Immediation

edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

  • Immediations
  • Published: 2019
  • ISBN: 978-1-78542-084-9
  • PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-062-7

A shudder instantly runs down the spine, calling each vertebrae to attention! Would ‘immediation’ not return us right away to direct perception of the world; what is given in experience; the simplicity of the present and all the attendant (historical) problems? It is necessary to revisit the notion of “mediation,” enshrined in the very term “the media”, which is everywhere today. All “media-tion” stages and distributes real, embodied – that is, immediate, events. The concept of immediation entails that cultural, technical, aesthetic objects, subjects, and events can no longer be abstracted from the ways in which they contribute to and are changed by broader ecologies. This book seeks to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action. Immediation I and II ask otherwise: what are the thinking-feeling imperceptibilities that colour, contour and condition relational experience today? All 25 contributors explore qualities of relationality, spacetimes of the event and transversal fields of thinking-making through expanded research. Together and apart, they generate novel concepts for immediating.

“Truly, Immediation is a rhizome. And yet, even as the tendrils make off in so many different, fascinating directions, the relationship between the chapters in each “movement” is indisputable: the essays address, reiterate, echo, scrutinize, reflect and “preflect” each other.
Gregory Flaxman – Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director of Global Cinema Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“…a palpable sense of controlled yet innovative experimentation.”
John Protevi – Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University

Editor Bios

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless, The Minor Gesture (2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (2014).

Anna Munster is a professor specialising in media art, politics and contemporary technologies in the faculty of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Munster also researches artificial intelligence and its relations and impact on visual culture. She is the leader of the Australian Research Council Project “Re-imaging the empirical: statistical visualisation in art and science”. Her major publications are An Aesthesia of Networks (2013) and Materializing New Media (2006), which won a ‘highly commended’ in the 2008 Prix Ars Electronica Media Research category. She is a founding member of the online peer-reviewed Fibreculture Journal and has published with Theory, Culture and Society, Inflexions, CTheory, and Computational Culture. Anna Munster is a practicing media artist collaborating with Michele Barker. Their artworks explore embodied perception, emphasising relations across sensory modalities and movement. Barker and Munster engage digital technologies, medical and scientific applications, and are interested in cultural and popular responses to science and technology. They have exhibited at The Science Gallery, Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Art, Seoul and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney among others.

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen is a professor in culture and media specialising in film and interfaces at Scandinavian Studies, School of Communication and Culture, Arts, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is leader of the Danish research project Affects, Interfaces, Events (2015-2020) and was leader of the Nordic research project Globalization and Nordic Art (2008-11), and of the Danish research project Reality, Realism, the Real in Visual Context (1999-2002). She chairs the board of School of Authors in Denmark (2016-2020), and is a committee member of the Swedish research fund, Vetenskapsraadet from 2016. She was Deputy-Editor-in Chief (2013-15) and Editor-in-chief of Journal of Aesthetic and Culture (2017-2019). Her recent books and editorships in English are: Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram (Aarhus University Press, 2018), From Sign to Signal.