Media Theory

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

Le développement dans l’art contemporain de pratiques artistiques qui se situent à la croisée de plusieurs médiums (intermedia, mixed media, multimedia) ou qui ont recours aux « nouveaux médias », tout comme dans le domaine du cinéma le passage de l’argentique au numérique et l’apparition de nouveaux dispositifs et de nouvelles formes de captation, de manipulation, de visionnement et d’archivage des images en mouvement, ont précipité la nécessité de repenser ce qu’est un médium. Face à un panorama artistique, cinématographique et technologique en constante transformation, ce colloque se propose de rouvrir la question de la définition du médium en interrogeant la distinction entre « médium » et « média(s) ». Suivant l’essor actuel d’un champ de recherche transdisciplinaire sur ces questions (Medienwissenschaft allemande, media studies anglophones, études médiatiques canadiennes, ou encore médiologie et travaux sur les appareils et la philosophie de la technique en France), il s’agit d’envisager l’ensemble des médiations se manifestant à l’intérieur d’un contexte culturel donné : les conditions de possibilités technico-matérielles de toute forme de perception et d’expérience, de représentation et de communication, d’enregistrement et de transmission.
Pour cela, il convient d’opérer un retour sur les différentes significations et connotations qui ont été attribuées au terme d’origine latine « médium » dans le cadre d’une longue généalogie qui a ses racines dans les notions aristotéliciennes de metaxu et de diaphanes et trouve ses points focaux au XXe siècle dans les écrits de László Moholy-Nagy et Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Arnheim et Clement Greenberg, Marshall McLuhan et Friedrich Kittler. Il s’agit ainsi de faire un état des lieux de la recherche actuelle sur ce thème en contribuant simultanément au décloisonnement entre les disciplines de l’histoire de l’art, des études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles et de l’histoire et de la théorie des médias.

This PDF includes Chapters 1 and 2 of the innovative text anthology, designed for use in Media Studies courses, especially large lecture courses like "Media and Society."
-- The book combines movies and texts to introduce students to critical media studies. Accessible and readable, the book is well-liked by students. Topics include the Spectacle, Hyperreality, the Global Village, Social/Mobile Media, Capitalism and Counterculture, Surveillance and Privacy, Ecology and the Anthropocene, Media and Science, Media Futures, the Meme (original version from Dawkins), and many others.
-- Upon adoption, I will provide handouts, syllabus, PPTs.
-- Published by Cognella.  https://titles.cognella.com/media-environments-9781516521104

Neste artigo será analisada a virada epistemológica proposta por Martín-Barbero ao deslocar sua atenção das mediações culturais da comunicação para as mediações comunicativas da cultura. O foco principal da análise estará concentrado na importância que a noção de tecnicidade– ao lado da institucionalidade, da socialidade e da ritualidade – passou a ter em seu pensamento. A sua noção de tecnicidade será tensionada a partir de certas reflexões produzidas pelos estudos das novas mídias e da materialidade da comunicação.Palavras-chave: Materialidade, mediações, tecnicidade

Este ensayo presenta una discusión y análisis sobre el caso Cybersyn, desde una perspectiva de arqueología de medios, poniendo particular atención en los desarrollos teóricos y metodológicos planteados por los académicos Friedrich Kittler y Wolfgang Ernst. En consecuencia, la discusión se centrará en aspectos no-visuales del proyecto en cuestión, dejando de lado las miradas «iconográficas» que hasta ahora han abordado este caso, primeramente, desde las fotografías que documentan su sala de operaciones. De modo alternativo, propongo mover nuestra atención hacia la red de télex y el sistema de procesamiento que sostuvieron a Cybersyn, para buscar en ellos, en los sistemas de símbolos que por allí circularon, la materialización del saber técnico que caracterizaría al caso, esbozando así, potencialmente, su alcance cultural.

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize–winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner’s legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer’s stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner’s work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.

While “media geography” has coalesced in recent years as an identifiable subdiscipline of human geography, media geography did not emerge from a linear history, nor does it have a clearly defined or singular focus. Compiling this edition, participating in media geography networks at conferences and elsewhere, and teaching media at our respective institutions have all abundantly revealed that media geography is a subdiscipline with many different routes and trajectories. People come to identify as media geographers as a result of an interest in a particular medium such as film, television or radio, through the literature on the Internet and geographies of cyberspace, through critical and popular geopolitics, through questions of development and the digital divide, through media and cultural studies, through communication studies, through scholarship on the city and urban studies, and through GIS, the geoweb and geospatial technologies.Media geography intersects with social and cultural geography, development geography, political geography, feminist geography, economic geography and GIS. One of the major contributions of media productions, spaces and analyses are the opportunities they offer for providing an entryway into understanding places and communities that we may otherwise rarely, if ever encounter—but this can be problematic when the identity and places that are being marked as yours, no longer appear recognisable, representative and/or desirable. The contributions in this collection pay close attention to such opportunities and challenges posed by a range of media formats, contexts and methods. These diverse entry points make for a rich emerging field in which a number of voices and perspectives are present. The field is further complicated and enriched by scholars in media studies who have turned to human geography and human geographic concepts, in order to take space, place and scale seriously in their analyses of media texts, industries and audiences. Given the diversity of the field, we thought it valuable as editors to write three position pieces that situate our work, and us personally, within the broader project represented by the scholars in this volume.

Völlig neue Bild- und Erfahrungswelten versprechen die jüngsten Produkte der Medienindustrie ihren Usern. Euphorisch investieren Google, Microsoft und Co. Unsummen in digitale Medientechnologien wie Virtual-Reality-Displays. Jeder Blockbuster muss in 3D gedreht werden. Entwicklungen wie diese verdeutlichen nicht nur den hohen Stellenwert, der sowohl der technologischen Seite als auch den ästhetischen Strategien visueller Medien zukommt. Sie werfen auch eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie adressieren multimodale Medienarrangements die Sinne der Rezipienten? Welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Wahrnehmung bei der Modellierung von Bildwirkungen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, legt der vorliegende Band den Fokus auf die Analyse medialer Interfaces. Konzentrierte sich die Bewegtbilder-Reihe bislang auf den Film, widmet sich Bild und Interface auch interaktiven Digital- und Computerspielbildern. Dadurch sollen weitere Bausteine einer kritischen Bewegtbildwissenschaft herausgearbeitet werden.

Kniha Jazyk nových médií vyšla poprvé v době, kdy internet ještě neovládaly obří korporace a mnozí v technologiích spojených s novými médii viděli příslib optimistické budoucnosti. Dnes už práce Lva Manoviche působí spíše jako historický dokument než jako příspěvek k aktuální teoretické reflexi dané problematiky.

This paper will be a revitalisation of Bataille's theories of community by looking at the spaces of communion that digital telecommunication have opened up. Thinking through Deleuze and Guattari's work on the "virtual," the paper will argue that digital telecommunication has opened an ever expansive space where subjects are brought in a form of communion with the potential to facilitate the formation of new subjectivities that radically break away from philosophy's traditional understandings of community. This paper will begin by briefly sketching out how schizoanalysis (the philosophic system developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) understands the formation of subjectivity and then briefly stich together a schizoanalytic understanding digital telecommunication from the fragments of Deleuze and Guattari's later work. Following that will be an schizoanalytic critique of online communities, arguing that these communities are largely " false " insofar as they lack any sense of communication and communion. These virtual " communities " serve to atomize and alienate people, reducing individuals to dividuals, numbered and controlled bodies lacking both agency and subjectivity. This paper will briefly conclude by looking at points of resistance found within political online communities. By juxtaposing Deleuze's interest in political Third Cinema and his concept of the time-image with Bataille's work on communion and sacrifice, this paper will look at how manifestations of political action are transmitted between globally diffuse activists, engendering new forms of resistant subjectivities.

Ez a tanulmány Takács Péter tiszteletére íródott, és egy olyan államelméleti megközelítést mutat be, amely párhuzamosan Takács Péter törekvéseivel:  nem kapcsolódik közvetlenül a joggyakorlatok dogmatikai vitáihoz, annál általánosabb konceptuális keretben fejti ki állításait. Az írás az ünnepelt 65. születésnapjára készült kötetben fog megjelenni. A kötet elkészítésért Cserne Pétert, Jakab Andrást, Könczöl Miklóst és Paksy Mátét illeti köszönet.

There is a growing interest in Virtual Reality (VR) in philosophical and cognitivist research. In this paper, I want to frame the discussion within 4E cognition, post-phenomenology, and mediology. The aim is to show how the effectiveness of virtual experience depends on how the constraints and possibilities of human bodies are respected: the higher the syntony between virtual and physical experience, the higher the illusion for the subject to be present in the virtual world. Bodily syntonization stresses the importance of the agentive side of virtual experience, against the mere visual one. Frameless vision, in fact, seems to be phenomenologically less important than actively exploring the environment by using the body as an interface. At the end of the paper, I will try to discuss VR from a media and aesthetical perspective.

The text presents digital games (including serious games) as medium of communication, considered as subjects in the discipline of media science. Under certain conditions, games are suitable for the effective transfer of theoretical and practical knowledge which can affect users. According to this, the theoretical article undertakes the issue of games evolution, illustrating why and how digital games started to be a research subject for communication and media researchers.

Currently, at the edge of the new digital frontier, automation and smart algorithms are gaining immense social attention, enticing, as mechanization and machines in the previous centuries, as much wonder as awe. Countless magazine headlines paint a fully automated future and ask question about the social significance of automation driven by artificial intelligence. The most recent cover of the MIT Technology Review magazine (July/August 2018 issue) reads: ‘AI and robots are wreaking economic havoc. We need more of them’. Automation seems to be creeping into all aspects of our lives (at least in the developed and industrialized parts of the world), remaining especially noticeable in the context of work (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2011) and the utilitarian products and processes of the fourth industrial revolution – such as fully automated Tesla’s factories, Google’s driverless cars or Amazon’s automated order and delivery chains, to start with
a few most recognizable examples. But, automation is not only altering work. It is changing play too (in the broadest sense of the word).

The research in question has documentary-bibliographical and descriptive content, since it is proposed to lift concepts, ideas and values related to the frequent use of the field of narrative, considering its notional complexity, its socio-cultural and epistemological content as well as the transformation process use to encompass other pressing objectives, such as those defined by life-writings. As a main theoretical reference, Brazilian and foreign authors are used to study the variable conceptualization of narratives, especially Cremilda Medina, Sinval Medina, Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins. Other authors complete the explanatory notes for the closing of questions concerning the current stage of development of life-writings with the use of actual high-technological devices of distance information and communication. From a contemporary point of view, the narratives have been transformed over several expressive media such as orality, writing and digital. These some different ways have also been enriched the broad sense in order to tell historic reports or imaginary stories. Many narratological perspectives have been disseminated to understand the dynamics of the narratives in the modern world, from the profusion of high-technological communication and expression media, which revitalized and transfigured them in forms of genres increasingly elastic and complex. Transmediality, possible world theories and multiverse environments, among other terms, have been described as transdisciplinary approaches in order to understand the strategies of used speeches and languages. The life-writings, particularly, have emerged as not only a creation with the aim of entertaining, but with the proposal for encouraging the critical, humanizing, libertarian and solidary thinking.

Keywords: Narratives, Life-Writings, Transmediality, Multiverses, Possible World Theory

Roberto Simanowski weiß zwar, dass die „Wende von Interpretation und Konzeption zu Zählen und Zeigen“ vollzogen ist. In Abfall beschreibt er dennoch Mittel und Wege, vor der „ernstzunehmende[n] Siegermeldung“ nicht die weiße Fahne zu hissen. Das verschmitzte, ironische Lächeln bezeugt dabei keinen Zynismus, sondern gemahnt hier vielleicht auch versteckt an einen Satz aus Gilles Deleuzes eigenem „PS“, dem Postskriptum über die Kontrollgesellschaften: „Weder zur Furcht noch zur Hoffnung besteht Grund, sondern nur dazu, neue Waffen zu suchen.“

Booklet from Collective Contract exhibition (The FRAG Collective 25 February -26 March 2022, POP-UP Gallery, the Academy of Arts in Prague) connecting some of the key problems of WORK / ENTERTAINMENT / REST today.
text by Václav Janoščík and the FRAG collective
graphic design: Artur Magrot

This article focuses on the changing nature of media studies in Russia. The author explores the ‘ferment in the field’ concept, introduced in the communication research in the early 1980s and developed further in 1990s, 2000s and nowadays by different scholars. The author identifies four actual ‘ferments’ as driving forces of media theory change in Russia, becoming a part of a second wave of fermentation process in global media studies, reinforced by digital transformations. The first
ferment is the central role of Moscow city based academic centers in Russian media studies; the second one is the high number and intellectual diversity of regional media studies. The pressures from an actively growing media business, the industry and the labor market, is the third ‘ferment’, and the fourth one is the experience, methodologies and conceptual framework of global media studies. The conclusion is that there is a need for the expanded discussion on the nature and principles of media as a research field not only within the academic community, but with public, media industry professionals, and regulators.

The research is supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 17-18-01408).

В статье на примере неиммерсивных игр (тамагочи, дигимонов, Pokémon Go, первазивных игр) рассматривается предложенное Й. Хейзингой понятие магического круга, то есть границы между игрой и не-игрой. Неиммерсивные медиа рассчитаны на особый режим потребления: пользователь делит внимание между несколькими медиа и занятиями, что приводит к тесному переплетению вымышленного мира и повседневной жизни. Явления такого рода позволяют исследователям компьютерных игр критиковать понятие магического круга, описывая его как проницаемую или подверженную разрывам границу. Анализ литературы показывает, что эта интерпретация является следствием ошибочного понимания Й. Хейзинги, а также теории фреймов. Различение игры и не-игры в неиммерсивных играх сохраняется, однако, за счет своей временной структуры они, подобно ритуалу, придают новые смыслы повседневной жизни. Легенды, стоящие за тамагочи и дигимонами, позволяют предположить, что неиммерсивные игры воспроизводят миф о киберпространстве как гибриде, стирающем разницу между воображаемым и матeриальным. Граница, таким образом, уничтожается в этом акте самоосмысления только символически.

This article, drawing on the example of non-immersive games (Tamagochi, Digimon, Pokémon Go, pervasive games) discusses the notion of magic circle, coined by J. Huizinga, which means a boundary between the game and non-game. Non-immersive media are intended for a special mode of consumption: users split their attention between several media and activities. As a result, the fictional world and everyday life become closely intervened. Such phenomena encourage game studies scholars to criticize the notion of magic circle: they describe it as a boundary that is permeable or easily broken. A critical reading shows that this interpretation is driven by misunderstanding J. Huizinga as well as the frame theory. In non-immersive games, the difference between the game and non-game is not lost. However, their time structure allows them to assign new meanings to the everyday life, like rituals do. The legends behind Tamagochi and Digimon suggests that non-immersive games reproduce the myth of cyberspace as a hybrid that blurs out the distinction between the reality and fantasy. In this self-reflective act, the boundary is broken only symbolically.

La conférence vise à illustrer une des notions fondamentales de l’esthétique contemporaine : la « réflexivité ». Il s’agit du fait qu’une œuvre ou une expérience artistique parle, entre autres, d’elle-même ; que l’art est, surtout, un discours, une réflexion, une prise de position sur l’art lui-même.
Dans un premier temps, on tentera de clarifier cette notion, distinguant une série de possibilités : citation, parodie, virtuosité, œuvre(s) dans l’œuvre, mise en abyme… Dans un deuxième temps, on discutera de la première exposition du Centre Pompidou–Metz comme du cas exemplaire, peut-être extrême, de la tendance réflexive de l’art. Une série de chefs-d’œuvre censés mettre en question le « chef-d’œuvre », un musée qui héberge les critiques au dispositif muséal, une expérience de l’art qui consiste en une série de modes d’emploi, de mises à distance, voire de détournements de l’expérience de l’art.
Finalement : l’art comme le discours sur le discours sur le discours… sur l’art.

En la medida en que la «aldea global» continúe organizándose de acuerdo a los principios de eficiencia y practicalidad dictados por la mano invisible del mercado, el cambio hacia lo virtual será progresivo y cada vez más presente en el ocio, el trabajo, la educación y en otros muchos entornos. Esta tendencia, iniciada con la llegada de Internet, fue recibida con aplausos en el nombre del progreso, pero poco se ha dicho de sus desventajas. Este trabajo examina las desventajas del formato on-line en el campo de la educación en general, y al ámbito universitario en particular.

The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-acousmatised, denied the power of narrative creation and relegated to onscreen, visual space. This paper will contrast this visual containment of female vocalisations with that of the female-hosted podcast, in which nothing is or can be seen. The podcast offers alternative routes of resistance for the female acousmetre, allowing her to maintain her disembodied status. This is poignantly evident in the popular true crime podcast, My Favorite Murder, in which the acousmatic female hosts counter crime film and television's reliance on images of violated female bodies with purely aural recountings. Through their anti-ocularcentric reliance on the aurally evocative, rather than the visually manifested, these female voices transform themselves and the victims of their discussions into haunting spectres that force listeners to imaginatively reconstruct scenes of female-directed violence, while acknowledging the ethics of their complicity in the propagation and popularisation of these narratives. Thus, the true crime podcast is one potential site of doubled resistance against the de-acousmatisation of female voices and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies; this resistance leads to an ethics of the spectral, a Derridean mourning without end. Seeing/not-seeing "To see or not to see the sound's source: it all begins here", Michel Chion writes in the prologue to his canonical work of film sound theory, The Voice in Cinema (1999, 4). This play of visuality, the oscillation between seeing and not-seeing, which corresponds to the ocular-centric binary of knowing and not-knowing, has come to dominate subsequent discussions of film sound. This beginning, the seeing or not-seeing, builds to Chion's cornerstone concept of the acousmetre, "a kind of talking and acting shadow" to which we cannot attribute a body (1999, 21). The acousmetre has power over the listener-viewer, the power of its own self-knowledge , control over its own revelation. In Chion's words, the acousmetre is "an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire and fascination". It is omniscient, panoptic, ubiquitous and omnipotent (24). Thus, in cinema, the acousmetre as a disembodied voice both frustrates and titillates the viewer. It comes as no surprise, then, that the act of de-acousmatisation,

Práca pojednáva o fenoméne technického obrazu a jeho vzťahu k umeleckej grafike v stredoeurópskom priestore. Skúma fenomény súvisiace s novými formami grafiky, prípadne s modifikáciou tradičných grafických techník v súvislosti so vstupom digitálneho obrazu na pole umeleckej grafiky. Mapuje časť rôznorodého spektra súčasnej grafiky so zameraním na diela a autorov, ktorí pri procese vzniku obrazu využívajú digitálne technológie. Výskum sa ďalej zameriava na dôsledky prenikania technického obrazu do umeleckej grafiky, ktoré sa postupne objavujú v diskusiách o grafike v umeleckých kruhoch, či na prehliadkach súčasnej grafiky. Reflektuje širšie umelecko-historické kontexty tohto fenoménu s ohľadom na vývoj fotografie a nových médií.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

La valenza atmosferica che contrassegna la nozione di medialità invita a
ripensare la dimensione partecipativa della produzione artistica e, in particolare,
di quella più direttamente orientata alla costituzione di ambienti che
rendono l’interazione tra soggetto e mondo sia osservabile che sperimentabile.
L’opera multiforme dell’artista messicano Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, la
cui spiccata originalità risiede nella natura “territoriale” dello spazio performativo
e nell’impiego interattivo del medium tecnologico, appare particolarmente
indicata per interrogare la nozione di mediascape. Il saggio si
sofferma in particolare su quelle opere che problematizzano l’idea stessa di
medium, la decostruzione delle pratiche interattive quotidiane e la vitalità
sinestesica della tecnologia.