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Media
Friday 3 October 2008 - 8 p.m.
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In previous decades the mixing of different media and art genres was principally an attempt to break with the modernist desire for purity and medium specificity. Terms such as ‘multimedia’, ‘mixed media’ and ‘intermedia’ were created to describe new fusions within the arts in other fields of operation, outside the white cube. Digital media also generated a democratic revolution. Everyone can become a multimedia artist. What is the status of the medium in art production and the discourse in art, in this situation referred to by Rosalind Krauss as the ‘postmedium condition’? How can an artist act critically in this complex cultural field now dominated by multimedia and mass media? How can this essentially Western discourse be related to the artistic production in non-Western cultures?

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Speakers
Kaja Silverman (US) is Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. Her specialist topics are cinema, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, time-based visual art and literature. Silverman’s numerous publications include Speaking About Godard (1998) and World Spectators (2000). Flesh of My Flesh will appear in 2009.
Laura U. Marks (CAN) is Professor in Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She specialises in new media art, experimental cinema, film theory and Arab and Islamic arts. Marks’s publications include The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000) and the forthcoming Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art.

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Moderator
Sudeep Dasgupta (NL) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
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