Page - 81 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

Religion, Belief and Medial Layering of Communication | 81www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 75–88 quite sufficient for the task. Yet the deep longing for and the belief in an immediate access to knowledge or experience (or in most cases a mixture) is also embedded in the media, as they usually make themselves invisible or unremarkable, thus suggest- ing a natural and direct access to meaning in the act of communication. some media seem to be more powerful than others. The Christian church has al- ways included rituals and rites in its practices, for example using relics or suggesting concepts like transubstantiation, which from a philosophical and ethnological per- spective can be defined as a form of contagious magic.18 from the perspective of se- miology, one could classify them as signs with an indexical quality, a term introduced by Charles sanders Peirce19 which in media studies would be applied to analogous media that have stored traces of the original object represented (as in analogue pho- tography or sound recording). These medial characteristics are related to strategies producing “evidence”.20 signs or media promising a contagious contact with their objects, holy or not, can be described as media to which a corporeal mark of the sym- bolised is attributed. altogether the media composites the churches impose on their audiences in order to turn them into believing communities are models for all kinds of medial strate- gies and formats that overwhelm the senses. Nowadays audiences are addressed by digital visual culture and the circulation of signs – be they images or words or moving images, or films – on the Internet. Churches make use of them as they always have made use of the newest media technologies – starting with illuminated books and illustrated printing. Churches nowadays also adopt the strategies and aesthetics of video clips and commercials. “Art”, on the other hand, is a specific concept of visual culture in the West, having been conceptualised no later than the renaissance with references to Neoplatonic authors of antiquity, lasting until today. art in this sense has become a religion in itself. Throughout Western art history (as a field of research), religious concepts of art have developed, such as the idea of the artist as alter deus and the artwork as a parallel creation.21 The concept of an art religion – as it was conceived in the 18th and 19th centuries22 – shows its effects even today when art markets rely on groups of believers and “stakeholder” artists are celebrated as or stage themselves as priests or martyrs of their religion.23 Art has become a field in which the audience is promised access to spiritual experiences directly through artworks. The spiritual in art – a main objective for example of modern abstract art – has, thus, become an ersatz religious 18 Walker 2000. 19 Peirce 2000. 20 schade/Wenk 2011, 98–104. 21 feminist art history has clearly shown that this concept is gendered. 22 auerochs 1999. 23 Bätschmann 1997.