I Hjemmedyrket, outsourcet, organiseret udfolder mediekunstner, kurator og professor Kristoffer Gansing på én gang et historisk overblik og en systematisk analyse af de seneste tredive års internetkunst og leverer med begrebet ’teknoæstetik’ samtidig en teoretisk og analytisk ramme for forståelsen af den netværksbaserede kunsts udvikling og udtryksformer. Med dette dobbelte historiske og teoretiske udgangspunkt præsenterer Gansing et indtrængende billede af den netværksbaserede kunst, dens forhold til de tekniske infrastrukturer, den opererer indenfor, og de nye former for socialitet og interaktion, der udfolder sig omkring den.

In contemporary discussions of film and artistic research, the historical undercurrent of film as an intense research and development activity, does not seem to be widely discussed. In contrast, film history and media archaeology has since long re-evaluated the status of early moving image technologies, which do not any longer denote pre-cinematic curiosities that simply predate the institution of cinema and its narrative forms but is rather seen as containing socio-technical trajectories and aesthetic regimes that can be studied in their own right. This essay performs a further modulation of the legacies of film history, one in which moving image technology is not seen as primarily a vehicle for film as cinema, but a continuously evolving technological and aesthetic infrastructure for film as research. This then becomes the starting point from which to reflect on artistic research in film, which today is being institutionalized as a form of practice-based research, arguably with the risk of loosing sight of an already long-established tradition of film, not only as research but also as artistic research. With the aid of an accompanying desktop video essay, the article speculates on the changing contexts of film as research visà-vis film as artistic research, from early cinema and its connection to scientific discoveries and the advanced data-analysis of today’s streaming platforms. Inspired by “The New Film History” and Tom Gunning’s influential notion of “The Cinema of Attractions” which revised the view on early cinema and the development of a filmic avant-garde, the presentation eventually focuses on artistic responses to the contemporary “Cinema of Extractions”, as a datafied infrastructure that now conditions what is knowable and sayable through the moving image.

‘The network is everlasting’ wrote Robert Filliou and George Brecht in 1967, a statement that, at first glance, still seems to be true of today’s world. Yet there are also signs that the omnipresence of networks is evolving into another reality. In recent times, the limits of networks rather than their endless possibilities have been brought into focus. Ongoing media debates about hate speech, fake news, and algorithmic bias swirl into a growing backlash against networks. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the contemporary reach and relevance of the network imaginary.

Accompanying transmediale 2020 End to End’s exhibition ‘The Eternal Network’, this collection gathers contributions from artists, activists, and theorists who engage with the question of the network anew. In referencing Filliou’s eternal notion, the exhibition and publication project closes the loop between pre- and post-internet imaginaries, opening up possible futures with and beyond networks. This calls many of the collection’s authors to turn to instances of independent and critical net cultures as historical points of inspiration for rethinking, reforming, or refuting networks in the present.

This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art. The concept of the post-digital is a way to critically take account of, contextualize, and shift the coordinates of new technologies as part of contemporary culture. The post-digital condition is not merely a theoretical issue but also a situation that affects conceptual and practice-based work.

The program of the transmediale festival in Berlin, celebrating its thirtieth year in 2017, has reflected these changes, and this book gathers new contributions from leading international theorists and artists of media and art who have taken part in the festival program over its past five editions. Divided into the thematic sections “Imaginaries,” “Interventions,” and “Ecologies,” this book is not a document of the festival itself, it is rather a stand-alone exploration of the ongoing themes of transmediale in a book format.

 The reader is developed as a collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Why are some political issues so hotly debated within an arts context, and others deemed irrelevant—or even untouchable? transmediale’s artistic director, Kristoffer Gansing, delves into the high-stakes political debates surrounding TTIP, asking both what import transatlantic trade agreements between the EU and the USA could have on cultural production and why so much of digital arts and culture sector has so long been silent on the topic. In turn he reflects on how events during conversationpiece revived debate.

Transversal Media Practices work across specific situations of technological development, critically examining and redefining the terms of production in different media by bringing heterogeneous histories, institutions, actors and materialities into play with one another. This dissertation is all about trying out and refining the methodologies of such transversal media practices, in the end outlining a conceptual set of tools for further development. Following the technological hype of the “digital revolution” of the mid-1990s, the field of new media studies gained popularity over a ten year period. This dissertation takes its cue from a historical turn in new media theory, and argues that it is time leave behind strict polarisations between old and new as well as analogue and digital. The study unfolds through two case-studies. The first, “The World’s Last Television Studio”, looks at tv-tv, an art and media-activist project that negotiates the socio¬cultural and material changes of the “old” and institutionalised mass medium of television. In the second case study, “The Art of the Overhead”, another old medium is engaged: the overhead projector – a quintessen¬tial 20th century institutional medium here presented as a device for rethinking the new through the old. The problematic of technological development, i.e. dealing with questions of how (media) technologies develop over time, forms the background to these two case studies. A key issue being how cultural and artistic practices dealing with the interaction of old and new media invite us to conceptualise technological development in new ways. The emerging field of media archaeology is employed as a methodology in media studies and cultural production, comprising a theoretical and applied analysis of media history, materiality and practice. This transversal approach allows media archaeologists to deal with the relation between the old and the new in a non-linear way as well as to pay attention to the technical materiality of media. It is argued that the transversality of the media-archaeological approach should be seen in contrast to other conceptions of media history and technological development, such as progressivist, mono-medial and evolutionary ones. In this study, the author tries out the potential of media archaeology to reform our conception of media technologies, and eventually formulates a set of concepts for thinking and doing media archaeology as a transversal media practice. These tools are about the imaginary, residual and renewable dimensions of media technologies and are meant to assist in the opening up and intervening into processes of standardised media development. On a general level the resulting set of tools for transversal media practices builds a bridge between theory and practice: they can be used for further research and cultural analysis where objects of study speak back to analytical concepts. At the same time these are tools for transversality that expand this form of cultural analysis in that the travelling between disciplines here also means a travelling between theory and practice. On a specific level, the tools enable this travel between theory and practice in media- and communication studies, and as such they contribute to the development of new practice-based methodologies in media research.