“Critical Immersion”
Built in the fabric of everyday life, screens mediate almost everything we see, hear, do, think, feel, buy and share. Screens process the way we imagine ourselves and others, weaving our mental and emotional lives with cultural tropes we co-create as we use and abuse them. For billion of human beings, switching off is literally unthinkable. Future generations will not understand what “offline” ever meant or even felt like. Total Immersion has long become normalcy, leaving us with a set of unavoidable challenges to redefine what it means to be aware, to think critically, and to participate in cultural and political life.
As perceptual and discursive habits evolve with the ever accelerating pace of technology, short video formats reshape reception and production habits to the point of shrinking our so-called attention span to the split second. How shall the notion of audiovisual literacy be negotiated in this context? What to train our reflective skills when a much discussed dopamine addiction seems to render focus impossible ? Learning to watch, write, board, shoot, edit and re-edit audiovisual narratives, the lectures and seminars presented here cultivate a form of deconstructive attention seeking to better observe, understand and regenerate the tropes and imaginaries we create and consume in the very context in which they permeate our realities.
“ZeitBildung”
WHAT SHOULD BE THE BENEFIT OF REFLECTING THE PARADIGM THROUGH NANO-PARTS?
The composite word “ZeitBildung” plays with the notion of time and education. It is also reversing the phonetics of a notoriously “yellow” newspaper (bildzeitung) to engage critically with the notion of Bildung in a current digital public sphere entangled with tabloid aesthetics and rethorics. This place can thus be considered a “metabloid ”.
The formats presented here seek to explore and question the creation, reception and transformation of “narratives” in the very context of their production, reception and transformation by the “people formerly called the audience”.
Teaching and learning activities take place in situ, in the very ubiquity of digital media, providing both a reflective engagement with a wide topical spectrum ranging from “cash” to “happiness” or “apocalypse” and an opportunity to explore critically the media ecologies in which these formats we are creating are conceived, distributed and appropriated.
In the past three decades, the so-called “digital convergence” radically transformed pre-existing understanding of broadcast media, unsettling formerly established business models, circulatory dynamics and access modalities to deploy new forms of engagements, reception and creative practices.
Social media platforms streamlined these new models at scale, democratising media participation while generating filter bubbles running on attention moneytizing and micro-targeting schemes. They also normalised surveillance, hate speech and outrage culture as engagement strategy - a notoriously toxic mixture complicating the moderation of public debates essential to democratic life.
Meanwhile, an ongoing technological transformation keeps disrupting media markets and cultures, reformulating what established professions, digital creators and audiences expect or need from each other. Along with the post-truth diagnosis and the normalization of fake news, the rise of artificial intelligence represents the latest of such ongoing disruption, bringing about unseen threats and opportunities.
“Zeitbildung” attempts to reflect these changes in academic and other-than-academic spaces, while developing creative methods exploring the mediasphere from within with a specific form of “critical immersion”.