectual and practical skill-sets throughout a host of methodologies extending across the entire con(per)ceptual landscape of media making -- from writer, director, designer, actor...to theorist, archivist, critic, and audience.  Indeed, as a contemporary innervation of Brecht’s “Epic Smoking Theatre”, mediaturgy’s lineage extends from eighteenth century origins (Lessing).  At bottom, all must conjoin toward its call for radical, didactic, dialogic and dialectic responses throughout all media making today.  Then, all this must be ‘said back to media’ using its own native forms (lexicon) and techniques (grammar).

     Here, one trajectory of TV mediaturgy, illustrated (without the use of a camera) in the native video-forms below, is drawn chronologically by THIS mediaturg over the last thirteen years.  Throughout you will find a wide-ranging record of my personal and intellectual walkabout from industrial media-horticulturalist, to nomadic remix-hunter-gatherer, to radical home-vidi-gardener, to a kind of self-sufficient mediaturg-pamphleteer.  Here, as elsewhere, you will find my experimental (ethnographic) manifestations probing at these glaring gaps inside normative media literacy and critique.