Medium as Environment: A Materialist Approach

BiographyKristin Veel is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen and Research Fellow at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on the impact of information and communication technology on the contemporary cultural imagination, with a particular interest in issues of information overload and surveillance, and the way in which these are negotiated in film, art and literature. She is PI of the collaborative project Uncertain Archives Adapting Cultural Theories of the Archive to Understand the Risks and Potentials of Big Data, and her forthcoming book A Tale of Two Towers:Gigantism in Architectural and Digital Culture, co-written with Henriette Steiner, will be out with MIT Press in spring 2020.Ulrik Schmidt“Medium as Environment: A Materialist Approach”This presentation will take the starting point in the simple observation that media has one of its etymological origins in Aristotle’s concept of perièchon, roughly meaning ‘that which surrounds, encompasses’ (Spitzer 1942). This indicates a basic environmentalunderstanding of media that is still present –albeit often more implicitly –in many key thinkers of modern media theory, from Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan to new (German) media philosophy (Kittler, Ernst, Berressem, Herzogenrath etc.) and media ecology (Fuller, Hansen, Terranova, Chun, Parrika, Bryant). In my presentation, I will, from a materialist and post-phenomenological perspective, discuss the aesthetic implications of this understanding of media as environments by exploring some of the ways media can function as affective, environmental framings of perception.