There is beauty in embracing both the past and the future, for it is in the blending of the old and the new that progress is made.
- Marge Piercy, He, She and It
How are our lives, politics, desires, and decisions are formed, informed, and scripted by screen-based imaginaries? This seminar returns to the times of the net and what came before. It will look at various forms of (new) media like video, net.art and electronic disturbance through the lens of urgency and the screen based wishes to escape the embodied realities of hetero-normative states of being, and open up the dreamtime space of alt.cultures and their struggles for liberation. We will read related manifestos as tools of those not included in Big Tech's algorithm to see how they inform social practices that challenge and corrupt the steady flow of politics, economics, aesthetics and history. Learning with those operating outside the dominant systems that produce and reproduce power, Manifestly Media will dust off the utopic metallic cast of 90's cyberculture and re-examine its less shiny and more radical potentials. This seminar will be continued over several semesters and navigate hacking, net.art, techno-feminisms, netzkritik and media art from below. In SoSe 25, we will navigate projects and texts by Shu Lea Cheang, Fran Ilich, Mark Fischer, Coco Fusco, Attila Kotanyi, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Marge Piercy, Carsten Nicolai, Alexei Shulgin and more.
Depending on the level of engagement, students can receive one of two credit options: (Leistungsschein Medienkunst, Leistungsschein Fachtheorie Medienkunst).
- Dozent/in: Diana McCarty