#mediumspecificity

Sources and Significance – Blog 2

This post looks at how Red Dead Redemption 2 uses game-specific tools to create immersion, and how that connects to debates around medium specificity

Immersion Through Interaction

Red Dead Redemption 2 is often called “cinematic,” but what makes it stick isn’t spectacle on its own. The game’s impact comes from interaction: the steady pacing, the dense environments, the soundscape, and the way player agency is threaded into everyday moments. That makes it a good case for thinking about medium specificity the idea that each medium has its own strengths and should lean into what it can do uniquely well (Lessing, 1766; Arnheim, 1938).

Medium Specificity in Games

If medium specificity matters, then games shouldn’t just imitate film language. They should use what film can’t: participation, time, and presence. In RDR2, narrative meaning often arrives through routine rather than constant cutscenes. Riding for long stretches, setting up camp, cleaning weapons, hunting, and simply watching the world change all become part of the story experience. These actions slow the player down and make the world feel inhabited. A film could show these moments, but it wouldn’t produce the same effect because the player’s involvement the choice to do them, to stay with them is the point.

The Game as a Total Work of Art

The game also fits the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art” where multiple elements combine into one unified experience (Wagner, 1849). Visual realism, ambient sound, performance capture, music, and environmental storytelling all reinforce each other. But unlike opera or theatre, RDR2 requires participation. Immersion isn’t just received; it’s co-produced through action and attention.

At the same time, the game exposes a tension between immersion and control. The open world feels free, but the main story remains largely fixed, which creates friction between player agency and narrative direction. It echoes the lecture concern that immersive media can guide and manage the audience, even while offering the feeling of freedom.

Conclusion

Overall, Red Dead Redemption 2 shows how games create meaning through medium-specific design. Its immersion comes from interaction, pacing, and lived-in routine, suggesting that the strongest “cinematic” moments in games often happen when the game stops trying to be film and commits to what only games can do.

References

Sources and Significance blogpost 2

AI as Meta-Medium: Medium Specificity vs Gesamtkunstwerk

Medium specificity landed in a world that’s already multisensory and accelerated: purity survives less as an ideology than as a method. Our media environment is already multisensory and accelerated, so it’s unsurprising that hybrid forms command attention more easily than single-medium purity. I’d argue that “purity” isn’t dead so much as displaced: in AI pipelines like my ComfyUI character-sheet workflow, the site of specificity moves from materials (ink, film stock) to systems (prompts, seeds, LoRAs, samplers). That’s where style and authorship now crystallise. In this sense, AI behaves like a meta-medium: it can imitate many arts, yet each concrete configuration (graph + parameters) yields its own constraints the new “rules of the game".

Leaving the medium-specificity session, one line stuck with me: in a plural, entangled culture, “purity” survives less as an ideology than as a method. In AI pipelines like my ComfyUI character-sheet workflow, the site of specificity moves from materials (ink, film stock) to systems (prompts, seeds, ControlNets, LoRAs, samplers). That’s where style and authorship crystallise.

If Wagner fused arts on a stage, today’s version often lives in latent space. AI collapses image, text and layout, so the question isn’t “what medium is this?” but “which configuration did you choose and why?”

image: my ComfyUI graph for the character-sheet pipeline

Why I built this

I wanted to model a character from my favourite manhwa in 3D. Before sculpting, I needed a clean character sheet (front/side/back + expressions) to lock proportions and costume logic. Instead of drawing it from scratch, I designed a ComfyUI workflow that keeps style and anatomy consistent while giving me fast iterations I can take straight into Blender.

The media object: my comfyui character-sheet generator

The goal was to generate front/back/side and expressions for a character to be 3d modeled in blender.

This pipeline lets me “draw” by designing a system. Pose is blocked by OpenPose, mass by Depth, line discipline by LineArt. My “brush” is the graph; my “stroke” is a parameter change.

At a glance (mapped to my diagram):

Load models & resources - UNet / DualCLIP / VAE / LoRA.

Prepare character image input — reference portrait (identity & palette).

Define prompts - (a) character-sheet layout prompt, (b) style + quality prompt, (c) character descriptors.

Combine & condition - join strings → CLIP encodes; PuLidFlux / InsightFace help maintain face identity/embedding.

ControlNet operations - OpenPose (pose sheet), Depth (volumes), LineArt (edge discipline) via ControlNet SD3 Apply.

Generation parameters - latent noise + scheduler, sampler (DPM++ 2M Karras), and guiders.

Pose-sheet input - scaled to match canvas; guarantees orthographic consistency.

Image generation - SamplerCustomAdvanced → VAE Decode.

Upscale/Tiler and Grid assembly — print-ready sheet; save.

What this enforces:

Composition from pose controls,

Form/lighting from depth control,

Line economy from line-art control,

Identity/style from LoRA + Flux/InsightFace,

Repeatability from fixed seed & sampler.

Medium specificity (today)

Classic modernism said each art should embrace its own limits (Greenberg). In my workflow, specificity lives somewhere else: in the configuration. The exact graph + weights + seed + sampler + ControlNet balance is what gives my sheet its look and reliability. Designing the pipeline is designing the form.

(Post-)Gesamtkunstwerk

Wagner fused music, stage, architecture into a single experience. AI fuses text, image, layout (and soon motion/sound) inside one system unity conducted by a trained model. It’s a kind of technical totality: immersion by generation. That’s powerful for production, but it can drift toward the same “AI sheen” if I don’t set deliberate constraints.

So is it good or bad?

Good: rapid iteration, consistent multi-view outputs, accessible hybrid making.

Risk: style homogenisation and fuzzy authorship.

My guardrail: log seeds/samplers, limit variables per run, and keep a human pass when needed.

Notes from a hallway debate (friend • me )

Friend: In a feed already multisensory and accelerated, single-medium purity struggles to hold attention. Hybrid orchestration (image + layout + motion/sound) matches how we now perceive.

Me: The 20th century saturated many “pure” experiments. Mixing media creates fresh constraints (graphs, seeds, models) to explore. “Medium” behaves more like a configurable system than a fixed material.

Lecturer: Pursuing purity is complicated under plural, entangled, stochastic conditions. Speak about specificity under hybridity—what a work does because of its setup, not its silo.

Reflection

Working with ComfyUI moved my authorship from stroke to system. ControlNet blocks pose, the sampler is my “film stock,” the seed fixes repeatability. That’s where my voice lives what I lock and what I let vary. Purity isn’t gone,I use it as a method (fix variables to isolate causation). The risk is homogeneity; the answer is intentional constraints and iteration notes so results are reproducible and mine.

I’m now pivoting this workflow toward product animations. The goal is to keep the same pipeline logic (pose/volume/edge control, fixed seeds) but apply it to short, loopable promos that hold up under motion.

References

Bolter, J.D. (2023) ‘AI generative art as algorithmic remediation’, IMAGE, 37(1), pp. 195–207.

Greenberg, C. (1940) ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review, 7(4), pp. 296–310. (Reprinted in: Frascina, F. (ed.) (1985) Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. London: Harper & Row, pp. 34–46.)

Kay, A. (1984) ‘Computer software’, Scientific American, 251(3), pp. 52–59.

Krauss, R. (2000) A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson.

Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Analysis of Spider-Man- Into the Spider-Verse Through Medium Specificity and Gesamtkunstwerk

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a groundbreaking animated movie that articulated the trick of comic book styles into movie techniques perfectly by giving life to this superhero character. It is truly amazing as a transmedia object, being simultaneously the last representative of the tradition of animatics, the iteration of the tradition of comic art, and the progenitor of contemporary cinematic forms. This paper analyzes the film comprehensively in line with the argument of Gesamtkunstwerk and employs an evaluation of the medium specificity to understand the construction of the exceptional artistic aesthetic in a motion picture.

Figure 1: Spider-Man- Into the Spider-Verse

The pictorial element of the movie is an excellent example of Gesamtkunstwerk because it integrates other types of art into one artwork. Inspiring itself from elements of comic art, 3D animation, and music, it is a yielding, receptive, and sensational experience. Live action, bright colors, spectacular music, and a allegorical profound narrative engage the viewer in the Spider-Verse, reproducing these components in one artistic whole. The ‘moving-picture-in-moving-picture’ approach of the film and swift, dynamic change between the realities also adds to its total involvement feeling, which was something Wagner wanted from his artworks to marguinov 2019, p.296).

Figure 2: Miles Morales in Action

For instance, the halftone dots, the motion lines together with on-screen texts resemble to a great extent the traditional print comic making it easier to gauge where it belongs from. In contrast to the previous live-action Spiderman movies that this animated movie emulates, the opportunity for using hand drawing and digitally rendered effects is appealing and complements the animated feature spectacularly with choices like the multiple layered views during dimensional shifts.

Figure 3: The Multiverse in Spider-Verse

Lev Manovich claims that such hybridity epitomizes post-media, a situation in which none media emerges as dominant, and the formation exemplifies animation’s ability to transcend traditional medium paradigms. By exemplifying Gesamtkunstwerk and exploiting medium specificity, Spider-Man: Spider-Verse is unique in so many ways that it forces a new kind of thinking or perspective about what animated features can accomplish (Walulik, 2021).

References

Sony Pictures Animation. (2018). Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Official Website. Retrieved from https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spidermanintothespidervers.

[READING] Keyword: Medium Specificity

“In order for a medium to have characteristic qualities it must be grounded in a tradition that has established these as intrinsic properties.”

“while poetry unfolds in time, painting exists in space”

Define avant-garde, kitsch, abstract painting, 

Look up Clement Greenberg, Wassilly Kandinsky, WJT Mitchell

“Music, he contends, is inherently pure and abstract because it cannot be described in terms of any other media.”

“In [Michael Fried’s] 1966 essay “Art and Objecthood,” he attacks minimalist art for producing effects that do not derive from within the work itself, but instead are dependent on the viewer’s relationship with the object.... According to Fried, these minimalists took Greenberg’s plea for purity too far; instead of exploring the materiality of the media, all they do is present the materials for what they are." Consider this in terms of the final project where you are asked to make media meta.

What was the argument over photography? Research Weston, Stieglitz, Strand, and Man Ray.

““The medium is the message,” which [Marshall McLuhan] coined in the first chapter of his 1964 book Understanding Media, not only entered the accepted rhetoric of media studies, but also became the common idiom used to discuss emergent technology. According to McLuhan, media should be defined as “extensions of man” (McLuhan, 1964:4), and include any technology that is not found in our natural state. In his view, “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (McLuhan, 1964:8); the medium is thus specific through its effects, not its content.”

“Outside of the realm of art, medium-specificity has taken on different cultural and social connotations, and the self-awareness that McLuhan promoted has led to a tongue-in-cheek culture of the “meta.” Our ability to talk openly in culture about the effects of media on our lives – from TV to the web to instant messaging–might not exist without McLuhan’s theorizing the media as the “message,” or as he later writes, “the massage.””