At the Institute of Art and Visual Culture, media studies has the fundamental task of focussing precisely on the relationship between media, the arts and visual cultures. For just as these cannot be separated from specific media technologies and practices, media history is also permeated by aesthetic practices in a variety of ways.

The scope of media studies goes far beyond its unquestionable responsibility for individual visual media such as photography or film. Cultural media studies, as we represent it, is characterised above all by methods of questioning: What social, cultural and ecological effects do media have? In what way do devices, techniques and codes determine not only how, but also what is communicated and by whom ? And what actions can they trigger or block?

In such a perspective, cultural techniques, materials, things and institutions and their interactions increasingly come into focus: Language and writing, archives and transport systems or scientific visualisations. Our attention is therefore focussed less on individual media and more on media structures and infrastructures.

Research that asks how media and mediality are involved in producing realities, subjects and modes of action also includes an examination of the relationship between gender and media as well as that between post/coloniality and media. These perspectives are particularly important for our teaching and research.