SCMS Annual Conference

This panel invites papers that offer critical perspectives on contemporary applications of the concept of medium specificity. The traditional idea of medium specificity was developed in conjunction with the modernist project that tasked art, in a reflexive gesture, with limiting its operations and effects to the properties specific to its raw materials. More generally, medium specificity is often posed as a question concerning the ontological status of a given art form. Although long discredited, the concept of medium specificity has experienced a unexpected resurgence in recent critical thought. The following examples are not exhaustive:

  • The introduction of digital technologies into the realms of art and aesthetics has revived the question of ontology. What is the digital? For media theorist Lev Manovich, it is the source of a new kind of language. For Timothy Binkley, it is better understood as a “metamedium.”
  • Film scholar D.N. Rodowick has recently turned to Stanley Cavell’s concept of “automatism” in his attempt to restore an ethical basis to Humanistic inquiry. In Cavell’s philosophy, automatism represents a complex rethinking of medium specificity in which the concept is ultimately taken in an ethical direction.
  • A final example can be found in the philosophy of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, it is neither possible nor desirable to deduce an aesthetic program on the basis of the technical means or raw material specific to a given art form. Instead, Rancière  proposes that we define “medium” as the conceptual space of articulation whose specific configuration determines how aesthetic experience achieves the condition of intelligibility.

In each case, the concept of medium specificity diverges from, yet sustains a continuity with, its traditional sense. This purpose of this panel is to bring together papers that offer a critical perspective on these and other contemporary conceptualizations of medium specificity.

Contact Info: Please send an abstract (ca. 300 words), bibliography (3-5 entries) and author bio (50-100 words) to Konstantinos Koutras at dino.koutras at carleton.ca by Aug 5. Successful submissions will be notified by Aug. 8. Please include “SCMS” in your subject-line.