Lecture series of the Chair of Media Aesthetics
WS 2017/18
Tuesdays, 6 - 8 pm c. t. | University of Regensburg | Central Lecture Hall Building H 4
Organiser: Prof. Dr. Christiane Heibach
Description of the
Figurationen des Unmittelbaren
For a long time, immediacy as a concept was banned from media theory discourses. It was considered one of the most fundamental axioms of media studies, which had been developing since the 1960s, that people could only access their environment via media mediation. However, a closer look reveals that the intensive discussions surrounding digital technologies in particular are characterised by a fundamental ambivalence: Virtual and augmented reality technologies, for example, have been striving since the 1960s and 1970s to provide recipients with the most intense, reality-like and therefore immediate experience possible. Current visions go even further when the technologies disappear completely into our familiar everyday world, so that we forget that we are in high-tech living spaces and constantly interact with (more or less) intelligent machines. These developments are also characterised by the paradigm of immediacy, which can be traced not only in technological practice but also in media theory discourses: The rediscovery of the affective effectiveness of media is just as much a part of this as the idea of enabling more direct interaction again through the use of digital technologies.
Distancelessness, emotionality, directness and immersion are thus components of figurations of the immediate. It is all the more relevant to examine these more closely as they not only promise intensity of experience, but also harbour manipulative potential and possibly promote anti-enlightenment tendencies of the present.
The lecture series will therefore take a critical look at figurations of the immediate from various disciplinary perspectives: Not only media studies will have their say, but also philologies, philosophical issues in theology, cultural studies as well as political science and, last but not least, art and design.
Programme
Dienstags, 18 – 20 Uhr c. t.
17.10.2017
Frank Hartmann (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Beyond media modernity: Interfaces
24.10.2017
Mădălina Diaconu (University of Vienna)
Weather as a medium and phenomenon
7.11.2017
Herbert Schwaab (University of Regensburg)
It's (still) alive. Residues of immediacy in the sitcom and in reality TV
14.11.2017
Stefan Rieger (Ruhr University Bochum)
Anthropophilia. The media's new clothes
21.11.2017
Christoph Wagner (University of Regensburg)
Constructions of immediacy in art
28.11.2017
Natascha Adamowsky (University of Siegen)
Occult media - special effects of immediacy
5.12.2017
Silke Roesler-Keilholz (University of Regensburg)
'net works'. Figurations of surveillance between proximity and distance
12.12.2017
Alexander Thumfart (University of Erfurt)
"Close to the people": The political staging of immediacy
9.1.2018
Solveig Ottmann (University of Regensburg)
Sensing Sounds. ASMR and other (im)immediacies
16.1.2018
Oliver Ruf (Furtwangen University)
Immediate design. About "smart" design
23.1.2018
Michael Fleig (University of Regensburg)
Immediacy between analogue and digital: On the phenomenon of media nostalgia in the
digital era
30.1.2018
Anke Finger (University of Connecticut, Storrs)
Immediacy in the Avant-Garde: On the Breaking Up of Media through the Senses
6.2.2018
Christian Wolff (University of Regensburg)
Immersion, Naturalness, Realism: Varieties of Immediacy in Human-Machine Interaction