Dumbtype Giaco Schiesser at his iDC visit offered a workshop and evening lecture- a good opportunity to get exposure to his ideas. Whenever a new medium emerges, he argued, the old media does not go away but it is impacted. Neither film nor theater will be replaced by computer-mediated art. Film is affected by the aesthetics and patterns of computers (and databases in particular).
But films will always have a different aesthetics than networks, for example. When theatre came into a crisis in the early 90s-- due to its encounter with emerging media- the responses were vastly different. Some theater groups like 'Dumbtype' integrated technology widely and others focused on freeing the bodies that are too often under "house arrest."

Students coming from programming and networks, Schiesser said, will make different films. In the 1970s JL. Godard went for 5 years to Lyon where he exclusively dedicated himself to video making. This experience led him to work differently in the medium of film. What is the  semantic impact of a medium? In French avant-garde film- initial technical experiments were taken up by the  likes of Godard later. Literature deals with being an author as much as it is concerned with communicating ideas. An author always also teaches other writers.

Schiesser brought up a discussion around terminology. Should we say "media art"? But then-- what is "non-media art"? What is "new media"? The term is surely contested and people seem troubled by it being an inherently shifting signifier. Today's "new" media is tomorrow's "dead technology."  The exhibition The Art Formely Known As New Media also addressed these questions. "According to the New Media Consortium, the term “new media” can be described as “new technology, such as DVD, haptics, streaming video, wireless transmission, and Internet 2....new uses for existing technologies, such as digital libraries, interactive story telling, and distance learning.” [1] "Information art"? What is not information? What about "digital art"? Is that limited to physical/object-based art? What about "emerging media"? This discussion, of course, is not new. Sometimes people blame the term for a certain laziness that merely avoids looking closer, naming the precise behavior of the art. Discussants agreed that often too many things are framed under one umbrella. Maybe talking about the behavior of art is more suitable and narrows down what one is actually talking about.

Giaco may not even recognize his lecture in these notes . To get a sense of his ideas in depth see his  text on Eigensinn and the video interviews.