Koç University CSSH Seminar: Hybridity in Contemporary Media Arts

Hybridity in Contemporary Media Arts

Time: 16:45
Location: Koç University, Rumeli Feneri (Main) Campus SOS Z 27

I will discuss heterogenous forms of interplay in the digital that are considered hybrid because they no longer refer to distinct media but to already mediated elements that characterise our present time of digital media. I will also refer to approachs in media studies and in cultural studies where they agree that artists are the promotors of radical and critical hybridity as much as they reflect culural-aesthetic multiplicity and difference and make us aware of the construction of meaning with and through media appearances. Because of the advanced deleopments with novel technologies in Asia, I will put one focus on examples of Japanese media arts that are also circulating within Europe, and will in comparison refer to exampes of critical media arts I from a European perspective that also reflects our highly saturated media enviornments. In this respect questions of connecting real and virtual location and the positioning of cultural context and the effects of effacing borders between fact and fiction are gaining importance. In light of these hybrid fusions, I wish to discuss the role of creative use of new technologies

Professor Yvonne Spielmann
Chair of New Media
University of the West of Scotland
School of Creative Industries
http://www.yvonne-spielmann.com

Professor Yvonne Spielmann (Ph.D. habil.) is Chair of New Media at The University of the West of Scotland, previously Professor of Visual Media at Braunschweig School of Art. She is author of the German language monographs “Eine Pfütze in bezug aufs Mehr. Avantgarde” (1991), “Intermedialität. Das System Peter Greenaway” (1998), and “Video. Das reflexive Medium” (2005). The English edition “Video. The Reflexive Medium” (published with MIT Press, 2008) was awarded the “Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics” in 2009. The Japanese edition is forthcoming from Sangen-Sha Press, Tokyo, the Polish edition is forthcoming from Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa.

The most recent book on “Hybrid Culures” (2010) discusses on hybridity in digital media arts with a focus on Japan (English edition forthcoming with MIT Press, 2012).