Between Media, Art and Performance: Multimedia, Transmedia, Intermedia

 

In this course, students will examine academic debates and concepts which discuss the different ways in which media, art, and performance relate to one another. From art criticism, to performance studies, to software studies, the concept of "medium” or “mediality” is often theorised differently: it at times refer to sign systems, forms of art, outcomes of performances, institutionalized practices, media materialities or technologies. Most of the key terms that are used to conceptualise what a “medium” is and what it does are usually developed from the perspective of specific disciplines and only a few discuss these questions on a meta-theoretical level.

In the seminar we will examine a range of academic debates on media relationships and medium specificities by trying to find out: what are the guiding interests, historical, and theoretical perspectives and key issues of the debates; what models of discourse could be distinguished; what are the key concepts of such debates; what kind of objects or phenomena are they referring to?  We will pay close attention to how the specificities or limits of given mediums can be crossed or blurred in certain works and result into novel modes of making, perceiving and experiencing media, art, and performance.