Browse results
The series “Aesthetic Practice” is dedicated to the investigation of practice dimensions of the arts from a transdisciplinary perspective, but also to the exploration of everyday aesthetic practices.It will address how works of art can be understood as manifestations of practices, such as exercises, rehearsals, improvisations, writing processes, acts of sketching or designing. These practices can furthermore be considered in their eespective aesthetic intrinsic value as well as explored in contexts beyond the art world. Other focal points include work on aesthetic practices in the context of a postcolonial aesthetics as well as activity-theoretical investigations of the relationship between action, practice, and aesthetic practice, which complement the current praxeological turn in the humanities and social sciences with an aesthetic perspective.
The series examines the crowd from antiquity through modernity to the present as a dispositive, i.e. as a heterogeneous totality of ways of speaking, bodies, power techniques, affects, metaphors, sign processes and cultural practices in three interlocking fields: (1) Conceptual history and semantics: the conceptually complex figure of the crowd is examined at different levels of discourse and with regard to the various neighbouring terms such as mass, swarm, rabble. (2) Gender discourse and epistemology: The crowd implies gender issues that problematise the relationship between gender and crowd through women's bodies, swarms of girls, nymphs, muses, etc. (3) Representation and aesthetics: The various discourses of philosophy, literature and aesthetics are concerned with the relationship between the individual and the collective, the public and the inward, the haves and the have-nots, and thus questions of representation.
Die Reihe ist getragen von der Idee, dass unter dem Begriff der Medienkulturwissenschaft unterschiedliche geisteswissenschaftliche Disziplinen ihr Interesse an der Materialität von Kommunikation und der Medialität ästhetischer Artefakte bündeln können. Das Spektrum der zu analysierenden Medien ist daher bewusst breit gefasst: Es reicht von Film, Fotografie und Fernsehen über Literatur, Musik, Theater und Medienkunst bis zur Internet Art. Studien zu einzelnen Medien, Genres und Künstler:innen sind ebenso willkommen wie kultur- und medienvergleichend angelegte Projekte.
This series publishes contributions on the theory, history and aesthetics of media. Key focal points are the synchronic and diachronic relations between media, culture and society. The cultural formation of media and their aesthetic composition will be explored, whilst at the same time delving into the interplay between reaction, reflection and initiation of cultural and societal processes within and by media. The intersection between media and cultural studies theories serves as the starting point for this approach. The series is based on the idea that different disciplines in the humanities can unite their interest in the materiality of communication and the mediality of aesthetic artifacts under the concept of media cultural studies. The scope of media to be analyzed is deliberately broad by design. It ranges from film and photography through television, music, literature and theater to media and internet art. Studies about single media, genres and artists are just as welcome as projects utilizing a comparative approach to culture and media.