GRK 2558:  Media Anthropology

• Subject Area: Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies ; Literary Studies ; Philosophy ; Social Sciences
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413067638

For decades, far-reaching developments in media technology have been underway that fundamentally challenge human self-conceptions and pose new questions. Human perceptions, routines and existential experiences alike are being integrated into a wide variety of technical and media environments and are linked to devices that determine everyday life and promote new habits (wearables, mobiles, GPS, interfaces etc.). Pervasive computing, smart cities, human enhancement, global digitization and advancements in biogenetics increasingly blur clear-cut distinctions between nature and technology, between artefacts and living beings. The entertainment industry and the arts are also subject to media transformations, such as an unlimited migration of images, and are coupled with computer-aided forms of self-thematization, knowledge formation and archiving (quantified self, post-cinematography, social media, digital humanities, archive art). What is striking in all this is a tendency towards an intertwining of nature and technology, of biology and artefact, of human and non-human, which leads to numerous hybridizations. These processes of transformation are negotiated particularly clearly and intensely in the aesthetic realm. The Graduate School on Media Anthropology (GKMA) is there fore concerned with the social, political and epistemic effects of such amalgamations of media and human modes of existence in aesthetic milieus. It examines media and mediatic operations through which the coupling, interconnection or other entanglement of media and humans is achieved and negotiated in literature, art, film, theatre, games, image circulation, digital communication platforms, festivals, archives and museums, and researches the forms of existence thatemerge from this interplay (e.g. gamers, avatars, fictions, users, spectators). The individual dissertations deal with questions of media anthropological determinations and differences of the respective aesthetic milieus and their changes depending on developments in media technology. Additionally, they will also reflect on how media-aesthetic topics and phenomena can be related to social and political developments of life (such as migration, virtualization and democratization).

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
• Participating Institution: Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar GmbH; - Staatstheater Thüringen -; Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv; Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek; Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Museum für Ur- und Frühgeschichte; des Archäologischen Landesmuseums Thüringen (ALT); Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora
• Business and Industry: Lichthaus GmbH - Kino im Straßenbahndepot
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Christiane Voss
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Julia Bee; Professor Dr. Lorenz Engell; Professorin Dr. Eva Krivanec; Professorin Dr. Maria Muhle; Professor Dr. Jörg Paulus; Professor Dr. Bernhard Siegert; Professor Dr. Andreas Ziemann