Medialogue Basel – Forum for Media, Art and Design Research
Medialogue is a joint research colloquium of the Institute of Media Studies, University Basel, and the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Medialogue will serve as a forum of exchange on current issues of media (research) practice, a testing ground for research approaches and hypotheses, and an endeavour to extend the very format of a colloquium. Medialogue as a series will take place at different locations and combine elements like demonstrations, guest lectures, text discussions, and experiments.
All are always welcome. For further questions and to receive any preparatory material do not hesitate to contact Felix Gerloff.
#1 – 02.03.2016 – 18.15
Key Concerns in Media Research: Methods, Scope, Relevance – An Introduction
The first session of Medialogue is concerned with questioning key parameters of media research in relation to influential discoursive positions and the groups’ ongoing projects. A special focus will lie on the role of methods and disciplinary confinements, engaging with readings of John Law’s After Method, Brian Holmes’ Extradisciplinary Investigations and others.
Key Concerns in Media Research: Methods, Scope, Relevance – An Introduction
The first session of Medialogue is concerned with questioning key parameters of media research in relation to influential discoursive positions and the groups’ ongoing projects. A special focus will lie on the role of methods and disciplinary confinements, engaging with readings of John Law’s After Method, Brian Holmes’ Extradisciplinary Investigations and others.
Venue
Seminar für Medienwissenschaft
Holbeinstr. 12, 4051 Basel
Seminar room on the 1st floor:
mewi.unibas.ch/
#2 – 06.04.2016 – 20.00
Brandon LaBelle: Second Culture Session
Inspired by the concept of second culture developed in former Czechoslovakia, the performance is a meditation on the politics of listening and territory. What might we hear within the frame of second culture? Is there a second listening to be performed, one that might give space for a polyphony of soundings? Staged as a session of collective listening, the performance considers sound as a vital medium for subject formation, and asks us to hear beyond the territorial rigidity of first culture, to form a temporary node of emancipatory acoustics.
Brandon LaBelle: Second Culture Session
Inspired by the concept of second culture developed in former Czechoslovakia, the performance is a meditation on the politics of listening and territory. What might we hear within the frame of second culture? Is there a second listening to be performed, one that might give space for a polyphony of soundings? Staged as a session of collective listening, the performance considers sound as a vital medium for subject formation, and asks us to hear beyond the territorial rigidity of first culture, to form a temporary node of emancipatory acoustics.
#3 – 27.04.2016 – 18.15
Infrastructures: A Conversation with Shannon Mattern
In this colloquium with infrastructures, media, art and literature scholar Shannon Mattern, we will discuss various pedagogical strategies, representational techniques, and modeling methods that have been employed to promote “infrastructural intelligence” — and we’ll consider what epistemologies, ontologies, ethics, affects, and politics are embedded in those approaches.
Shannon Mattern’s teaching and research address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces – architectural, urban, geographical, interactive, etc. – they create and inhabit. She has written about libraries and archives, media companies’ headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. She’s the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities and Deep Mapping the Media City, both published by University of Minnesota Press, and she’s a columnist for Places, a journal focusing on landscape, architecture, and urbanism. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Infrastructures: A Conversation with Shannon Mattern
In this colloquium with infrastructures, media, art and literature scholar Shannon Mattern, we will discuss various pedagogical strategies, representational techniques, and modeling methods that have been employed to promote “infrastructural intelligence” — and we’ll consider what epistemologies, ontologies, ethics, affects, and politics are embedded in those approaches.
Shannon Mattern’s teaching and research address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces – architectural, urban, geographical, interactive, etc. – they create and inhabit. She has written about libraries and archives, media companies’ headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. She’s the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities and Deep Mapping the Media City, both published by University of Minnesota Press, and she’s a columnist for Places, a journal focusing on landscape, architecture, and urbanism. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Venue
Kleinhafen
Südquaistrasse 14
4057 Basel
5th floor
Map
Public Transport: Tram No. 8 (direction: Weil am Rhein) to Kleinhüningeranlage.
#4 – 25.05.2016 – 18.15
Heuristics of Re-Enacting Practices and Re-Assembling Tools
Introduced by an input on the synchronization practices of bouncing balls and visual clocking by Jan Philip Müller (Institute of Media Studies, University of Basel), this session of Medialogue focuses on the methodological potential of re-enactment and re-assembly within the framework of two PhD projects, setting into motion a critical assessment of specific media archaeological research practices and their adaptability to these projects’ contemporary as well as historical subjects. Stefanie Bräuer (Institute of Media Studies, University of Basel) retraces the affordances of the electronic oscilloscope and its function of visual clocking in its appropriated use for generating abstract imagery in 1950s experimental filmmaking. Felix Gerloff (Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, HGK FHNW) investigates current practices of software development in the creative industries both through participant observation and own coding exercises and projects. Hands-on methods have been discussed lively in the fields of media archaeology, history of science, classical archaeology and musicology, as well as concerning didactics, modes of exhibition and practice-lead research. Yet in the process of (PhD thesis) writing, the gap between the discursivity of text and the operativity of practices remains problematic. In this session the concentration on current versus historical subjects of the respective PhD projects shall showcase the re-enactment of practices and tools as well as call for a discussion of their heuristic potentials and breaking points.
Heuristics of Re-Enacting Practices and Re-Assembling Tools
Introduced by an input on the synchronization practices of bouncing balls and visual clocking by Jan Philip Müller (Institute of Media Studies, University of Basel), this session of Medialogue focuses on the methodological potential of re-enactment and re-assembly within the framework of two PhD projects, setting into motion a critical assessment of specific media archaeological research practices and their adaptability to these projects’ contemporary as well as historical subjects. Stefanie Bräuer (Institute of Media Studies, University of Basel) retraces the affordances of the electronic oscilloscope and its function of visual clocking in its appropriated use for generating abstract imagery in 1950s experimental filmmaking. Felix Gerloff (Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, HGK FHNW) investigates current practices of software development in the creative industries both through participant observation and own coding exercises and projects. Hands-on methods have been discussed lively in the fields of media archaeology, history of science, classical archaeology and musicology, as well as concerning didactics, modes of exhibition and practice-lead research. Yet in the process of (PhD thesis) writing, the gap between the discursivity of text and the operativity of practices remains problematic. In this session the concentration on current versus historical subjects of the respective PhD projects shall showcase the re-enactment of practices and tools as well as call for a discussion of their heuristic potentials and breaking points.
