Media Aesthetics: Experience, Practice, and Pedagogy
May 2-4, 2024
Sponsors:
听顿别蝉肠谤颈辫迟颈辞苍:
The media aesthetics project examines and engages the saturation of ordinary life by varieties of constant mediation, while also examining the diverse array of mediated experiences and modernities worldwide. Here we have in mind new forms of digital technology from smartphones, ubiquitous wireless networks, social media, and streaming platforms. Art forms such as literature, cinema, music, and visual art remain important here. But now, with the durationally encompassing nature of contemporary mediation, we look to aesthetic experience broadly for its power to navigate the everyday. Focusing on the aesthetic nature of mediated experience offers an opportunity to put aside the overwhelmingly negative ways in which media users are interpellated in most discourses (as neurologically addicted, as lacking attention, as victims of Silicon Valley, etc.) in favor of accounting for the real texture of people's ordinary lives. Here we are thinking of aesthetics not just in the sense of art or discourses on art but also in the Greek sense championed by Walter Benjamin in his artwork essay, namely aesthetics as听aisthesis听or a sensibility rooted in perception and sensation. Aesthetics in our view offers a crucial arena of investigation in its attention to sensory experience, textual form, and collective world building. Our project asks: what does it mean to regard contemporary experience by privileging the aesthetic? This conference addresses this question by pursuing the promises and possibilities of an aesthetic education specific to ordinary life in the twenty-first century. What critical language and techniques can best respond to this moment in pedagogy and scholarship? How can we mobilize crosscurrents in humanistic disciplines to navigate, endure, survive, and find pleasures in this increasingly technological historical present?
Participants
Schedule
Thursday, May 2:听听
9:30- 10 am: Introductory Remarks: Dilip Gaonkar and Jayson Harsin
Session 1: 10am -12,00 noon: Lecture Panel:听Media Aesthetics Now
Lunch
Session 2: 1:00-2:30pm:听Media Theory and Media Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 3: Lecture Panel: 3:00-5.00pm:听What is Media Aesthetic Education?
Friday, May 3:听听
Session 4: 10.00am-12.00 noon:听How to Teach Media Aesthetics?听Workshop on Syllabi; Pedagogical methods for Media Aesthetic Education Project
Lunch
Session 5: 1.00-2.30pm:听Global Media Cultures: Platforms, Mediums, Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 6: 3.00-4.30pm:听Aesthetic Education of Citizen: Information, Misinformation, and Democracy Under Duress
Saturday, May 4
Session 7: 10am to 12noon:听Workshop on Key Word/Key Themes for Media Aesthetics Project
Event Poster
April 9, 2024: An evening with former BT天堂 colleague Adrienne Russell,听presenting听her听new book听The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech and Activists are Vying for our Future听(Columbia University Press 2023).听In her book, Adrienne argues that our听inadequate response to climate change is intertwined with the profound challenges facing our communication environment.听She will discuss her research on journalists, activists, scientists, and other advocates for climate action, how their efforts are often compromised in today鈥檚 media landscape, and what we can do about it. Adrienne Russell听is Mary Laird Wood Professor of Communication and co-director of the听Center for Journalism, Media, and Democracy听at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.听
February 1, 2024: Rethinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect.听Comments by contributors: Professor Jayson Harsin (BT天堂), Professor Bilge Yesil (CUNY Graduate School) and Professor Hannah Westley (BT天堂) with response by Francois Allard-Huver (Universit茅 de Lorraine).
October 19-20, 2023:听Discourse on the Plague (1347-1600): Authorities, Experience, and Experiments, Conference at The American University of Paris.听Co-organized by Brenton Hobart (The American University of Paris) and V茅ronique Montagne (Universit茅 C么te d鈥橝zur).听Medical treatises, historical writings and literary narratives about the plague use a common linguistic register which repeated itself from Antiquity through Renaissance Europe and which persists in today鈥檚 popular and scholarly imagination of how we envision epidemic disease听鈥 Covid language and plague language are to a large degree one and the same. The听truth听concerning disease is thereby molded, if not skewed, by a preconceived discourse, which the writers of such听truth听are (or feel) forced to revisit: to prove knowledge of and move beyond past disease; to establish themselves as authoritative; likely, to learn how to transform ineffable horror into the art form that the printed word is.