An Interdisciplinary Approach: Media Arts

 

What is interdisciplinarity? What is its approach? How does it apply to media arts? These questions should interest the creative mind. For interdisciplinary thought seeks to overcome the tendency towards specialization intrinsic to traditional disciplines of study in higher education and seeks instead common pathways of approaching problem solving or creative activities.

Defined most simply, interdisciplinarity is the use of two or more traditional disciplines to produce a study, develop a research project, or, as just alluded to above, participate in creative acts. Interdisciplinary approaches began to gain steam in academia after World War II, particularly in the United States. And, then, in the 1970s and 1980s interdisciplinarity gained a strong foothold in a few select humanities and arts programs. For the past few decades the emphasis, however, has shifted. Now, it is science and technology programs that are increasingly recognizing the importance of bringing in experts and specialists from many disciplines to open new fields of study, as in quantum physics or artificial intelligence.

The historical origins of interdisciplinarity, however, go beyond the past 70 or so years. Many of its roots can be found in Classical thinking. And even in the fist part of the twentieth century, there were important advances towards this type of thinking in modern academia. The most notable proponent, here, being Arthur O. Lovejoy, who advanced the notion of the history of ideas in his influential work, The Great Chain of Being (1936). Rather than subdivide study into political history, economic history, military history, or intellectual history, the goal is to bring participants together and focus on thematic ideas or, in Lovejoy’s case, discern how the hierarchical structure of medieval European society had its origin in Plato and Aristotle and then continued to influence notions of social structure until the late eighteenth century.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was in the eighteenth century that the first impulses of interdisciplinary thought gained a widespread foothold. Such was the case in particular with Enlightenment intellectuals, such as Bacon, Boswell, Burke, Diderot, Franklin, Gibbon, Goethe, Hume,  Jefferson, Rousseau, Vico, and Voltaire. While the nineteenth century tended to reimpose walls of separation in academic specialization, even then, the broad sweep of ideas, often combined with advancing the political nationalism and imperialism of the era, served to yield up works that could be called civilizational in nature. Lovejoy’s work would build upon these antecedents. Then, in 1970, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History gave a stamp of academic approval of sorts to a more widespread scholarly commitment to interdisciplinarity.

That is a shorthand guide to the historical context of interdisciplinary approaches to the arts and humanities. With the advent of media studies, especially film studies, yet another turn in interdisciplinarity came about. For in many ways, film is the perfect example of an interdisciplinary art form.  It brings together the creative side of scriptwriting with the technical mastery needed for directing, musical scoring, the business side of producing, and then applies the technical arts of photography, editing, sound design, production design, costuming, and even research when appropriate for biographical or films set in particular times and eras.  Film, in fact, does bring together several arts for one finished product.

Yet even here there are also antecedents.  Most notably in the notions fashioned by Richard Wagner and exemplified in his works for opera. Wagner’s Ring series, including Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, gave the highest expression to his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “work of art in totality.” The sets, the music, the lyrics, the origins in national mythology, the acting, directing, and even costuming of these works came closest to the Wagnerian notion of a merger of art forms into a comprehensive art. In many ways, these concepts stoked the furnace of filmmaking as a unified art form, just transferred to the plastic media of film stock itself.

Film, then, accompanied by what we today would label other media arts, soon developed in the tradition of Gesamtkunstwerk. Early developments in film certainly brought together the staging, acting, set design, directing, and producing of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but it also added in the newer technologies of photography and composition, the moving image, and the peculiarly filmic art form of motion picture editing. By the 1920s, silent filmmaking was already a recognized art form among aesthetic and art critics such as Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer.

Following the end of World War I, yet another new media took hold, and its impact would rival that of film. This was radio. In many ways, the technological development of radio paralleled that of motion pictures. It had its origins in the the last three decades of the nineteenth century but awaited its “invention” with Guglielmo Marconi’s long distance transmission of radio waves in 1896, right after the Lumière brothers’ first public screening of films in December 1895, which is widely regarded by many as the origin of cinema as we know it today.

Marconi launched his radio service in Britain. But subsequent development of radio technology would mostly take place in the United States. During World War I, radio in the United States came under government control. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, however, government gave a strong impetus to the emerging technology. Men drafted into the army and navy were assigned to duties that included communications, field radios, and transmission centers. Demobilized after the war, these veterans would form a strong core of the movement in amateur “Ham” radio. Although present before the war, Ham radio enthusiasts were particularly important in the spread and use of both radio transmitters and receivers after the war.

Radio would initially focus on the transmission of news and music. These are functions it still retains today—overwhelmingly so. But it would also develop into a medium with a varied platform of different genres and functions.

More than innovations in the cinema, radio during the 1920s was the breakthrough technology, much like internet technologies in the twenty-first century. It provided immediacy and intimacy. Broadcasts were delivered directly into homes. The audience became a differentiated mass—radio had niche entertainment and news beamed to individuals or families, unlike the anonymous undifferentiated mass of the cinema theater. It was no coincidence that RCA (Radio Corporation of America), which manufactured radio receivers and established the first radio network, NBC, became the hottest stock on Wall Street during the Roaring Twenties.

Whether it was “fireside chats” from the US president, sports play by play, variety, talent shows, news, music broadcasts, dramas, mysteries, comedies, or forays into science fiction, radio became the dominant channel of entertainment from the 1920s until the late 1940s and even early 1950s. Dramatization and storytelling through the airwaves, in fact, was often a training ground for producers, directors, and actors who would go into cinema—and later television. Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air, for example, would gain notoriety for its radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ novel, The War of the Worlds. So authentic seemed the broadcast that listeners in many cases thought an actual Martian invasion of Earth was underway. Welles and his Mercurty Theatre players would go on to produce Citizen Kane, which still tops the lists of the greatest motion pictures ever made.

Radio would eventually lose its dominance of mass entertainment to television. Radio and film entertainers such as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and Groucho Marx would eventually migrate to television. So would popular radio programs, such as Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Life of Riley, The Jack Benny Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke, Suspense, and Father Knows Best.

Such programming and emergent technologies brought the ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk to their ultimate fruition. This happened despite detractors who refused to acknowledge, first, radio and, then later, television as art forms. The originator of the term may himself have been shocked at its application. But it is nonetheless true. Radio, television, and, today, multiple platforms spread across the internet incorporate the entirety of multiple art forms into a new a digitized dimension.