Panel co-organised with Johan Schollaert and Stefano Masserini at the NECS 2022 Conference, Polytechnic University of Bucharest, 25 June 2022, 16.15-18.00.
What do we mean by media anticipation? What role does this notion play in the apprehension of contemporaneity characterised by its fractal panopticism? While media connect otherwise distant entities (spaces, subjects, contexts, etc.), this panel aims to reflect upon the operations through which they bridge different temporalities, with a focus on the ones that anticipate a future occurrence, preparing for or building up to something that has yet to come. The anticipatory affordances of media can be used as a means to visualise possible futures as forms of knowledge in different contemporary socio-cultural contexts (cinema, artificial intelligence, etc.), or a tool to prepare and trigger future desires as power relations among audiences (advertising strategies, online communication, etc.). Within this perspective, media anticipation irremediably builds different layers of knowledge, therefore different realities already haunted by the future. This panel will observe the anticipatory or premediating dynamics of media in three main areas: holographic cinema, video and machine-learning art, and mass communication strategies. Through this exercise, some epistemic capacities of media will be analysed: how can media be used to organise the future? How can archives or data (which are per definition accumulating past occurrences) be used to look into the future from present fantasies? What are the cybernetic circuits that feedback the forward and build memories of what hasn’t happened yet, creating the need for something we don’t even know? Thus, media anticipation aims to designate an ensemble of operations that put the future right in front of us, likely transporting our fantasies away from the present in a future we don’t always fully control. Hence, through anticipatory operations, media can offer us knowledge, visionary powers and advantages, or conceal us from the present, letting the mediated future take control of our imaginations, bodies, and desires.
Panelists:
Stefano Masserini Stefano Masserini (New Sorbonne University – Paris III)
Three Forms of Media Anticipation | Preparation, Prediction, Embodiment
Violaine Boutet de Monvel (New Sorbonne University – Paris III)
Back to the Future: From Closed-Circuit Video to Artificial Neural Networks in Media Arts
Johan Schollaert (New Sorbonne University – Paris III)
‘In Short, Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented!’: The Myth of Holography as the Future of Cinema
Respondent:
Antoine Prévost-Balga (Goethe University Frankfurt / New Sorbonne University – Paris III)
Chair:
Magdalena Zdrodowska (Jagiellonian University)