Suchergebnisse

Abstract

Making, media, and theory -- Workshop : conductive play dough -- In defence of uselessness -- Workshop : useless box -- Writing with a soldering iron : on the art of making attention -- Workshop : smartphone basket -- Digital rituals, wearables and non-users -- Workshop : resistor case -- Epilogue: Dirty media.

Recently some scientists studying what happens in neurons when animals move freely created a bizarre media assemblage. This combined the generation of virtual world events for worms (by tampering with their neurons via optogenetics) with these worms "free" movement through their actual surroundings. Contemporary media and world are indeed finding many strange continuities and overlaps. Yet this paper suggests that what looks strange in such assemblages has always been the case. Contemporary media only draw attention to this more because, first, they possess more technical power to work within the entire world as medium, and, second, they increasingly diagram media/world relations with an acceptance of world as medium and media as world.Long ago, Alfred North Whitehead wrote of this 'world as medium'—for him, a medium for the 'vector transmission' of feeling. For Whitehead, "worlds" are worlds of feeling (feeling as worlding). Signal, the basis of media and communication, is feeling in movement, which is to say the world in movement, which is to say the world communicating itself in feeling as it creates itself. Things or events—both of which we can consider as what Whitehead terms "actual occasions"—do something special within the world as medium. They maintain their intensity. This paper will outline a theory of affect, signal, intensity and world, drawing largely from Whitehead and Deleuze. It will also provide a quick series of propositions concerning affect and politics that arise from thinking the world as medium. It draws attention not only to Whitehead's usefulness for thinking media and world but to Whitehead's own media philosophy (and in a couple of footnotes yet to be developed, to Whitehead's importance to media and communications theory and practice in the 20th century).

This work examines how effective democratic participant media theory (DPMT) is in the Nigerian media context, in terms of the tenets upheld, tenets not upheld as well as tenets marked with ambiguities. Data from the analysis of the editorials of three national newspapers –The Nation, The Sun and Vanguard - show that only The Sun - has editorials published daily, which supports the theory's tenet of the citizen's need for content. Political issues emerge fifth among six other sub-themes in their coverage and the citizen's determination of the need for media content turns out to be the purview of the journalists who are centrally controlled.

What are the premises of the major questions in media theory? Arguing for better questions this contribution notes the persistence of eurocentricism, ­mediacentricism and technological determinism and the dominance of the ­experience of what Jared Diamond calls the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) nations in framing the terms of debate and study.Anthropology in works such as Larkin (2008) may help defamiliarise the ­presumptions of western media theory and more clearly address the question of 'Where is the global "Greenwich Mean Time" of Media Theory?' Arguing for the need to place the technological present in historical perspective (cf Edgerton, 2008) this contribution makes the case for the primacy of historical and spatial contexts over the immediate moment of technological invention – on which so much attention is customarily focussed. To focus on media technologies and 'inventions' without considerations of their context runs the risks of embracing such dangerous simplifications as the idea that their socio-cultural effects can be deduced from their presumed technological 'essences' – whereas any given technology may very well come to have quite different significance in varying cultural contexts.

Strange as it may seem, Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, Marc Forster's film Stranger than Fiction, Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pere Borrell del Caso's painting "Escaping Criticism" reproduced on the cover of the present volume and Mozart's sextet "A Musical Joke" all share one common feature: they include a meta-dimension. Metaization - the movement from a first cognitive, referential or communicative level to a higher one on which first-level phenomena self-reflexively become objects of reflection, reference and communication in their own right - is in fact a common feature not only of human thought and language but also of the arts and media in general. However, research into this issue has so far predominantly focussed on literature, where a highly differentiated, albeit strictly monomedial critical toolbox exists. Metareference across Media remedies this onesidedness and closes the gap between literature and other media by providing a transmedial framework for analysing metaphenomena. The essays transcend the current notion of metafiction, pinpoint examples of metareference in hitherto neglected areas, discuss the capacity for metaization of individual media or genres from a media-comparative perspective, and explore major (historical) forms and functions as well aspects of the development of metaization in cultural history. Stemming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors propose new and refined concepts and models and cover a broad range of media including fiction, drama, poetry, comics, photography, film, computer games, classical as well as popular music, painting, and architecture. This collection of essays, which also contains a detailed theoretical introduction, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: intermediality studies, semiotics, literary theory and criticism, musicology, art history, and film studies

Preliminary Material -- Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions /Werner Wolf -- Metareference from a Semiotic Perspective /Winfried Nöth -- The Case is 'this': Metareference in Magritte and Ashbery /Andreas Mahler -- Beyond 'Metanarration': Form-Based Metareference as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon /Irina O. Rajewsky -- Metalepsis and Its (Anti-)Illusionist Effects in the Arts, Media and Role-Playing Games /Sonja Klimek -- Generic Titles: On Paratextual Metareference in Music /Hermann Danuser -- "Music about Music": Metaization and Intertextuality in Beethoven's Prometheus Variations opus 35 /Tobias Janz -- Exploring Metareference in Instrumental Music – The Case of Robert Schumann /René Michaelsen -- Phantasmic Metareference: The Pastiche 'Operas' in Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera /David Francis Urrows -- Intramedial Reference and Metareference in Contemporary Music /Jörg-Peter Mittmann -- "Please Play This Song on the Radio": Forms and Functions of Metareference in Popular Music /Martin Butler -- "L'architecture n'est pas un art rigoureux": Jean Nouvel, Postmodernism and Meta-Architecture /Henry Keazor -- Of Museums, Beholders, Artworks and Photography: Metareferential Elements in Thomas Struth's Photographic Projects Museum Photographs and Making Time /Katharina Bantleon and Jasmin Haselsteiner-Scharner -- The Gradable Effects of Self-Reflexivity on Aesthetic Illusion in Cinema /Jean-Marc Limoges -- Novel in/and Film: Transgeneric and Transmedial Metareference in Stranger than Fiction /Barbara Pfeifer -- Narrative Fiction and the Fascination with the New Media Gramophone, Photography and Film Metafictional and Media-Comparative Aspects of H. G. Wells' A Modern Utopia and Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie /Hans Ulrich Seeber -- Metareference and Intermedial Reference: William Carlos Williams' Poetological Poems /Daniella Jancsó -- Metareferentiality in Early Dance: The Jacobean Antimasque /Ingrid Pfandl-Buchegger and Gudrun Rottensteiner -- Textworlds and Metareference in Comics /Karin Kukkonen -- Metareference in the Audio-/Radioliterary Soundscape /Doris Mader -- Metareference in Computer Games /Fotis Jannidis -- When Metadrama Is Turned into Metafilm A Media-Comparative Approach to Metareference /Janine Hauthal -- Quotation of Forms as a Strategy of Metareference /Andreas Böhn -- 'The Media as Such': Meta-Reflection in Russian Futurism – A Case Study of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Poetry, Paintings, Theatre, and Films /Erika Greber -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.