Excavating Media: Devices, Processes, Apparatuses

An interdisciplinary conference addressing new approaches to media theory and history.

Venue: Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Dates: 30th June – 1st July 2017

Media often escape articulation, even as they shape articulation itself. Today, we increasingly express ourselves through and within digital media, yet our critical vocabulary for these devices, their processes, and the apparatuses in which they are enmeshed, remains thin. Even as the study of media has become an increasingly prominent feature of the scholarly landscape in recent years, it remains a notoriously difficult field to define. This conference will explore the methodologies with which we might excavate past media forms and the knowledge they produce, as well as practices with which we might usefully juxtapose new and old media in order to reframe these technologies in the present.

Plenary addresses will be given by:

Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art)

&

Bernhard Siegert (Gerd-Bucerius-Professor for History and Theory of Cultural Techniques and Director of IKKM, Bauhaus Universität Weimar)