Media Aesthetics
Media Aesthetics is a research area that emphasizes the medium's importance for the mediated expression.
Liv Hausken. Foto: Espen Heia.
Focal points of attention are mediation, materialities of mediation and technology; and the specific media experiences the present expression seems to play on or take for granted. Media Aesthetics explores a diversity of media practices and phenomena in order to generate new theoretical and analytical insights on the impacts of the materialities of mediation, information and expression.
Media aesthetic analysis
Media aesthetic analysis starts from concrete phenomena as objects of experience. As a compound and versatile research area, Media Aesthetics is unified by the fundamental question of how media mean and make sense. This question demands a specification of the very terms aesthetics and media.
The concept of aesthetics is in Media Aesthetics regarded as a theory of culturally and historically embedded sensation and perception. More specifically, Media Aesthetics regards aesthetics as a critical reflection on cultural expressions, on technologies of the senses and on the experiences of everyday life, from an ideal of a non-hierarchical view of sense perception.
The concept of medium is considered and treated as complex. Hence the questions of media is refocused from a notion of something fixed, a mere apparatus – a medium, to a notion of process of mediation as a process, as the performance of a function – mediality or mediation.
Media Aesthetics is situated where aesthetic discourses meet the realm of technological and mediatic phenomena. Media specific concepts are seen as dynamic and contextually flexible; always reflecting their specific situatedness within a medial, technological, social or cultural context.
Interdisciplinary research
Media Aesthetics at IMK cannot be delimited to a particular academic discipline, but is rather to be seen as a set of perspectives which can be applied beneficially within a variety of disciplines. Currently, the Media Aesthetic research area can allocated in three subareas, namely Medial Transferals, Visualization and Scientific Imaging and Audiovisual Aesthetics. Read more about the subareas and associated research projects here.