Zukünftige Medienästhetik

A future media aesthetic is both a media aesthetic of the future and an aesthetic of future media. Media art has always explored unimagined and untried possibilities of various media, creating an imaginative glimpse of future media. Media art, one of the central art forms of the 20th and 21st centuries, saw it as one of its tasks to invent new media (Rosalind Krauss) - often precisely by resorting to technologies and processes that seem obsolete. Media art, then, does not merely reflect an underlying medium, as was claimed by (high) modernist aesthetics, and problematically enough, for all art. It first invents a medium. Media are thereby surrounded by imaginaries that precede their invention, accompany their enforcement, and resonate nostalgically in their disappearance. Media art can therefore be understood as a special case of such imaginaries - an imagination that is not (only) discursive, but material, demonstrative and performative. The planned issue gathers contributions that examine the practices of inventing future media through media art. One focus is on the important media art project Piazza virtuale by Van Gogh TV, which conceived the future medium of an interactive television at documenta IX in 1992, precisely on the eve of the spread of the Internet.