Research Journals

Knowing well about the problematic of publishing notes, unfinished forms of writing, in a very early stage, I am publishing here an excerpt of thoughts that I had when reading up on Pierre Bourdieu's theories on art, filtered by a quite concise presentation by Derek Robbins.

The housing-price collapse of 2008, the credit crunch, the bank failures, the downswing of the world economy, the fiscal crisis of the sovereign states, all have been expressed as wild gyrations in the global circulation of information, attention, emotion. Everything undergoes tremendous acceleration at the crucial moments, before the wave recedes into a blur.

On 8th and 9th of July 2010 I attended the conference "Regulationstheorie in der Krise" (Regulation theory in the era of crisis) jointly organised by the University of Vienna and the Renner Institute (political academy of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, SPOE). The title transports a double meaning, it refers to the crisis of regulation theory as well as to what has regulation theory to say about the current crisis? I do not claim to be an expert in economics and I am also a newbie to the regulation approach. However, I found this conference very interesting and thought provoking, so I try a summary in English.

Let’s play hide-and-seek with future generations. We hide. The seeker is not among us yet. He or she lives in another era, a time yet to come. We don’t know if he or she will be a finder. We are not even sure we want or need to be found. We might simply just jump from our lair one day, reveal ourselves, unexpectedly, to win the game.

This research investigates media art through practice based and theoretic research. At the centre of this investigation are seminal exhibitions in the history of media art as well as my own curatorial practice. The thesis proposes that paradigm shifts in media art and society are closely linked and that studying those paradigm shifts through the chosen exhibitions provides insights into the interlocking dynamics of art, technology and social change.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the proclaimed crisis of the city marked a general crisis of governance: the discussion about the supposed “decline of cities” was characterised by a controversial debate about a possible loss of control. Paradoxically, all hopes have been pinned on those technologies that were held accountable for the dissolution of the urban space. That’s because, as in similar techno-utopias before, cyberspace was considered to be constructable and, therefore, controllable.