Media Aesthetics: Experience, Practice, and Pedagogy
May 2-4, 2024
Sponsors:
Description:
The media aesthetics project examines and engages the saturation of ordinary life by varieties of constant mediation, while also examining the diverse array of mediated experiences and modernities worldwide. Here we have in mind new forms of digital technology from smartphones, ubiquitous wireless networks, social media, and streaming platforms. Art forms such as literature, cinema, music, and visual art remain important here. But now, with the durationally encompassing nature of contemporary mediation, we look to aesthetic experience broadly for its power to navigate the everyday. Focusing on the aesthetic nature of mediated experience offers an opportunity to put aside the overwhelmingly negative ways in which media users are interpellated in most discourses (as neurologically addicted, as lacking attention, as victims of Silicon Valley, etc.) in favor of accounting for the real texture of people's ordinary lives. Here we are thinking of aesthetics not just in the sense of art or discourses on art but also in the Greek sense championed by Walter Benjamin in his artwork essay, namely aesthetics as aisthesis or a sensibility rooted in perception and sensation. Aesthetics in our view offers a crucial arena of investigation in its attention to sensory experience, textual form, and collective world building. Our project asks: what does it mean to regard contemporary experience by privileging the aesthetic? This conference addresses this question by pursuing the promises and possibilities of an aesthetic education specific to ordinary life in the twenty-first century. What critical language and techniques can best respond to this moment in pedagogy and scholarship? How can we mobilize crosscurrents in humanistic disciplines to navigate, endure, survive, and find pleasures in this increasingly technological historical present?
Participants
Schedule
Thursday, May 2:
9:30- 10 am: Introductory Remarks: Dilip Gaonkar and Jayson Harsin
Session 1: 10am -12,00 noon: Lecture Panel: Media Aesthetics Now
Lunch
Session 2: 1:00-2:30pm: Media Theory and Media Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 3: Lecture Panel: 3:00-5.00pm: What is Media Aesthetic Education?
Friday, May 3:
Session 4: 10.00am-12.00 noon: How to Teach Media Aesthetics? Workshop on Syllabi; Pedagogical methods for Media Aesthetic Education Project
Lunch
Session 5: 1.00-2.30pm: Global Media Cultures: Platforms, Mediums, Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 6: 3.00-4.30pm: Aesthetic Education of Citizen: Information, Misinformation, and Democracy Under Duress
Saturday, May 4
Session 7: 10am to 12noon: Workshop on Key Word/Key Themes for Media Aesthetics Project
Event Poster
April 9, 2024: An evening with former AUP colleague Adrienne Russell, presenting her new book The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech and Activists are Vying for our Future (Columbia University Press 2023). In her book, Adrienne argues that our inadequate response to climate change is intertwined with the profound challenges facing our communication environment. She will discuss her research on journalists, activists, scientists, and other advocates for climate action, how their efforts are often compromised in today’s media landscape, and what we can do about it. Adrienne Russell is Mary Laird Wood Professor of Communication and co-director of the Center for Journalism, Media, and Democracy at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently a fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.
February 1, 2024: Rethinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect. Comments by contributors: Professor Jayson Harsin (AUP), Professor Bilge Yesil (CUNY Graduate School) and Professor Hannah Westley (AUP) with response by Francois Allard-Huver (Université de Lorraine).
October 19-20, 2023: Discourse on the Plague (1347-1600): Authorities, Experience, and Experiments, Conference at The American University of Paris. Co-organized by Brenton Hobart (The American University of Paris) and Véronique Montagne (Université Côte d’Azur). Medical treatises, historical writings and literary narratives about the plague use a common linguistic register which repeated itself from Antiquity through Renaissance Europe and which persists in today’s popular and scholarly imagination of how we envision epidemic disease – Covid language and plague language are to a large degree one and the same. The truth concerning disease is thereby molded, if not skewed, by a preconceived discourse, which the writers of such truth are (or feel) forced to revisit: to prove knowledge of and move beyond past disease; to establish themselves as authoritative; likely, to learn how to transform ineffable horror into the art form that the printed word is.