» Spiraling Taxonomy Ribbon
The Spiraling Ribbon follows your mouse movements. If you click on the screen, the ribbon will freeze, allowing you to mouse-over the individual panels comprising the ribbon. The panels are thumbnail images of taxonomies.
» Towards a Taxonomy of Media
As a component in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Theories of Media course, the taxonomy of media assignment helped orient considerations of media and mediation in relation to communication, institutional practices, and environments. Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests that the instinct to classify out the universe is a fundamental constituent of the human psyche, so perhaps it is this instinct to which the assignment appealed. [1] Students begin the exercise by creating a list of media, and then try to construct a taxonomic schema to organize the list into classes and sub-classes.
Taxonomies might take any number of forms. One could create a hierarchical tree, with very general classes at the top, and more specific types at the bottom. [see: Adams, Anderson, Knox, Marcello, Schroeder, Veit] For instance, if language is a medium, then speech, alphabetic writing, hieroglyphics, pictographs, gesture-language, and printing might be thought of as different types of linguistic expression. One might also employ the spread-sheet approach, and simply construct two lists, one of different media, and the other of criteria for differentiating one medium from another. [see: Veith, Raoult] Differentiating criteria might include sensory distinctions such as the visual, auditory, and tactile; physical differences such as motion or stillness, material support, and dimensionality; social/cultural status (art or non-art) technical reproducibility, author function, degree of reciprocity between sender and receiver; characteristic codes (digital or analog; indexical, iconic, or symbolic). Of course, the organizing principles for a taxonomy of media are virtually endless, and the avatars of media theory have left us in no short supply of approaches: Hot and Cold, New and Old, High and Low, and so forth.
Senses
Some taxonomies attend to the five senses, or more restrictedly what Hegel called the "theoretic senses"—the eye, ear, and touch. While the very notion of audio-visual media suggests the eye and ear play a central role in sensorum produced by media, students also examined the hand in relation to tactile and touch. The resulting schemas depicted interlocked circles of the senses, replete with networks of senders and receivers intermingled in the field of mediation. [see: Houlihan, Schadlick, Bivar]
Metaphysics
Some taxonomies draw from Kantian categories like space and time, which have the seductive and perilous feature of encompassing everything by virtue of seemingly receding limits. Such approaches encountered questions like: "What resides outside time and space, and how is it perceived?" [see: Sabu, Weg] Still others used case studies to rehearse Gotthold Lessing's argument about time arts and space arts—that literature is an art of time and painting is an art of space.
Ranges, Neighborhoods, Localities
Some restricted their taxonomies to mass media [see: Adelman], digital, or in some cases, all dead or obsolete media. [see: Sandifer, Dead Media Project]. The concept of dead media is not unlike the concept of the dead lake in ecology: it’s still there but nothing is happening. With dead media, distinctions are made along the lines of: Which media are dead, which still alive? Which ones are sick or dying? what are their pathologies? One of the most common tropes in media theory and media history is that from time to time, some media are declared to be dead. Painting is dead. Theater is dead. Photography is now dead, or in the case of chemical-based photography, at least an ailing media. Often rumors of the death of a medium are premature; the death of a medium in one place may prove to be the condition for its resurrection elsewhere.
Intermedia
Some taxonomies explored mixed or inter-media such as film to examine the ways in which media types intersect within a single medium. For instance, a few students examined the different ways in which titles, subtitles, sound, silence operate within cinema. [see: Rissman, Sabo] Others discussed how the space of the museum, like the university, is divided into departments based on media. [see: Montgomery] For example, the Museum of Modern Art, as with any major museum, is comprised of powerful and traditionally bound departments based in media types: painting, sculpture, photography. But since the 1960s, it’s been much more difficult to figure out which departments certain works of art should go into: installations that use photography and moving image can be difficult to sequester. Cindy Sherman's untitled film stills, for instance, went uneasily into the Department of Photography. The departmental structure of museum itself depends upon and often deconstructs taxonomies.
Topographies
A few students moved from concept of taxonomy to related notion of topography, treating media as spaces or habitats rather than species or organisms. [see: Beitler, Schroeder, Zinchuk]
Limits
Some students struggled with the issue of collective validity in media taxonomies, as well as and the limits of classifications of rationality in the project. [see: Roberts]
The assignment also calls for students to reflect on what a taxonomy is—that is, not just its instrumental use, but its status as a forum involved in creating rational structure from vast array of data, discerning divisions, and clusters. We hope that through prompting students to discuss rationales for their models and to “read,” as it were, the schemas after the occassion of their creation, they will be able to better articulate not only what they know, but also how and why they know.
W. J. T. Mitchell
Eduardo de Almeida
Rebecca Reynolds
February 2004