The 2012 media|matter conference
reflects the increased interest in the material aspects of our culture,
triggered by the material turn as postulated by Deleuze & Guattari,
Varela & Maturana, Serres, and others. In consequence we will assess the
implications of this blossoming field of research which focuses rather on what
represents, than on what is
represented.
The aim of our conference is to
re-focus approaches in culture- and media-sciences and to open up and foster
new, interdisciplinary perspectives and concepts towards a revised
understanding of media. By highlighting the materiality of the medium and
reading this very materiality as medium, questions occur: can content
and form still be regarded as separate? Or shouldn’t we rather acknowledge that
the matter of the medium affects the message that is conveyed and represented?
Shouldn't we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized
information?
In the same way,
social- and cultural-sciences cannot ignore the findings of the life-sciences,
especially in the fields of complexity-theory and non-linear systems. Thus this
conference also intends to bring together artists and researchers from diverse
disciplines with differing understandings of media and materiality, not only to
create feedback-loops between natural- and cultural-sciences, but also to re-think
the somewhat fuzzy concepts of nature and culture.
