Real Virtualities

Full course description

Media extend our senses and our engagement with the world—as Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, famously said. In this process mediathey do not leave things untouched, but transform how we experience our environment and how we act in it. Through newsmedia we are an immediate witness to events all over the globe. With webcams webwebcamera’s we access the world online from wherever we are. Our cellphones help us to keep our friends with us anywhere we go. In these processes, off- and online experience and actionistence, becomes inextricably entangled. This course reflects on the emerging culture of ‘real virtuality’. Students will be introduced to two main philosophers that have dealt with the changing relationship between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’ (W. Benjamin, J. Baudrillard). The issues they address in relationship to older media such as photography, film and television will be related to new media practices, such as telepresence and augmented reality, and evaluated in the light of these. The methodology introducedemployed is (post)phenomenology. Where the thinkers mentioned above take an overarching approach, Donr. Ihde’s phenomenology focuses on concrete sets of perceptual relations between users, media and the world and helps to make more nuanced analyses. During the course students will discuss different media applications, including media artworks, and work towards their own analysis of an application in the light of the themes discussed.