Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice (2012-)

Sensate is a peer-reviewed, issueless, open-access, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Its mission is to provide a scholarly and artistic forum for experiments in critical media practices that expand academic discourse by taking us beyond the margins of the printed page. Fundamental to this expansion is a re-imagining of what constitutes a work of scholarship or art.

Editors-in-Chief: Lindsey Lodhie, Peter McMurray, Joana Pimenta, and Elizabeth Watkins
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license

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Kristoffer Gansing: Transversal Media Practices: Media Archaeology, Art and Technological Development (2013)

Transversal Media Practices work across specific situations of technological development, critically examining and redefining the terms of production in different media by bringing heterogeneous histories, institutions, actors and materialities into play with one another. This dissertation is all about trying out and refining the methodologies of such transversal media practices, in the end outlining a conceptual set of tools for further development.

Following the technological hype of the “digital revolution” of the mid-1990s, the field of new media studies gained popularity over a ten year period. This dissertation takes its cue from a historical turn in new media theory, and argues that it is time leave behind strict polarisations between old and new as well as analogue and digital. The study unfolds through two case-studies. The first, “The World’s Last Television Studio”, looks at tv-tv, an art and media-activist project that negotiates the sociocultural and material changes of the “old” and institutionalised mass medium of television. In the second case study, “The Art of the Overhead”, another old medium is engaged: the overhead projector – a quintessential 20th century institutional medium here presented as a device for rethinking the new through the old. The problematic of technological development, i.e. dealing with questions of how (media) technologies develop over time, forms the background to these two case studies. A key issue being how cultural and artistic practices dealing with the interaction of old and new media invite us to conceptualise technological development in new ways.

The emerging field of media archaeology is employed as a methodology in media studies and cultural production, comprising a theoretical and applied analysis of media history, materiality and practice. This transversal approach allows media archaeologists to deal with the relation between the old and the new in a non-linear way as well as to pay attention to the technical materiality of media. It is argued that the transversality of the media-archaeological approach should be seen in contrast to other conceptions of media history and technological development, such as progressivist, mono-medial and evolutionary ones. In this study, the author tries out the potential of media archaeology to reform our conception of media technologies, and eventually formulates a set of concepts for thinking and doing media archaeology as a transversal media practice. These tools are about the imaginary, residual and renewable dimensions of media technologies and are meant to assist in the opening up and intervening into processes of standardised media development.

On a general level the resulting set of tools for transversal media practices builds a bridge between theory and practice: they can be used for further research and cultural analysis where objects of study speak back to analytical concepts. At the same time these are tools for transversality that expand this form of cultural analysis in that the travelling between disciplines here also means a travelling between theory and practice. On a specific level, the tools enable this travel between theory and practice in media- and communication studies, and as such they contribute to the development of new practice-based methodologies in media research.

Doctoral dissertation in Media and Communications Studies
School of Arts and Communication, K3; Faculty of Culture and Society; Malmö University
Dissertation series in New Media, Public Spheres and Forms of Expression
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789171044815
350 pages

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public defense of dissertation (17 May 2013, Malmö)
Media archaeology at Monoskop wiki (incl. source bibliography)

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Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig (eds.): CAS: What is it? (2013) [English/Czech]

Publication documents the activities of the Center for Audio Visual Studies (CAS) at FAMU in Prague, founded in 2005. Featuring 30 works by the CAS students and alumni as well as texts by the teachers Helena Bendová, Martin Blažíček, Miroslav Petříček, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig and Miloš Vojtěchovský

Publikace CAS: Co to je? není výstavním katalogem ani sborníkem z odborné konference. Pohybuje se někde mezi, podobně jako je mezioborové studium v Centru audiovizuálních studií FAMU. Jádrem publikace jsou dokumentace různorodých projektů dnes už třicítky studentů či absolventů CAS, ale i práce jejich učitelů. Do knihy například přispěl filozof Miroslav Petříček, ale je tu i dystopická sci-fi povídka. Najdeme tu analýzu studentských filmů od filmové historičky Heleny Bendové, ale i dokumentace a anotace samotných děl. Ty se pohybují na široké škále od dokumentárních filmů, interaktivních instalací, on-line projektů, živých performancí po street artové intervence do veřejného prostoru. Z pedagogů CAS do knihy dále přispěli Martin Blažíček, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Eric Rosenzveig a Miloš Vojtěchovský.

Publisher Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, 2013
ISBN 9788073312657
332 pages

book launch (Prague, 16 April 2013)
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Patrick Lichty: Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture (2013)

Lichty’s range of commentary and analysis dissects nearly two decades of what has now become new media society. Before Facebook’s IPO and Wikileaks’ media storm, artist-as-activists experimented with data gloves, virtual world performance, and anonymous, anarchic disruptions determined to bewilder traditional enclaves of art and political society. In this collection Lichty presents several such experiments in distributed creativity: collaborations across a range of technologies and platforms, where authorship becomes a vague placeholder and sometimes acts as a performance in of itself, and the artwork is equally in flux, always in process, and often disappearing into bits.

These essays provide an extensive and timely overview of critical thought on new media culture, written by an observer-participant who has made major contributions to the sociopolitical movements he archives. Spanning art and new media theory, activism and literary criticism, this assembly seeks to understand the networked society in flux: what it means when the virtual integrates with the physical, and when newer, uncategorized media works prompt major shifts in cultural production and change the very definition of art and protest. As a veteran observer of the technological society, Lichty has produced the ideal guidebook for exploring the wilderness of our digital mediascapes, both past and present.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, April 2013
Theory on Demand series, Vol. 12
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License
ISBN 9789081857543
169 pages

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Michelle Kasprzak (ed.): Blowup: Speculative Realities (2013)

This eBook ex­plores the sig­nif­icance of the recent philo­soph­ic move­ments known as ob­ject-​ori­ent­ed on­tol­ogy and spec­ula­tive re­al­ism for the vi­su­al and me­dia arts. It was edited in connection to the Speculative Realities exhibition.

Two artists and one col­lab­ora­tive duo were com­mis­sioned to make new art­works re­flect­ing broad­ly on con­cepts with­in ob­ject-​ori­ent­ed on­tol­ogy and spec­ula­tive re­al­ism. The artists were Tu­ur van Balen & Re­vi­tal Co­hen, Cheryl Field, and Karoli­na Sobec­ka.

To sup­ple­ment the de­scrip­tions of the works and brief in­ter­views with the artists in this eBook, three new in­ter­views were com­mis­sioned. Sven Lüttick­en was in­ter­viewed by Rachel O’Reil­ly, Jus­si Parik­ka was in­ter­viewed by Michael Di­eter, and Rick Dol­phi­jn was in­ter­viewed by Michelle Kasprzak.

The ex­hi­bi­tion took place from De­cem­ber 8, 2012 un­til Jan­uary 11, 2013 at Rood­kap­je, Meent 133, Rot­ter­dam.

Publisher V2_, Rotterdam, January 2013
Blowup Read­ers series, Vol. 6
55 pages

exhibition
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Mediascape, catalogue (1996)

Catalog of an exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in association with ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and held at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, June 14 – September 15, 1996.

Exhibiting artists: Ingo Guenther, Jenny Holzer, Toshio Iwai, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Bill Seaman, Jeffrey Shaw, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola.

With texts by Heinrich Klotz, Ursula Frohne, Oliver Seifert, and Annicka Blunck.

Publisher Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York; with ZKM, Karlsruhe, 1996
ISBN 0892071729
68 pages
via Archive.org

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Georg Trogemann (ed.): Code und Material: Exkursionen ins Undingliche (2010) [German]

Algorithmen und digitale Informationsprozesse sind allgegenwärtig – sie nisten in den kleinsten Objekten und durchdringen alle Lebensbereiche. Die digitalen Codes, diese „Undinge” (Flusser), die unsichtbar und im genauen Sinn des Wortes „unbegreiflich” sind, galten anfangs auch in der Kunst als Inbegriff des Immateriellen. Mit ihrer Hilfe sollte der Widerstand des Materials überwunden und die alte physische Welt ersetzt werden durch eine neue virtuelle, die es erlaubt, die künstlerische Idee unverfälscht zu realisieren. Wer sich als Künstler auf die inneren Strukturen des Computers einlässt und zum Beispiel selbst programmiert oder Platinen lötet, für den verwandeln sich die abstrakten Algorithmen und digitalen Codes in reales künstlerisches Material. Die in Code und Material versammelten Arbeiten zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass Codes, Algorithmen und digitale Informationsprozesse nicht nur für die Umsetzung einer künstlerischen Idee verwendet, sondern die inneren Strukturen der digitalen Maschinen selbst untersucht werden.

- Auswahl aktueller Arbeiten der Medienkunst
- Einführung in das Spannungsverhältnis von Materialität und immateriellen Codes
- Künstlerische und theoretische Positionen zum „Unding” Information

Publisher Springer DE, 2010
ISBN 3709101204, 9783709101209
190 pages

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