German Society of Aesthetics XII. International Congress – The Media of Art/The Arts of Media

So-called ‚media art‘ has been around not only since technical media began to intervene in the art world; there has never been media-free art. There is no art that does not express itself in certain media, be it image, sound, light, space or language. There is no art that does not rely on marble and chisel, colour and canvas, pen and paper, sound waves and screen, bits and bytes. Neither media nor materials are ever external to a work of art; rather, aesthetic meaning only arises through the respective medial-material configuration and would be invalid without it. The XII. Congress of the German Society for Aesthetics will focus on the question of the media of the arts: Can the arts be understood differently or better if we look at them in the light of their media? What distinguishes the arts from one another? Does each art genre have its own medium? What does media specificity mean in the tradition, from Lessing to Greenberg, and what does it mean today, in the age of artistic „entanglement“ [Verfransung] (Adorno) and of multiple hybrid forms? Modernist attempts to return art to its pure, illusion-free medium stand in contrast to more recent developments in which intermediality, cross-over and transmedial practices set new standards. Despite all the invocations of a ‚post-medial condition‘, the classic question remains impellent: to what role material qualities play in form-shaping processes and to what extent the different contexts of manifestation influence the circulation of signs.