ORIGINS, ARCHAEOLOGIES, HISTORIES: EPISODES IN THE HISTORY OF MEDIA

Das Seminar wird in Englisch gehalten. Seminarleiter: Timothy Druckrey & Michael Bielicky.

The history of ‘media art’ is not limited to the deployment of specific technologies – electricity, the development of the telegraph, the recording of sound, the introduction of photography or cinema, the launch of radio, the blast-off of television, the emergence of video, the reverberations of the computer, or the growth of networks.

Rather the development of modernity itself is embedded in the reverberations of both its vision machines and its temporal apparatuses.

By looking backward into the pre-history of 20 th century culture we will aim to develop an approach in which the arts (broadly) as intricately woven into social, scientific, and creative upheavals that led to a constant eruption of radical art and media – much of it assimilated into progressive notions of the ‘avant-garde.’

This seminar will probe the history of the apparatus and rethink the role of the so called ‘media’ as the crucial form in the radical experiment of the 20th century. The starting point, as Agamben says, is that the apparatus is “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings.

Beginn: 14. April / Donnerstags 15-18 Uhr / Raum 323 (Entropia)