[spectre] (fwd) Call for Papers, Special issue: Media aesthetics

[Andreas Broeckmann]

http://www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/index.php

Call for Papers, ZfM Nr. 8 (1/2013)

Special issue: Media aesthetics

Guest Editors: Erich Hörl (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Mark B. N. Hansen 
(Duke University)

“The aesthetic power of feeling”, wrote the late Félix Guattari, seems 
to be “on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the 
collective assemblages of enunciation of our era.” In discerning a “new 
aesthetic paradigm” he was not anticipating something along the lines of 
the primacy of the institutionalised arts within the social field, but 
rather a kind of “proto-aesthetic paradigm”, traversing all universes of 
value and existential territories, from the arenas of science and the 
ethico-political, to the modalities and practices of subjectivation. 
This general aestheticisation which Guattari had in mind at the end of 
the 1980s may be regarded as one of the first descriptions of a 
fundamental upheaval in the history of technology and sensation, a 
change taking place during the second half of the twentieth century, but 
especially since the 1990s, and one which potentially shifts the meaning 
of aesthetics as such: under the new media-technological conditions we 
observe a proto-aesthetic dressing of the present. This means a 
fundamental prioritising of the problem of perception and ultimately of 
all the sensations and affects which underpin the faculty of perception 
– such that media aesthetics may well become a fundamental problem of 
media studies. At the same time, the aesthetic question thereby proves 
increasingly to be a techno-ecological question of the networked and 
sensory environments in which sensation occurs.

The possible sensorial and sensational facts which characterise the new 
aesthetic – or more precisely, media-aesthetic – regime, range from 
streams of time-objects, as they spread hyperindustrialised and 
technologised audiovisual objects on the basis of numerical transfer 
standards, to the rise of sensory milieus (e.g. RFID), to the 
algorithmic environments of the software agencies of ubiquitous media, 
ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and calm technologies. We are 
witnessing the transformation of the “technological unconscious” (Nigel 
Thrift), and with it the transformation of the aesthetic conditions and 
means by which the world appears – the general backgrounds of existence 
and experience, and thus the meaning of the world.

This special issue of ZfM sets out to clarify the historical-systematic 
contours as well as the political implications of the new aesthetic 
paradigm. This necessitates focusing on the key technical-medial scenes 
of the current sensorial caesura, outlining the associated conceptual 
challenges and issues of politics of terminology, in order thereby to 
contribute to the redescription of media-aesthetics under technological 
conditions, in particular those of the new era of social and mobile 
media in the network age.

The following central questions are to be addressed: What are the core 
problems of media aesthetics that are associated with the 
technical-medial transformation of the present, and what are the 
corresponding media-aesthetic perspectives? What is the meaning of 
experience, perception, sensation, subjectivity under these new 
media-aesthetic conditions? Does the outline of an original 
media-aesthetic question emerge, on the ground of the new facts of 
perception emergent in digital, networked media systems and algorithmic 
milieus, which would contrast with the now traditional philosophical 
aesthetics? What scenes should be considered, and which semantic frames 
are required, in order to seize the media-aesthetic question in its 
specificity and its urgency? How does the new conceptual politics relate 
to traditional aesthetic conceptual regimes – where are the possible 
connections, and where do we find a need for other conceptual 
strategies? What genealogical scenes for the new media-aesthetic 
paradigm can be discerned in the twentieth century? What are the 
political challenges of the new aesthetic condition? How should we 
assess previous attempts to redefine aesthetics under these radical 
media-technological conditions?

Text submissions (around 25,000 characters, notes and spaces included), 
by the end of August 2012, to: erich.hoerl at ruhr-uni-bochum.de

This special issue of ZfM will be published in April 2013.

The language of publication is German. Papers are accepted in German, 
English and French; papers will be translated after peer-review and 
acceptance.