[rohrpost] Conference Announcement: Media Transatlantic IV – Traffic

[Theo Röhle]

International Conference

Media Transatlantic IV – Traffic

March 29 – 31, 2012, University of Paderborn, Germany

Aiming to bring together media scholars from the United States,  
Canada, and Germany, the conference continues a series of symposia  
that began in 2007. After "Re-Reading McLuhan. An International  
Conference on Media and Culture in the 21st Century" (2007), "Media  
Theory on the Move. Transatlantic Perspectives on Media and  
Mediation" (2009) and "Media Theory in North America and German- 
Speaking Europe" (2010), the conference scheduled for 2012 focuses on  
"traffic".

Media products and signs travel just like things and people;  
constantly flowing, they overcome space and time, partly on communal  
and partly on specific networks. Traffic is the sum of its parts, made  
up of an infinite number of acts of transport and transfer. It is,  
however, more than that, because traffic has its own logic and forms  
its own structures and rules. Scientists from different fields will  
follow the tracks of Harold Innis and discuss the media as a form of  
traffic.


Program:

Thursday, March 29:

John Peters  (University of Iowa, USA):
Keynote: Media as Traffic between Nature and Culture.

Panel 1: Innis, McLuhan and Co.

Gabriele Schabacher  (University of Siegen, Germany):
Traffic as 'Dirt Experience'. Harold Innis' Tracing of Media.

Jana Mangold  (University of Erfurt, Germany):
McLuhan's Comprehensive Traffic Science.

Menahem Blondheim  (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel),
Elihu Katz  (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel):
Traffic in an Ancient Empire: Time and Space According to the Biblical  
Book of Esther.



Friday, March 30:

Panel 2: Flows and Counterflows

Grant David Bollmer  (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA):
Vital Networks of Blood and Information: A Media Archaeology of  
Traffic and Flow.

Peter Bexte  (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany):
Endless Traffic & Drowning Sons.

Richard Cavell (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada):
Traffic as Taxonomy in Innis and McLuhan.

Greg Elmer  (Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada),
Ganaele Langlois  (University of Ontario Institute of Technology,  
Oshawa, Canada):
Networked Campaigns:  Traffic Tags and Cross Platform Analysis on the  
Web.

Martina Leeker  (Berlin / University of Köln, Germany),
Michael Steppat  (Beuth Hochschule Berlin, Germany):
Data Traffic. Transformation as a Challenge.


Panel 3: Hold-ups

Wolf-Dieter Ernst  (University of Bayreuth, Germany):
Mobile Performance.

Peter Krapp  (UC Irvine, CA, USA)
Polar Media: The Invisible Axis



Saturday, March 31:

Panel 4: Traffic of Concepts

Norm Friesen  (Thompson Rivers University, Canada):
The Academy and the ‘Commerce of Mind’: Dewey and Educational Media.

Shannon Lowe  (Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster, UK):
Trafficking in Media Methodology: Propositions for an Approach from  
Literature.

Wolfgang Sützl (Vienna/ University of Innsbruck, Austria):
Street protests, electronic disturbance, smart mobs: dislocations of  
resistance

Andreas Ströhl  (Goethe-Institut, München, Germany):
 From ‘Traffic’ to ‘Exchange’ to ‘Communication’ (and Back to  
‘Traffic’ Again). On the Changes of a Modern Model of Thought.



Further information:
http://www.uni-paderborn.de/en/institute-einrichtungen/gk-automatismen/tagungen/

Program as PDF:
http://www.uni-paderborn.de/fileadmin/gk-automatismen/Media_Transatlantic_VI_-_Program__-_Letter.pdf


The Media Transatlantic IV – Traffic conference is organized by the  
DFG Research Training Group “Automatisms” at the University of  
Paderborn, Germany

Participants / guests are asked to register until February 29th.

Please contact the organizers via:
mail: koord at gk-automatismen.upb.de
Phone: +49 (0) 5251 603275
http://www.upb.de/rtg-automatisms


–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Theo Röhle
Post-doctoral researcher

University of Paderborn
Research Training Group "Automatisms"
Warburger Str. 100
D-33098 Paderborn
www.upb.de/rtg-automatisms