The purpose of this conference: to deepen and expand
transatlantic dialogue between North America and German-speaking Europe
(Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in the area of media theory. Areas of
research and scholarship relevant to this dialogue include communication,
philosophy, media literacy, and literary and cultural studies.
This conference took place at UBC Vancouver from April 8 -10,
2010. This Website documents this event via:
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Thursday, April 8 |
Opening Remarks (N. Friesen, R. Cavell)
Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in
E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University in
Kamloops, BC, and is author of Re-Thinking E-Learning
Research: Foundations, Methods and Practices (Peter
Lang, 2009)
Richard Cavell is the author of McLuhan
in Space: A Cultural Geography (2002; 2003; digital
publication 2007), which is the first book to examine
McLuhan's work as foundational to the spatial turn in media
studies. |
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(Chair: Bob Hanke)
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Tristan Thielmann
Finding
the Way over the North Atlantic Ridge: German Theory and
American Practice of Geomedia
Since we have been interacting with a gigantic, global, disorganized but
incessantly expanding mass of “born-digital” data and cultural content in
the last decade, German media theory has lost its international supremacy.
Is it impossible to track the profound structural change
from “New Media” to “More Media” with traditional methods of
media and cultural analysis? Or, did German media studies
miss the ongoing reconstitution, namely two complementary
drives that are currently determining the fields of research
at the international level - on the one hand, the social and
cultural practices acting on their media and, on the other,
the media acting on their practices? [more...] |
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Michael Darroch
Giedion
and Explorations: Transatlantic Influences on the
Toronto School
In the context of examining the continuing influence
of Toronto School thinkers on contemporary theories of media and the
materialities of communication in German-speaking Europe, it is vital
to recognise transatlantic influences on the development of the Toronto
School in the first place. This paper examines the influence of the
Swiss art historian and architectural critic Sigfried
Giedion on the collaborative work that developed during the
Culture and Communications Seminar (1953-55) and the
publication of the Explorations journal (1953-59) at the
University of Toronto. [more...]
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(Chair: M. MacDonald)
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Christine Mitchell
Language, Material Misfit
The study of media, culture and communication has undergone a theoretical and methodological turn towards ‘materiality.’ While language would seem to have been well accounted for in such materialist frameworks, it nevertheless sits uneasily within such discourses.
This paper interrogates this discord by considering the
theoretical/methodological provenance of ‘materiality’
and ‘materialism’ in approaches to language-based
cultural forms. It then discusses a particular
manifestation of this discord as it emerges in
material/materialist contrasts between language and
code(s) in studies of computers, software, and machine
translation. [more...] |
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Till Heilmann
Innis and
Kittler: The Case of the Greek Alphabet
Harold Innis and Friedrich Kittler are exemplary thinkers, if not founders, of two quite distinct fields in
communication and media studies: The Toronto School of communication theory and German discourse analysis of media (Diskursanalyse technischer Medien). Though their work is separated by time, space, and intellectual heritage, for Innis as well as for Kittler the Greek alphabet holds a unique place in history and in their respective theoretical understanding of media.
[more...] |
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Twyla Gibson
The Translation of the
Word: Homeric Formulas, Platonic Forms, and Media Theory
The theory of media associated with a group of scholars known as the Toronto School of Communication—Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong—relied on the arguments of Milman Parry and Albert Lord concerning the oral-derivation of Homer’s formulaic poetry. Innis built on the Parry-Lord method of
comparative history and warned that predominating technologies produce a distorting bias. Havelock argued that Plato’s dialogues mark the division between orality and literacy in ancient Greek culture. The advent of the
phonetic alphabet promoted changes in vocabulary, syntax, and basic categories of human thought that entailed centuries of development time and a long period of tension and interaction.
[more...] |
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Friday, April 9 |
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(Chair: Roberto Simanowski) |
Michael MacDonald
Martial McLuhan
Although the work of Marshall McLuhan is enjoying a “renaissance for a wired world,” as Gary Genosko aptly puts it, scholars still tend to dismiss McLuhan as a “guru,” “oracle,” or “metaphysician” who mistook the global information ecology for a “media Eden” (Virilio). Paul Virilio, for example, contends that McLuhan was “drooling”
over the spiritual properties of cyberspace, while Friedrich Kittler rejects McLuhan’s ideal of “understanding” media as a mirage produced by the “silent theology” that governs his media theory as a whole: the dominant media of our time, argues Kittler, “control all understanding” (not to mention our very “schematism of perceptibility”), and for this reason understanding media remains an “impossibility.”
[more...] |
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Markus Krajewski
Small Theory of the Time Table. Projectors, Technical
Media, and Globalization around 1900
With nearly inflationary use, around 1900 the prefix “world” is placed before such diverse projects as Sandford Fleming’s “unified world time,” the implementation of a “world auxiliary language” (like Esperanto, Ido, or Volapük), the spread and circulation of a “world currency,” and not least the standardization of various national units of measurement into a “world format.” This unusual clustering of such heterogenous plans, all of which add the prefix “world” to their programmatic titles, constitutes a number of undertakings at the turn of the 20th century with maximum
scope. [more...] |
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Daniel Gilfillan
Knowledge Migration and Nomadic Broadcast: Flusser and
Post-1989 Radio Space
Two live broadcasts produced by the orf Kunstradio
programme form the focus of this paper. Each engages conceptually with
issues of globalization in the context of the growing European Union. Given Austria’s geopolitical location and Vienna’s imperial history as center of the Austro-Hungarian empire, these broadcasts provide a medial and artistic layer to understanding Austria’s role in contemporary discussions about issues of migration within post-1989 Europe. State of Transition (1994) explores various geographical points and economic sites where human movement occurs (airport transit halls, market squares, border crossings) to diagnose larger questions of asylum, while Horizontal Radio (1995) combines the technical possibilities of radio transmission and the theoretical imagination of its designers to create a networked performance environment where artists from any of the 26 cities involved in the broadcast could collaborate.
[more...] |
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(Chair: Jaeho Kang)
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Anthony Enns
Vibratory Photography: Integrating the Psychic, Perceptual and Photographic Apparatus
In the nineteenth century, physiologists frequently compared the eye to a photographic camera. Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, famously described the eye as a black box with a lens that perceives points of light just as individual grains are recorded on photographic plates. British physician Robert Hanham Collyer similarly argued that optical information is transmitted from the retina to the brain via the optic nerve in the same way it is recorded by a photographic apparatus, yet he also emphasized that its mode of transmission was vibratory. The notion
of the eye as a camera thus led to speculation that the method of recording photographic images might also parallel the transmission of electrical impulses through the nervous system.
[more...] |
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Darryl Cressman
Music as Media: An Innisian History of
Western Musical Culture
One of the recurring examples used by Max Weber to
explain the rational character of Western society is music. Rationalization,
for Weber, is both a material process and a mode of thought, and in this
way musical culture is instructive for understanding the object of Weber’s
sociological analysis. Asking, “why harmonic music developed from the almost universal polyphony of folk music only in Europe and only in a particular time period, while everywhere else the rationalization of music took
a different path?
[more...] |
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Rainer Leschke
McLuhan and Medienwissenschaften: Sense and Sensation
McLuhan’s concern with an economy of the senses is well known, as is his emphasis on their relation to mediatic forms
and transitions. It follows that it should not be difficult to combine McLuhan’s notion of a sensory economy together with an analysis of a media-system’s functions and in principle at least, to found a science
of media (Medienwissenschaft) on that basis. But such an undertaking has yet to be ventured, and the potentially fertile ground presented by the senses remains conspicuously fallow.
[more...] |
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Roberto Simanowski
Against the Embrace. On Phenomenology and Semiotics in New Media Aesthetics
In his 1990 essay “Is There Love in the Telematic Em-
brace?”, British artist and self proclaimed “visionary theorist” Roy Ascott
updates his concept of “Behaviorist Art”, proposed more than 20 years before, stating: the traditional artwork, which “requires, for its completion, the viewer as, at best, a skilled decoder or interpreter of the artist’s ‘meaning’ [...] gives rise to the industry of criticism and exegesis, in which those who ‘understand’ this or that work of art explain it to those who are too stupid or uneducated to receive its meaning unaided.” As the quote reveals, what is at stake in behaviourist, interactive art is not only the work of the artist but also that of the critic.
[more...] |
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