In Terms of Media…

Our present is shaped not only by visible architectures of data and computation, but also by registers that precede or exceed explicit discourse:

the mythological and occult substrates through which technological imaginaries take hold;

the noise from which systems, meanings, and exclusions emerge;

the conditions of mediated life and their entanglement with colonial histories of power and sensing;

the atmospheric environments that orient conduct and produce consent without explicit command.

What are the terms under which media acts through lore, noise, sense, and air?

With its second instalment, the In Terms of Media… symposium continues the Weibel Institute for Digital Culture's ongoing engagement with contemporary media technologies.

Rewatch the first symposium from 2024 here

With:

Elisa Balmaceda, Josephine Berry, Anna Engelhardt, Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado Casanova, Patricia Reed, Aura Satz, Marc Steinberg, Valentina Tanni, Jamieson Webster, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Gary Zhexi Zhang, and Jesse Damiani (Workshop)

Across four panels and two workshops, the symposium brings together artists, theorists, and practitioners to trace these registers from multiple angles, attending to the historical conditions from which our present has emerged and the alternative practices it might yet generate.

Lore:

This panel approaches technoculture as a myth-making machine, tracing how narratives and aesthetics coalesce into speculative folklore that shapes how technology is imagined. Folklore is understood as a form of situated knowledge-making that emerges when systems exceed legibility, with users and platforms alike taking part in its production, from vernacular sense-making to strategic self-mythologizing.

With Günseli Yalcinkaya, Valentina Tanni, Gary Zhexi Zhang. Moderation: Sophie Publig
(5 Nov, 15:00–16:30)

Noise:

noise is not merely the negation or an obstruction of meanings. In a more productive sense, the complexity of the term might be considered as the condition from which systems, meanings, and materialities become possible precisely through their exposure to friction and interference as an onto-epistemological condition. This panel considers what it means to think from within indeterminacy rather than simply against it.

With Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado Casanova, Patricia Reed. Moderation: Mikkel Rørbo
(5 Nov, 17:00–18:30)

Sense:

As networks of sensors and surveillance expand in service of a technocratic global order, the panel asks what it might mean for artistic practices to reorient sensing as tender, slow, and situated. Gathering artists and theorists attending to listening, vibration, touch, and embodied sensation, the panel moves between the biopolitics of sound, colonial histories embedded in aesthetic regimes, and epistemologies emerging from feminist, decolonial, and more-than-human practices — foregrounding resonance, tenderness, and grounded ecological entanglement, while accounting for turbulences.

With Elisa Balmaceda, Josephine Berry, Aura Satz.
Moderation: Denise Helene Sumi
(6 Nov, 15:00–16:30)

AIR:

Taking air as medium, chemical agent, and social field, this panel asks how atmospheres are engineered to produce orientation, alignment, and consent without explicit command. Atmospheric governance operates not through declaration but by conditioning the environment in which certain thoughts, affects, and decisions become thinkable and others do not. Bringing together artists and researchers working across material, perceptual, and geopolitical registers, the panel asks what it means to think and act politically through and against air.

With Anna Engelhardt, Marc Steinberg, Jamieson Webster. Moderation: Asia Bazdyrieva, Naoki Matsuyama
(6 Nov, 17:00–18:30)

The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures is a space for intervention, investigation, and experimentation within the expansive disciplines of arts, science, and technologies. Based at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the institute critically engages digital and algorithmic cultures. Building on the rich heritage of Viennese investigations into cybernetics, net cultures, media art, and tactical media, the institute serves as a vital node within a global network of research institutions on digital cultures. (More info)