MEDIA THEORY 2007-2008
Tutored by Willem van Weelden

Willem van Weelden has a background in social philosophy and visual art. He is committed to new media from 1990 onwards and has published on this topic in various magazines and catalogues. He was involved in numerous new media projects as a creative director and coach. Currently his focus is on writing and teaching.

First session: Monday October 22
Students of the first year will meet with Willem van Weelden for the first of four one-day meetings that his seminar MEDIATHEORY will consist of. Today’s special guest is Arjen Mulder, biologist, theorist and writer of (amongst much more) the book Understanding Mediatheory.

Second session: Monday November 19
After the first session with Arjen Mulder and the general introduction to mediatheory; the aim of the session of the 19th of November will be to deal with the pervasiveness of mediation in everyday life and the contextual problems that are raised by it. What would be the outlines of a practical media theory that critically analyses the daily mediation that we are confronted with? The notion of context, crucial to any understanding of mediation (mass media or other) has become problematic especially when looked at e.g. the copy-culture that we live in: authorship is completely redefined in the culture of recycling images and content and the (technological) formatting of the ways in which we communicate and produce content. Information management is but a young branch of super-mediation that deserves special attention to artists and critical scientists, for it has become the editorial nerve that structures our conception of visibility and ‘transparency' of mediation. Yet, most often these attempts to ‘manage’ flows of information and its formatting (structurally and culturally) spring forth out of the technology itself, instead of the cultural context that produced the information or content in the first place. The ‘mechanic phylum’ that produces this sense of ‘real-virtuality’ can be observed as a non-place, a paradox of contexts. With a focus on developments of photography, cinema (film/video), and electronic communication, the session tries to theorize with help of thinkers like Benjamin, de Certeau and Zizek a new conception of ‘everydayness’ in the light of our unsatisfiable need for mediation to experience the Real. Special attention will be given to the concept of ‘interpassivity’, the shadow of the buzzword of the nineties: ‘interactivity’. From that treatment attention will be given to media activism and a critical art practice that expands the current notions of design and responsibility.

Eclipse of the Spectacle and the Culture of Real-Virtuality A lecture by Eric Kluitenberg

It is time to leave the theories of Debord about the Society of the Spectacle behind us. If today we witness the hyper-spectacular in the mass media, this should not fool us. It is not the apotheosis of the spectacle, but much rather the eclipse of the spectacle - the final moment of tragic sublimity, of hyper-violence, before it fades out...
(Opening of a column for the InfoWarRoom series, June 8 2007)

It is silly to declare mass media dead when they are all around us and more massive than ever. An unprecedented mass of people on this planet requires an unprecedented level of mass media. However, to think that this is purely the ‘success’, or even the apotheosis of mass media means to misperceive essential characteristics of the contemporary global media-experience.

Eclipse of the spectacle is for me the moment when the media become so all encompassing, pervasive, so deeply woven into the very fabric of social reality that in a paradoxical way they become ‘invisible’. This invisibility does not mean that you cannot see them, but the media become so every-day so always present, so all-around us that they loose any form of particularity - they become vernacular, generic media.

This condition of generic media makes media criticism very difficult and requires other procedures to re-sensitize perception for the compelling powers of electronic mediation. The problem with this is that the social is not mediated, but much rather that the social is the mediated in itself.
Sociologist Manuel Castells recognized this condition as ‘real-virtuality’ and concluded (in his study Rise of the Network Society of 1996) that we live in a ‘Culture of Real-Virtuality’. Besides problems this also offers new avenues for critical intervention in which the boundaries between aesthetic practice, media intervention and politics become thoroughly blurred.

Most problematic to me seems the emergence of new regimes of visibility and invisibility. The omnipresence of electronic media (including surveillance systems) produces a new intense visibility. But under such conditions of near-complete visibility, strategic decision-making tends to retreat into the domain of invisibility. We know, however, that democracy requires visibility. It is dependent on processes of identification and representation that are essentially procedures of visibility, of being or making visible. How to engage the new power regimes that rest on invisibility is a question that is very hard to answer.

My talk will explore these issues and discuss examples of interesting interventions into the domains sketched briefly here and to point out their essentially unresolved dilemmas.

Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, and organizer on culture, media and technology. He is head of the media program at De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, and teaches a.o. at the Institute for Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. He lectures and publishes extensively on culture, new media, and cultural politics throughout Europe and beyond.
His publications include, The Book of Imaginary Media (NAi Publishers, Fall 2006); Hybrid Space - theme issue of Open - Cahier for Art and the Public Domain #11, Amsterdam, November 2006; Debates & Credits, Media / Art / Public Domain, De Balie, 2003; Delusive Spaces - with the Institute of Network Cultures (forthcoming Early 2008), as well as many essays.
Previously, he taught media theory for the post-graduate education programs in art & design and new media at Media-GN / Frank Mohr Institute and Academy Minerva in Groningen, the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, and worked on the scientific staff of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Third session: Monday December 17
This monday the session will concentrate on the legacy of the  traditional conceptual art. Drawn from media theory notions like  ‘context’ and ‘mediumspecificity’ are put in action in a survey of  the historical developments of conceptual art and its transgression  into interactive/interpassive design and generative art.

Media theory and conceptual art are cultural products of the same era (60ies) and have never met a thorough examination of their paralel orientations. Media theory has developped ever since and the critical assumption juxtaposed to this is that conceptual art did not show  such a development. For it seemd to be plagued by the desire to  produce works that were an expression of ‘pure ideas’.

Can the notion of a ‘pure idea’ be put in conjunction to a conception  of the virtual?And what would a renewed conceptialism be withinn the  context of generative art and a new critique of the institutional  practice of contemporary art?

An investigation into (interactive/interpassive) design seems  inevitable to come to terms with a legacy that formed such an  important basis of modern art.

The evening lecture will be deliverd by arthistorian, critic, and  curator Paul Groot.

Experiencing the high times of concept art when studying art history,  and having taught at the Ateliers ’63 together with notable exponents  of this movement, Paul was an early adapter to an orientation on art that welcomed new media and the new contexts that came along with them. One of the main voices within the Mediamatic tribe, Paul has  published numerous essays on media art and the new conditions of a  artistic practice that is located on the edge of consumer culture, design and the ruins of representation that mark the traditional  modern art. The title of the lecture will be: ‘The Time-listener, from Andy Warhol’s ‘Sleep’ to the atomclock’.