Post-Media Lab [project]

:: conception/curating/coordination | 1110-1312 | together w/ Cl. Apprich, J. Berry Slater, A. Iles


(i): Giles A. Radford/metamoof> :
Internet. 2006. Tanger, Marokko.
(cc by-sa-nc)
>



for a minimum of 2 years we can host numerous projects around the concept of “post-mediality” and together elucidate the possibilities of critical interventions given the governing networks of the “second-media age”, ie under the conditions of the globalization of network infrastructures, ubiquitous computing and digitally driven media convergence.

it thereby parttakes in the first wave of a shift noticeable everywhere in media theory and media reflection: a turn – ultimately a re-turn – to more culturalist, critical minded and socially reflective theories of media. it is part of a broader shift Èto find transversal concepts that could help considering New Media […] in a broader cultural context, and in a non-technological way.Ç [media newmedia postmedia>]

– especially of interest to me is a possibility within the Post-Media Lab to relate and reach-out to critical minded, programmatic projects, participating in a broader discourse of self-definition:

The Lab aims to build a place where the aesthetic and utopian moments of ubiquitous media can be recaptured, and the multilayered forces and textures of media space become newly legible. We take up ‘post-media’ as an inherently critical notion adequate to the media strategies of scenes, movements and collectives – rather than the individualities and normativities produced by commercial media – which construct and intensify social agencies, help develop new forms of relation and generate counter-meanings.


it seems as exciting to be able to radically broaden the form and understanding of academic notions of ‘theory’ – and in consequence to not intervene into the originary theory aspirations of the hosted projects in any intrusive way – while still opting for letting the different styles and worlds of ‘theory’ interact with each other:

Residency-holders will work autonomously, i.e. not to a brief. Their projects do not have to be unique to Post-Media Lab – on the contrary, we particularly welcome ongoing projects to stay in the Lab for a limited period within their longer lifespans. We also encourage the inclusion of projects with their own wider institutional infrastructures or, indeed, risky and speculative projects with open outcomes….


– the whole ‘vision statement’ at the PML- website: >


… from the english PML vision-statement:
In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro background environment – actively accessible by only a small coterie of scientists, experts, and state or corporate agents – to pervading and augmenting our lives at an increasingly micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know from direct experience that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects in need of constant reckoning. The Post-Media Lab offers a space in which to examine, reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried perspective. We seek to slow down the machinic pace of ‘cybertime’ just enough to allow for a different tempo of thought to engage and encompass it. Through a programme of four bi-annual residency cycles spanning 2012 and 2013, the Lab will provide participants (artists, technologists, film-makers, activists, cultural/media theorists) with the practical and intellectual support and resources to build real-world, aesthetic, technical or theoretical assemblages which operate acutely on the interface between digital networks and social and political life. This activity will be situated within a variety of experimental, discursive and distributive contexts, also making use of public events, publishing projects and online documentation to foster a trans-local public, and network of participants, for the Lab.
[…]
Guiding principles of the Lab will be to maintain a wide historical perspective and to scrutinise established programmatic and strategic positions; the concepts, experiments and radical promise of past engagements with telecommunications, digital media and aesthetics will be kept in mind, as much to reprise their energies and enthusiasms as to create a gauge for where we find ourselves today. To this end, we will retrieve early and inspirational forecasts of the internet´s radical social potential; avant-garde experiments into the activation and participation of audiences; pioneering experiments in building alternative social and technical infrastructures and self-institution; and technologists´ dreams of inherently horizontal, open and distributed networks. Their histories will help us diagnose and think beyond the outlines of our contemporary networked life, with its qualitatively new potentials and crises.