Hannover – Page 2 – medieninitiative

Wanda Strauven, “Children as Media Archaeologists”

Abstract for Wanda Strauven’s keynote talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

Pretend (&) Play: Children as Media Archaeologists

Wanda Strauven

In this talk, I will present a series of concrete situations where children make, very intuitively, connections between the past, the present and the future of media. In their play, children often “imagine” future media applications by actually applying them. Their imagination is therefore more than just a fantasy or mental fabrication; it is instead a practice or “form of activity” (Tätigkeit), to use Siegfried Zielinski’s definition of media archaeology. Especially in their act of “repurposing” media and other devices, children become true media archaeologists. In other words, I will offer some thoughts about the child’s play as a media-archaeological laboratory. For this purpose, I will also take into account some general theories about play, game, object lesson, optical toys and language.

Christina Meyer, “Technology – Economy – Mediality”

Abstract for Christina Meyer’s talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

Technology – Economy – Mediality: Nineteenth Century American Newspaper Comics

Christina Meyer

In my talk I will focus on one of the first serialized, colored comic figures of the late nineteenth century, which appeared in two competing New York newspapers (The World and the New York Journal): Mickey Dugan, better remembered as the Yellow Kid. This kid was one of the first successfully marketed, iconic comic figures to which the public was introduced, and whose adventures it encountered over a 5-year period (1893-1898). The Yellow Kid had not only a place, and served diverse functions, within the Sunday comic supplements – as a protagonist in the comic pages, as a want-ads promotional device, and as a front-page filler – but also ‘outside’ of them, in the form of all kinds of merchandise products, advertising, poster and billboard ‘sign,’ and as a name-giver for, or rather protagonist in, songs and theater plays (among other things). The Yellow Kid was a commodified ware to be purchased and collected in all kinds of forms. There were, among other things, Yellow Kid candy, chewing gum pets, Yellow Kid pin-back buttons (often giveaways distributed by tobacco companies that used the Yellow Kid to introduce and sell a new cigarette brand), wooden cigar boxes, numerous tins (in different sizes, and designed for all kinds of purposes), puzzles, dolls, and many more things. What interests me about the Yellow Kid, and what makes this comic figure a relevant research topic for this symposium, are precisely these ‘border-crossings’ or transitions, from one (carrier) medium to another and the effects these changes generate. One line of argumentation I wish to pursue in my talk is that the merchandising of the Yellow Kid is a narrative moment in itself, which is also, self-reflexively, commented upon in the Yellow Kid newspaper comic pages.

Ilka Brasch, “The Operational Aesthetic as a Receptive Mode”

Abstract for Ilka Brasch’s talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

Facilitating Media Change: The Operational Aesthetic as a Receptive Mode

Ilka Brasch

When the Scientific American published Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs of a horse in motion on October 19^th, 1878, the magazine advised its readers to cut the images and mount them into the drum of a zoetrope. By means of this nineteenth-century optical toy, the readers could then prove whether Muybridge’s photographs really did depict the movement of a horse during gallop (Newhall 43). In addition to being one historical instance of media change, the example describes an engagement with media that exceeds a simple acknowledgment of mediated content. The tinkerer’s play with technology, I argue, relates back to what Neil Harris termed the operational aesthetic: a critical engagement with the nature and structure of an artifact, which then allows for the observer to judge about its truth value (Harris 79).

Tracing the history of a critical engagement with developing machines, or ‘new media’, since the 1840s, I will establish the operational aesthetic as a particular mode of engagement with media. That receptive mode then influenced the ways in which tinkerers, operators, or spectators experienced media change. Although media change itself impacts the operational aesthetic, that particular receptive mode also impacts the engagement with ‘new media’. As a final step, I will consider how the operational aesthetic influenced, and was changed itself, during the spectators’ engagement with silent film serials up to the 1920s. All in all, the presentation will serve to offer the operational aesthetic as one way of imagining media change.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Newhall, Beaumont. “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insitutes, 7 (1944): 40-45.

Alexander Starre, “Evolving Technologies, Enduring Media”

Abstract for Alexander Starre’s talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

Evolving Technologies, Enduring Media: Material Irony in Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books”

Alexander Starre

In the electric shockwaves sent through the United States by the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, the French writer and publisher Octave Uzanne appeared to have lost his belief in the future of the book. As a reporter for Le Figaro, Uzanne spent three months touring the country, meeting President Grover Cleveland and inventor Thomas Edison, besides strolling the fairgrounds in Chicago. After his visit, he published the short story “The End of Books” in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894, which depicts a future in which books have been replaced by the phonograph. In the seminal volume Rethinking Media Change (ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins), Priscilla Coit Murphy reads “The End of Books” as an exuberant embrace of new media. This paper aims to complicate Murphy’s analysis through a materialist perspective on Uzanne’s text as a historical artifact. “The End of Books” does not unfold its full complexity in the English text printed in Scribner’s. The French version “La fin des livres”, which forms part of the collection Contes pour les bibliophiles (1895), exposes the material irony embedded in the text. Octave Uzanne’s relationship to technology was strikingly ambivalent and manifested larger shifts in networks of communication and cultural distinction. While he was fascinated by new electro-mechanical inventions, his ultimate goal was to improve the quality of printed artifacts. From this peculiar case, my paper will extract several theoretical implications for current debates in media studies and book history.

Imagining Media Archaeology

On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 (at 6:00 pm in room 608 in the Conti-Hochhaus), the Film & TV Reading Group will meet to discuss two texts relevant to the larger theme of “Imagining Media Archaeology” (part of a semester-long series of events detailed here). The texts are:

1) Jussi Parikka, “Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects.” In:What Is Media Archaeology? Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 41-62.

2) Wanda Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch?” In: Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. 148-163.

In case you missed it: both Jussi Parikka and Wanda Strauven will be keynote speakers at our symposium “Imagining Media Change,” which will be held on June 13, 2013 — for more info, check here and here.

As for the Film & TV Reading Group: we are always happy to welcome new participants to our informal discussion group! For more information, please contact Felix Brinker.

Imagining Cinematic Transformation

On Wednesday, May 8, 2013 (at 6:00 pm in room 608 in the Conti-Hochhaus), the Film & TV Reading Group will meet to discuss two texts relevant to the larger theme of “Imagining Cinematic Transformation” (part of a semester-long series of events detailed here). The texts are:

1) Francesco Casetti, “The Relocation of Cinema,” _NECSUS_ 2 (2012): online at http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-relocation-of-cinema/

2) Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, “Conclusion: digital cinema — the body and the senses refigured?”, in: _Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses_. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 170-187.

We are always happy to welcome new participants to our informal discussion group! For more information, please contact Felix Brinker.

Imagining Media Change — Symposium Poster

[UPDATE: See here for the complete symposium program and abstracts.]

Recently, I posted the description for the symposium on “Imagining Media Change” that we’re organizing this June, with keynote speakers Jussi Parikka and Wanda Strauven — part of this semester’s larger series of events. Now I am proud to present the poster for the symposium (designed by Ilka Brasch and Svenja Fehlhaber), which includes an overview of the schedule and speakers. A more detailed schedule, including the titles of talks, will be made available soon.

Flash Gordon (1936): “Imagining Media Change” — Screening #1

On April 17, 2013, we will be screening the serial Flash Gordon (1936), the first installment in this semester’s film series “Imagining Media Change.” (See here for a flyer with more details about our film series and related events, and here for a description of the symposium that forms the conceptual centerpiece.) In this context, science fiction (and sci-fi film, in particular) presents itself as a central vehicle for “imagining media change” in the 20th and 21st centuries — as a medium for conceiving the future, and in this way negotiating the changes characterising the present. Looked at in retrospect, early sci-fi films like Flash Gordon therefore also form a natural site for a media-archaeological investigation of past changes and their parallel histories and relations to our own ongoing efforts to negotiate the transition to a digital mediascape.

The screening (6:00pm on Wednesday, April 17, in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) is free and open to all, so spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us.

Symposium: Imagining Media Change

[UPDATE: See here for the complete symposium program and abstracts.]

Imagining Media Change

Symposium of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research and the American Studies department at the Leibniz University of Hannover, 13 June 2013 (Niedersachsensaal, Conti-Campus)

In the midst of the ongoing digitalization of our contemporary media environment, recent media and cultural studies have developed a renewed interest in the production and staging of technological innovation, in the occurrence and impact of media change, and in the ways these transformations inform the production, circulation, reception, and aesthetics of popular texts and media forms. The emergence of ‘new media’ in particular, it would seem, prompts us to rethink the role of mediating technologies within social and cultural spheres, and to explore how our everyday lives are transformed by a newly digitalized technical infrastructure. Such explorations are necessarily reflexive, however, as our attempts to imagine media change are themselves mediated by cultural texts and technologies in the grip of change. Dynamics of medial self-historicization guide our very thinking about media history: commercial logics, in particular, emphasize the superiority of the new, attest to the inevitability of the past’s obsolescence, and seek to captivate our imaginations with branded visions of the media-technological future. Seeking to look beyond these pressures, a reflexive engagement with recent media change is therefore called upon to reevaluate the impact of previous transitions and transformations throughout media history, and to excavate, if possible, discontinuities and ruptures in the development of modern media as they relate to broader social, cultural, and material processes of change. From a media-archaeological perspective, the history of media emerges not as a straightforward, linear process of technological innovation and implementation, but rather as a discontinuous series of media crises and negotiations of change. Understanding the uneven historical emergence and transformation of different types of media thus promises a renewed understanding not only of historical media, but also of contemporary media change and our present (in)ability to imagine its scope and impact. Crucial to this enterprise is an appreciation of reflexivity itself – a recognition of the fact that when media change, they also change our imaginations, including our imagination of media change. In the face of corporate and other interests that seek to capitalize on this logic and to steer our imaginations of the digital transition for their own benefit, what’s ultimately at stake in a media-archaeological excavation of our medial past and present is therefore nothing less than a political question: Will we be the subjects or merely the objects of “imagining media change”?

The symposium “Imagining Media Change” takes a broad view of media-historical and counter-historical developments and transformations since the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the reflexive interactions between media undergoing change and media being used to imagine the parameters, effects, and significance of media-technological transformations. We are interested in historical and contemporary visions of change as they are articulated in or pertain to a wide range of media (including film, television, literature, and other visual, aural, textual, or computational media). The one-day symposium aims to bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interests and to facilitate discussion of the material, political, aesthetic, and speculative dimensions of media change. Keynote lectures will be held by Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, UK) and Wanda Strauven (University of Amsterdam, NL).

For more information about the symposium “Imagining Media Change,” please contact felix.brinker@engsem.uni-hannover.de or refer to the events page (http://medieninitiative.wordpress.com/events/).

Film & TV Reading Group: Imagining Technological Innovation

In the summer semester 2013, the meetings of the Film & TV Reading Group will be organized around thematic units related to this semester’s overarching theme of “Imagining Media Change.” The first meeting, coming up on April 10, is devoted to “Imagining Technological Innovation.” (It will be followed by “Imagining Cinematic Transformation” on May 8 and “Imagining Media Archaeology” on June 5).

The texts for the first session are:

Franco Piperno, “Technological Innovation and Sentimental Education” (in: Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 122-130.)

and

Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: Cartographies of the Old and New” (in: What Is Media Archaeology? Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 1-18.)

We are always happy to welcome new participants to our informal discussion group! For more information, please contact Felix Brinker.