05 Dec 2016

disseminations. Media Cultural Practices for the Digital Age – International Symposium

The term culture derives from the Latin word colere: to nurse, to farm, to reclaim.
From the concept's origins in agriculture it was then transferred to the human ambition to foster and develop intellectual goods. In any case, culture is strongly connected with lived activity: with practiced literacy and education. In view of the exploding variety of media productions, and a steadily increasing usage of media in daily life, the need of media aesthetic education gains more and more significance.

The term dissemination relates to sowing, spreading, and sharing. Coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it was associated with endless spreading and potential emergence of meaning (1972). The symposium will subject the term to further transformations, testing and applying it in regard to prospective media specific cultural concepts. Within this frame, internationally renowned experts will discuss their theoretical and practical approaches to the topics of media culture and media aesthetic education.
What's the significance of raising the question of culture in the age of digital media? Which kind of phenotypes will such media culture take on and which methods will it use to sustain? Is it possible, by focusing on media cultural topics and practices, to achieve some deeper understanding on how to change or improve the media's quality and enrich our lives?

These and other questions will be discussed, inspired by horizons opened up by e.g. Neil Postman, R. Murray Schafer, and Jutta Wermke: The symposium's experts stem from media and cultural studies and/or engineering sciences who are at the same time practitioners like Leah Barclay (Australia), Mark Lipton (Canada), Raitis Smits (Latvia), Stephen Kovats (South-Sudan/Germany), Dalila Honorato (Greece), Jörg Stelkens, Max Kullmann, Klaus Schüller, Daniil Vishnya (Germany) and the world famous ornithologist Walter Tilgner.

Conference chair is Sabine Breitsameter, Professor for Sound & Media Culture at Darmstadt UAS, program director of the Master´s course International Media Cultural Work (imc.mediencampus.h-da.de/).