An encyclopedia of media objects

What is... an object? a medium? an encyclopedia?

a speculative research project Tutor: Florian Cramer, J.J.F.Cramer ... hr.nl

0: Introduction

April 4th - brainstorming and collective visual mapping: what are objects, media, encyclopediae? Assignment: Choose three "media objects" as your rough prototypes to critically reflect upon.

Part 1: what is an object?

April 16th - Martin Heidegger, The Thing, 1935/1962, in: Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, The Object Reader, Routledge, 2009, 113-123 + assignment to each student to show how one of their chosen objects can be used to illuminate or criticize Heidegger's notion of thing

April 23rd: excursion to BAK Utrecht, meet at 11:00 at Rotterdam Central, meet at the subway entrance inside the main hall - Tristan Garcia, Form and Object - A Treatise on Things, Edinburgh University Press 2014 (Presses Universitaires de France 2010), p. 19-38: "No-Matter-What" & Bruno Latour, Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts, 1992 in: Object Reader, p. 229-254 + assignment to each student to present how Garcia's notion of things and Latour's notion of artifacts relate to their prototyped media objects

April 30th - critical revision of initial visual mapping; critical revision of prototypes.

Part 2: what is a medium?

May 11th - Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast, 1954 & Understanding Media, 1964, chapter 1: "The medium is the message" + voluntary assignment: Ernesto Fennolosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 1920 + assignment to each student to relate their initial notion of "medium", as embodied in their prototypes, to McLuhan's notion of medium

May 18th - Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1960, in: Harrison/Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, section 17 + Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage to the North Sea, Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, 1999 + Félix Guattari, Towards a Post-Media Era (1988), in: Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater (eds.), Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, Mute, 2013, p.26-27 + assignment to each student to relate their prototyped media objects to to the notions of the artistic medium, "post-medium" and "post-media"

May 28th - Public lecture & discussion, possibly in collaboration with PZI Fine Art: What are "media" in the arts? - Continued work on media object prototypes, with individual studio visits.

Part 3: what is an encyclopedia?

June 1st - Reading encyclopedias: Pliny, Naturalis historica, 77-79 AD; Johann Heinrich Alsted, Encyclopedia, 1630; Dennis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1751-1772; Peter Greenaway, Prospero's Books (1991)

June 11th - Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, 1942 + Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, preface, 1966 + collective revision of initial mappings, taking into account (a) media object prorotypes, (b) notion of (speculative) encyclopedias

Part 3: speculative design research

June 18th: The last weeks will be dedicated to developing, in several teams, parts of an experimental Encyclopedia of Media Objects that will start with a definition of itself. This encyclopedia can take any form, and is born from a critical reflection of (a) what a medium is in general and (b) what its own media, objecthood and notion of encyclopedia will be in particular. At this point, the prototypes

Final week: June 22nd-June 27th: public presentation of the first edition of the encyclopedia of media objects at V2_, in a form/format that fits the concepts of enclycopedia, media and objects developed in the seminar.

previous work

2014/2015

• Real-time - User:Max_Dovey/Reading_Writing_Research_Methodologies/realtime
• Sociogram - User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS/SG
• Selfie - User:Mihail_Bakalov/Trimester_4/READING,_WRITING_AND_RESEARCH_METHODOLOGIES/MediaObject
• User profile - User:Δεριζαματζορπρομπλεμιναυστραλια/Graduateresearchseminar/emo
• Patron Saints - User:Luisa_Moura/research/work/Luisa_Moura,_patron_saints,_2014
• Button - User:Mathijs_van_Oosterhoudt/rwrm/button
• Magician - User:Lucia_Dossin#EMO_entry
• Giants - User:Chen_Junyu/graduation/theise/project_proposal/Draft:EMO
• Image - User:Artyom_kocharyan/mediaobject
• Technoprimitivism - User:Zigbe/MediaObject
• the mouse and the interrupt - User:Joak/mediaobject

2013

Encyclopedia of Media Objects wiki