Call for papers about Media Aesthetics: ZfM
“The aesthetic power of feeling”, wrote the late Félix Guattari, seems to be “on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective assemblages of enunciation of our era.” In discerning a “new aesthetic paradigm” he was not anticipating something along the lines of the primacy of the institutionalised arts within the social field, but rather a kind of “proto-aesthetic paradigm”, traversing all universes of value and existential territories, from the arenas of science and the ethico-political, to the modalities and practices of subjectivation. This general aestheticisation which Guattari had in mind at the end of the 1980s may be regarded as one of the first descriptions of a fundamental upheaval in the history of technology and sensation, a change taking place during the second half of the twentieth century, but especially since the 1990s, and one which potentially shifts the meaning of aesthetics as such: under the new media-technological conditions we observe a proto-aesthetic dressing of the present.
This special issue of ZfM sets out to clarify the historical-systematic contours as well as the political implications of the new aesthetic paradigm. This necessitates focusing on the key technical-medial scenes of the current sensorial caesura, outlining the associated conceptual challenges and issues of politics of terminology, in order thereby to contribute to the redescription of media-aesthetics under technological conditions, in particular those of the new era of social and mobile media in the network age.
Text submissions (around 25,000 characters, notes and spaces included), by the end of August 2012, to: erich.hoerl@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
This special issue of ZfM will be published in April 2013. The language of publication is German. Papers are accepted in German, English and French; papers will be translated after peer-review and acceptance.
Tags: aesthetics, call for papers, media
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