Event Poster
The media aesthetics project examines and engages the saturation of ordinary life by varieties of constant mediation, while also examining the diverse array of mediated experiences and modernities worldwide. Here we have in mind听new forms of digital technology from smartphones, ubiquitous wireless networks, social media, and streaming platforms. Art forms such as literature, cinema, music, and visual art remain important here. But now, with the durationally encompassing nature of contemporary mediation, we look to aesthetic experience broadly for its power to navigate the everyday.
Focusing on the aesthetic nature of mediated experience offers an opportunity to put aside the overwhelmingly negative ways in which media users are interpellated in most discourses (as neurologically addicted, as lacking attention, as victims of Silicon Valley, etc.) in favor of accounting for the real texture of people's ordinary lives. Here we are thinking of aesthetics not just in the sense of art or discourses on art but also in the Greek sense championed by Walter Benjamin in his artwork essay, namely aesthetics as听aisthesis听or a sensibility rooted in perception and sensation. Aesthetics in our view offers a crucial arena of investigation in its attention to sensory experience, textual form, and collective world building. Our project asks: what does it mean to regard contemporary experience by privileging the aesthetic? This conference addresses this question by pursuing the promises and possibilities of an aesthetic education specific to ordinary life in the twenty-first century. What critical language and techniques can best respond to this moment in pedagogy and scholarship? How can we mobilize crosscurrents in humanistic disciplines to navigate, endure, survive, and find pleasures in this increasingly technological historical present?
Thursday, May 2:听听
9:30- 10 am: Introductory Remarks: Dilip Gaonkar and Jayson Harsin
Session 1: 10am -12,00 noon: Lecture Panel:听Media Aesthetics Now
Lunch
Session 2: 1:00-2:30pm:听Media Theory and Media Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 3: Lecture Panel: 3:00-5.00pm:听What is Media Aesthetic Education?
Friday, May 3:听听
Session 4: 10.00am-12.00 noon:听How to Teach Media Aesthetics?听Workshop on Syllabi; Pedagogical methods for Media Aesthetic Education Project
Lunch
Session 5: 1.00-2.30pm:听Global Media Cultures: Platforms, Mediums, Aesthetics
Coffee Break
Session 6: 3.00-4.30pm:听Aesthetic Education of Citizen: Information, Misinformation, and Democracy Under Duress
Saturday, May 4
Session 7: 10am to 12noon:听Workshop on Key Word/Key Themes for Media Aesthetics Project