Time: Thursday January 15, 19:30-21:30
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
Admission: Free

This lecture is organised by the Master Education in Arts, and part of the Seminar Digital Cultures taught by Levien Nordeman.

Ever since cybernetics, technological devices have been supposed to carry their own social agency and reshape reality. This belief can be found in such diverse fields as media theory, systems engineering, design, hacker culture and pedagogy. It also informs contemporary philosophical debates, such as those on speculative realism. But to which extent is it actually possible to design social and cultural uses of media? From the birth of the Internet to the recent (allegedly North Korean) hack of Sony Pictures, the history of communication technologies is rife with social accidents and cultural misappropriations that often ended reshaping and redefining media as collateral damage. The implications for media design, media pedagogy and other “lab” approaches to media are humbling.

Within Hogeschool Rotterdam, Florian Cramer is a Research Professor in New Media, and the Director of Creating 010, a centre focusing on Communication in the Digital Age, and Cultural Diversity. Cramer collaborates with the Institute of Network Cultures to further thinking about the future of print in a post digital era. He is the author of numerous essays and books on literature, art, computer culture, copyleft and the politics of media, and a part-time programmer at WORM, Institute of Avantgardistic Recreation.

Next up in this series is a lecture on gender and digital media by Nana Adusei Poku (Research Professor at Creating 010) on March 12.