Research into ‘historical’ or ‘early’ media but also of pre- or non-digital modern media has been recognized as of genuine significance to the understanding of today’s media-bound world. This lecture series both recognizes the important historical research that has already been conducted in this field and departs from its principal concerns, in the interest of what Professor Yves Abrioux proposes to call a poetics of media. Consequently, it will engage in a series of close readings of works of literature and art but also of other artifacts, both past and present.

Lecture 3: Configurational Media

Allied to the close reading of artworks and other artifacts, the concept of medium technicity argues for an approach that envisions media as configurational, rather than procedural. This is far from implying an opposition between work realized in computational and non-computational environments. The two previous lectures will accordingly have had recourse to a deliberately heterogeneous series of artworks and other artifacts: political documents, protocols from the social sciences, gardens or landscapes, paintings, architecture, film, fiction, poetry, digital art or literature, etc. from different periods. After exploring the tensions between configurational and procedural approaches in twentieth-century art, the final lecture will set out to show that the significance of specific contemporary artworks that explicitly proclaim their attachment to a form of media or code-bound determinism nonetheless derive their power and significance from the configurational capabilities of their materials.