National Park House Wittbülten, Spiekeroog, 7 - 9 October 2025

Since Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin described forms of media transformation in technical, narrative and aesthetic terms as remediation in Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), this term has been taken up in media theory, memory studies and archival research as well as in theories of the curatorial. It was adopted from the environmental sciences, where remediation refers to processes for restoring or improving contaminatedsoiland water. This decidedly ecological perspective, which Bolter and Grusin did not pursue, needs to be considered again.

Remediation therefore not only means the transformation of media formats and practices, for example through digitisation, but also the negotiation of responsibility: if colonial violence, ecological destruction or archival gaps are inscribed in data, images, texts and objects, then every transformation also has an ethical-political dimension. In this sense, remediation is not a purely technological change, but implies a process of (re)activation and re-evaluation that renegotiates historicity, materiality and mediality in ecological and archival-political terms.

Cultural and media studies approaches to the term and concept of remediation were therefore at the centre of the retreat. The aim of our discussion was to further develop these approaches conceptually and to open up the term for media-ecological considerations and for the activation of colonial collections and archives as well as for curatorial concepts and artistic or filmic practices.

With Louise Adams, Marie Sophie Beckmann, Jakob Claus, Anja Dreschke, Charlene Gerdes, Felix Hasebrink, Petra Löffler