Goldsmiths’ University postgraduate module After New Media has now been released as an open access, online course.
This course builds on, and challenges, existing approaches to media by tracing the transition from debates on new media to debates on mediation. ‘Mediation’ takes us from a more spatial, black-boxed approach to separate media, and separate aspects of the media (production, content, reception) towards a more temporal approach which is often invoked but rarely developed.
The course will ask what it means to study ‘the media’ as a complex process which is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological and technical. It will trace the origins of this question in debates on remediation that are critical of new media teleology (and its links to capital), and it will trace the evolution of this question through a range of philosophical and contextual approaches which will frame the concept of mediation in relation to creativity, conservatism, change and continuity.
In the context of specific media events such as the LHC project at CERN, the current global financial crisis (the Credit Crunch), the world’s first face transplant, the ongoing quest for life on Mars and the emergence of intelligent media, the course will investigate the relation between the event and its mediation. This course asks, would it be more accurate to say that rather than being represented by the media, these events are performed through mediation, and, if events are performative, then how should we respond to them in our critiques?
The course is best viewed using the iTunes U app or via the iTunes U website here, but the podcast lectures will also be available soon on the Goldsmiths University website. Lectures and additional material including videos and slides will be released on a weekly basis throughout November, December and January and will remain available for review until September 2015. A ‘liquid reader’ accompanies this course and students and participants will be invited to contribute to this with their own articles, essays or image-based responses.
For further details please email ben.craggs@gold.ac.uk
Goldsmiths, University of London