Ecology of the media

Based on the finding that contemporary media form relations, that they are equally effective as global networks and local structures, we ask about the specific processes and operations of their networking and their effectiveness. From the perspective of an ecology of the media, both the resources and materials from which media devices are produced and the media practices of their individual or social use and consumption come into view. The research field of media ecology explicitly includes questions of sustainability, geopolitics and the materiality of relational media as well as the options for action associated with them in the sense of an 'ecology of media practices'. Furthermore, an ecology of media questions the historical conditions of media developments that have (in)formed current media structures in order to sound out options for future media relations in and beyond the so-called 'Anthropocene'.

Media milieus, infrastructures and interfaces

Media cultures articulate themselves primarily in practices that simultaneously characterise different media milieus in which these practices are tested. A media milieu is understood as the interplay of human and technical actors as well as the specific social, aesthetic, infrastructural and geopolitical conditions under which media practices emerge and are negotiated. On the one hand, our research interest implies counter- and subcultural media milieus and altering infrastructures, in particular underground film and related artistic and cultural practices. On the other hand, we analyse interventions anddisruptionsin various media milieus.

We also pay particular attention to the networked infrastructures of contemporary media that organise communication through images and their distribution in digital milieus, on social media platforms, in databases or digital archives. Our research aims at an archive ecology that examines the relations between media practices, milieus and infrastructures of communicating, distributing and archiving images and designs various sustainable 'archives of the future'.

(Post)colonial media constellations and epistemologies

In this research project, we examine the manifold entanglements of media technologies and cultures with colonial practices of extraction, appropriation and utilisation of resources, people and things, as well as those aesthetic and knowledge practices that prove resistant to these colonial practices. Be it photographs or film recordings that researchers from the Global North have made of colonised people, their cultural practices and ways of life in the name of 'Western' sciences such as anthropology or ethnography, popular media such as the postcard or knowledge figures and epistemologies through which people and cultures are (dis)qualified and distanced as 'others' - there is always a relationship of tension between self and other that equally determines the colonised and the coloniser and forces them into multiple asymmetrical power relations. Our research on the medial and epistemological structures of colonial relations between proximity and distance aims to decolonise 'Western' ways of knowing and instances of knowledge such as colonial museums or archives.