Rethinking Materiality: Affect, Technology, and Art

June 16 – 18, 2016

Event — Since the mid-nineties art and media theories have distanced themselves from critiques of representation and instead have embraced a new orientation towards an affective or »materialist« view. Together with new ontological concepts pointing at pre- and non-human materiality and affections, digital technologies have built an infrastructural environment and have been a constitutive force for questioning fundamentally the status of matter and affect.
Time and movement as two decisive dimensions of affect (cf. Angerer/Bösel/Ott: Timing of Affect, 2014), play a central role in art and media in general, and matter, according to Karen Barad, challenges us to redefine the production of meaning (apart from language). We invite researchers with a focus on Time-based Media and Performative Arts in order to discuss the digital stimulus for a rethinking of materiality and critical reflection on the material turn in three major directions: Questioning Materiality, Methodological Challenges, Aesthetic Strategies.

The workshop is part of the COST Action IS1307 »New Materialism – Networking European Scholarship on ›How matter comes to matter‹«.

FRIDAY, JUNE 17

14:00 –14:30	Welcome & Introduction of our Guests
14:30 – 16:00	Input: »Control: Media Technologies and the Modulations of Affect« (O. Leistert, J. Weber, S. Wiemer)
16:00 –16:30	Coffee Break
16:30 – 17:30	Discussion of two Texts: John Cheney-Lippold »A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control«; Jeremy Crampton »Assemblage of the Vertical: Commercial Drones and Algorithmic Life«
18:00 –20:00	Public Evening Lecture by Louise Amoore »Cloud Control«

SATURDAY, JUNE 18

10:00 am	Future plans and activities
12:30 pm	Lunch Break
2:00 pm	End