CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Media Convergence: Cultural Effects of Mediatisation
and Digitization (informationalisation)
Session organisers: Mikko Lehtonen and Yvonne
Spielmann
Fornäs, Johan (National Institute for Working
Life and Linköping University, Sweden) INTERMEDIAL PASSAGES THROUGH THE
BORDERLANDS OF MEDIATION
Concepts of intermediality, intertextuality and multimodality are here put in a
wider cultural context of boundaries and transgressions, inspired by how earlier
concepts of passages and thresholds resonate with recent ideas of mixtures and
flows across borders within contemporary media culture. A trace from Walter
Benjamin is followed through the borderlands of a contemporary shopping centre
and into convergent digital networks, in order to approach the flows across
borders in late modern media and cultural studies. The paper will outline main
kinds of media passages through real and virtual spaces, and differentiate
between some types and levels of intermedial relations.
van Kranenburg, Rob (University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands) DISAPPEARING COMPUTERS AND NEW MEDIA SPACES
In this paper I will read this move from mixed media to mediatizing the
environment as one in which open source thinking is vital to ensuring that
meta-information on information archictecture is widely and publicly available.
The decisive new beginning of the 21st century is the exchangeability of time
and space in places that are mediated with computational processes that generate
not data (linked to other data) but information (linked to human beings). In
these places where computational processes have disappeared into the background,
into everyday objects - the environment becomes the interface. In a mediated
environment it no longer is clear what is being mediated, and what mediates.
Such environments - your kitchen, living-room, our shopping malls, streets of
old villages, are new beginnings as they reformulate our sense of ourselves in
places in spaces in time. As new beginnings they begin new media. In order to
reflect upon what is generated by new media, and what is of vital importance to
21st century policy and politics, it is necessary to simplify our current
practice into four major building blocks that make up our current view of what
new media constitutes: code, node, link, network.
Lehtonen, Mikko (University of Tampere,
Finland) TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL MULTIMODALITY
The media landscape is changing rapidly. The printed word is not any longer the
self-evident sovereign of the field. The visualization of culture, increasing
number of multimodal texts as well as the increase of intermedial relations
between different media forms all contribute to the formation of a new
landscape. The paper examines multimodality and its consequences in late modern
culture. From cultural studies point of view multimodality challenges the
existing disciplinary and other borders in media and other textual studies and
calls for interdisciplinary work.
Rojola, Sanna (Åbo Akademi, Finland and
University of Lancaster,United Kingdom) MUSIC MAKING WITH MACHINES MAKING MUSIC
Techno music is music made solely with machines. This makes the idea of
"music composing genius" quite alien to techno and brings the artistic
process closer to something that we might rather call craftsmanship. In my paper
I will look at the (inter)relationship between the producers of techno music and
the machines used in its production. What are the cultural effects of machines
that make music? I will look at the human-machine interaction and the way both
human and non-human actors play a role in the music making process. I will show
that the relationship of the 'user' and the machine is a very complex one, each
producing the other. I will also connect the different articulations of machines
and music makers to gender and look at the ways these constructions are gendered
and also gendering.
Spielmann, Yvonne (Braunschweig School of Art,
Germany) INTERMEDIA, HYPERMEDIA, AND HYBRIDIZATION: SOME IDEAS ON CONCEPTS OF
CONVERGENCE
With the increase of today's media convergence - as it results from the use of
computers and is carried out with digital tools - older concepts such as
intermediality are newly discussed in the light of a wider cultural shift. The
paper will argue that the understanding of underlying concepts of interplay that
are specific to different media is crucial when we want to discuss and determine
more complex phenomena of mediatization and digitization that blur the
distinctions. As hybrid cultures develop within an already highly advanced
technological, aesthetic and cultural fusion the merger gets to a degree where
density and complexity are building blocks for new cultural forms but at the
same time veil the construction of re-combinatory and re-mediated systems of
information and visualization. The scrutiny of these structural shifts may also
shed light on the production of knowledge and the traffic of representational
values that are communicated in the 'endless dataspace' where access becomes a
question of power.
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