Veranstaltung auf Englisch.

The workshop seeks to initiate a critical inquiry into the entanglement of media and extinction through the conceptual prism of energy and its relation to contemporary communication infrastructures. This approach foregrounds the manifold energies that media both mobilize and depend upon – energies that are not only infrastructural and material, but also affective, attentional, and psychopolitical in nature. The energetic demands of media systems – whether extracted from environmental substrates or human bodies – contribute to complex metabolisms of depletion, exhaustion, and transformation. Such processes implicate media in regimes of extraction and entropy, wherein the energetic conditions of their possibility are often obfuscated or rendered invisible.

Central Questions

1. What forms of energy do media produce and require in order to exist and proliferate, and what are the sources and limits of these energies?

2. How might mediatic energy—whether consumed, transmitted, or extracted—be understood in material, affective, attentional, or even animal terms?

3. To what extent does mediatic energy operate as an invisible yet essential force within contemporary infrastructures?

4. How do media contribute to processes of energetic depletion across environmental, psychological, and corporeal domains, and which mediatic metabolisms are at play?

5. What narratives do media construct – or suppress – about energy’s scarcity, availability, and historical trajectories, including the possible return of lost or residual media forms in post-electric futures?

Preparation

The workshop is an event to prepare together with possible research partners for the Villa-Vigoni proposal (due in April 2026) tentatively entitled „Facing Media Extinction. Exercises in survival and speculation“.

All participants are asked to bring three materials which they find productive on the issue of media/extinction studied for the point of view of energy to discuss: 1.) a written essay in their language tradition, 2.) a novel/movie, 3. other media content (not „artistic“: advertising, social media content…). The material can be established or less-known. The workshop will create different moments of discussion about each category of objects that lead to define a general theoretical and practical frame for an application to Villa Vigoni’s three-national call. To this end, among the expected outcomes a key objective will be sketching a multilingual (English, French, German, Italian) glossary with key terms to think the nexus between media and extinction, comparing the semantic scopes defined by each of the four languages involved.

Organizers

Giacomo Tagliani (Università di Modena-Reggio)
Jacopo Rasmi (Université Saint Etienne)
Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam)

in cooperation with

Jan Distelmeyer (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)
Winfried Gerling (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

Anmeldung

Bei Interesse an einer Teilnahme an dem Workshop bitten wir aufgrund begrenzter Kapazitäten um eine E-Mail an