RMeS RMa Course: Matters of Media in Art-Science: between the organic and the digital

When: November-December 2024, exact dates see below
Where: Leiden University – room Lipsius 2.04
ECTS: 5
Instructor: Dr. Ksenia Fedorova
Organisation: RMeS
For: First and second year RMa students in Media Studies, who are a member of a Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool). Students who are members of RMeS will have first access.

Registration will open 11 September 2024 via THIS LINK

In this course students examine media theoretical dimensions of practices at the intersection of art, science and technology. Materiality has always been of particular importance for the arts as its qualities contribute actively to perception and hence the ‘work’ of art. Today’s technologies make possible activation of latent capacities of matter in numerous novel and thought-provoking ways. Soft robotics, genetic modification, bio-based materials, and ‘internet of forest’ are among the many examples of hybridity between living and nonliving matter and the realm of information. The diversity and constant evolvement of material forms (especially the inclusion of organic matter) give a new twist to the classical functions of media – to store, to transmit and to process information. Furthermore, posthumanist and new materialist theories, as well as neocybernetics prepare conceptual frameworks for shifting away from the anthropocentric perspective and embracing the importance of ecological relations, adaptive systems and diverse forms of cognition. Material conditions mediate exchange and contribute to the very production of knowldege. Artists experimenting with new ‘matters’ (or ‘materia’) of media often inevitably delve into the worlds of science finding inspiration in the fields like bioinformatics or geophysics and in media technologies employed and generated by them. The science-art relationship has become an exciting and dynamic field where controversial ethical issues, societal consequences of technoscience, and the art of science itself are being addressed. In this course we will unravel intricate capactieis of technologies to mediate between matter and meaning and the domains of the human and the more-than-human.

The students will:

• become familiar with approaches to media in terms of their materiality;
• learn to reflect on the social and cultural consequences of technoscience by studying art works;
• analyze the specificity of the usage of media in technological and bio- art by engaging media theoretical, STS, new materialist and aesthetic perspectives.