Art Media – Media Art

Media and art are terms that are used separately to denote very many different phenomena, but they have also found acceptance in their compound forms of media art and art media. Their applicability is very wide-ranging and subject to very few rules. While that is so, this virtual lack of any restrictions harbours an opportunity. It helps to do away with a rigid assignment to categories and can thus pave the way to a broad understanding of what media and art have represented up to the present and what they can develop into in the future. For it would seem that we cannot dispense with these two terms even if they are now frequently employed as opposites.
Thanks to their widespread use and steadily increasing success the media now not only reach out to every corner of the globe. The significance they have acquired has also enabled them to stand the world on its head in that reality as portrayed in the mass media has achieved the status of primary reality as a supplier of information. If the media constitute everyday reality, art interpreted along traditional lines is the enhancing or transcending of what is customary. Art embodies information that goes beyond time and circumstances. It is moulded into a form that breaks with the directness of reality and opens up avenues that are capable of linking the past with the present to constitute the future, thereby enabling them to coexist.

Speakers:

Bern [06/05/2004]:
Gernot Böhme, Bernhard Siegert, Dieter Daniels, Thomas Feuerstein

Karlsruhe [06/19/2004]:
Maurizio Lazzarato, Christiane Paul, Sylvie Blocher, Judith Barry