Three Questions On Media Criticality – A Field Notebook and Critical Media Salon

Three Questions On Media Criticality is the setout for an inquiry into the conditions, modes and potentials of critique of, in, and through ‘media’. After the institute’s first colloquium series on “What constitutes Critique?” and the official opening event of the Critical Media Lab in autumn 2014 it is one of the initial ventures of the lab and first public dissemination of our discussions about media criticality.

The project is a collaboration with transmediale, the festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. It was initiated with the collection of concise responses by invited scholars, artists and designers from different backgrouds on three provocative questions: What are promising modes of critique today? What is critical about media technologies? What comes after critique?

The answers were collated in a field notebook that was presented at transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL in Berlin. It accompanied a Critical Media Salon, an open discussion format held at the festival as well. The responses of the notebook here served as a common reference and instigation of the dialogue between the attending participants, members of ixdm, and guest interlocutors Darsha Hewitt and Christoph Brunner.

The discussion brought up a range of crucial aspects of media criticality like notions of productive and immanent critique, the temporality and periodicity of critique, or its relation to the politics, aesthetics and materiality of media technologies, among others. By that, it also serves to refine our own positioning towards criticality we elaborate at the Critical Media Lab.