What are the Politics of Material Agentiality?

The recent ‘material turn’ has sparked lively debates on how to integrate matter-oriented perspectives with feminist/queer film and media criticism that focuses on the politics of representation. While these latter frameworks readily provide instruments of political critique, it is not yet clear how exactly material agentiality figures in the world of emancipatory engagement, which is – in large parts – a world of social structures, human agency, language-driven discourses and symbolic exchange.
In this workshop we will explicitly ask for the emancipatory potential of material agentiality: What exactly can an artwork’s material dimensions do, which dynamics can they set off? How are the radically open futurities – that much of material criticism suggests as its prime potential – to be thought together with tenacious normativities and inequalities? We will discuss these questions for moments in film and video that make historicity perceptible with obsolete technologies and media formats.

Friday, April 22nd 2016

14:00–14:30
Welcome

14:30–15:00
Introduction: A Matter of Historicity
Eva Kernbauer, Marietta Kesting

15:00–16:00
Q & A: New Materialism, Old Media
Kristina Pia Hofer and Axel Stockburger

16:30–17:30
The Museum of Trance
Henrike Naumann

18:00–19:00
Archival Romances: Found, Compressed, and Loved Again
Laura Marks

Saturday, April 23rd 2016

10:00–11:30
Dead Technologies and the Politics of Temporality
Andy Birtwistle

11:30–12:30 
Concluding panel with all participants
Moderation: Marietta Kesting

With Andy Birtwistle (Canterbury Christ Church University), Henrike Naumann (Artist, Berlin), Laura Marks (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver), Axel Stockburger (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) as well as Kristina Pia Hofer, Eva Kernbauer and Marietta Kesting (all University of Applied Arts Vienna).