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Our objective for this article is to illustrate the importance of understanding digital skill as process by taking its mediality—interweaving tools, technologies, and media—into consideration. Drawing on 12 case studies with participants performing digital tasks, we use Ingold's four phases of skill (getting ready, setting out, carrying on, and finishing off) to research and represent the rhythm of digital skill. By using medialities of inscription, scripting, and annotation, we demonstrate how researchers can use mediality to perceive rhythms of digital skill without being physically co-located in the performance. As different medialities enable and constrain the perception and descriptions of digital skill, we develop spotlines as a method that combines different medialities particularly well suited for describing and comparing the temporal order of phases for performing digital skill by rendering each performer's pace and intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Campus Medius project Mapping Austrofascism explores and expands the possibilities of digital cartography in cultural and media studies. In this article, I elaborate on the project’s development from a historical case study to a mapping platform. The first chapter presents the initial version, an interactive map with a timeline displaying 15 events within 24 hours in Vienna on the weekend of May 13 and 14, 1933. The second part discusses the current version of the project that additionally focuses on the main event of this exemplifying time-space or chronotope: an Austrofascist “Turks Deliverance Celebration” (Türkenbefreiungsfeier) in the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace, which is imparted from a bird’s-eye perspective, panoramically, and in street view by five mediators each. The next chapter deals with the technological infrastructure and the data model of Mapping Austrofascism, which operationalizes the theoretical concepts of the dispositif and the actor-network. In conclusion, I outline our plans to establish a digital platform for describing and visualizing media experiences in everyday life.

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a comparative analysis of Henrik Ibsen's play En folkefiende [An Enemy of the People, 1882] and its adaptation into a graphic novel by Javi Rey (2022). The plot revolves around Dr Tomas Stockmann's discovery that the water of the touristic baths of his hometown is polluted and his futile attempt to convince his fellow citizens to take action. I argue that this can be read as an allegory of specific aspects of the Anthropocene. Moreover, while both works address the production of ignorance about human environmental change, the graphic novel possesses medium-specific ways of depicting the gap between knowledge and action. Finally, while the play is a black comedy, the graphic novel conveys a stronger faith in democratic pedagogy, adapted to twenty-first-century discourses on climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the narratological and semantic implications of Stefan Zweig's biographical narration, demonstrating how the biographical texts and the fictional narratives differ in the degree to which they represent the complexity of the narrated life. This applies in a similar way to biographical literature about Stefan Zweig, which appears in different genres and media in the late modern age. The unifying focus of this essay is the mediality of narration, which draws attention to the given media-aesthetic peculiarities in each case and in sum clarifies the biographical complexity that relates to the narration of life in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relation producer/media/receiver from the viewpoint of intermedial studies. It starts by presenting an overview of the role of the reader in the context of exclusively verbal texts, in general, and literary texts, in particular. The hypothesis is that mediatic configurations comprising different modals require a multireceiver apt to perform sophisticated cognitive process at the moment of midiality. The argument is illustrated by the analysis of the production and reception dynamics of visual works, namely paintings by Édouard Manet and Salman Toor. The theoretical framework is provided by the works of Vincent Jouve (2002), Wolfgang Iser (1996) and Umberto Eco (1984, 2018) on reading; and by the works Claude Paul (2015), Irina Rajewsky (2012), Lars Elleström (2017, 2019, 2021) on intermedial studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediation of Hungarian Language Culture / Anyanyelvi Kultúraközvetítés is the property of Szent Istvan University, Kaposvar Campus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper argues that architectural design methods integrating improvisational practices can generate and develop capacities for intervention in and through their processes. The McAppy project (1973-1976) by the British architect Cedric Price serves as a case study. Its aim was to improve working conditions on the construction sites of a leading British construction company. Based on his cybernetic thinking, Price implemented a three-phase procedure that intervened in the existing situation of an ongoing construction site and changed its spatial and organizational structures on a test basis. Through this testing procedure, Price opened up a programmatic spatio-temporal framework, which in turn enabled and attempted to evoke creative or critical interventions by all those involved in the process. My article suggests looking at this process as an improvisational practice: The events on-site and the practices of those involved come into focus. They testify to the critical-creative and thus interventional potential of design as a cultural technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the importance of French studies in modern society and why stakeholders should reinvest in shared inheritance of global French. Other topics include canonicity as a medievalist working in Old French and Old Occitan, the mediality of medieval studies, and her experiences in learning ancient and European languages like French, German, and Latin.

Starting from Jeff Wall's artist writings (eg. Gestus), through different phases and techniques of his production and the gaze adopted in the most significant works (Mimic, 1982; Milk, 1984; Man with a Rifle, 2000 etc. ), I intend to focus on the nature and role of "micro-gestures" in the Canadian photographer's research also in the light of the definition given by Giorgio Agamben of gesture as a pure "exhibition of a mediality": "means without an end" which by the mere fact to be photographed, suspended from achieving their purpose, would embody the idea of “milieu pur” of fiction for the viewer (Mallarmé). But staged and photographed, or perhaps digitally assembled in a single image by Wall, the automatic, mutilated, interrupted gestures - similar to those of a mime – of a modern body would amplify their character as emblems (means of communication of an incommunicability, fragments of a human complexity that has lost its meaning) capable of making appear the “being-in-a-medium of man”, to quote Agamben again. They show their being in potential without being. They concentrate the activation of a film-like narrative in the frozen detail of a frame. They make it possible to re-read Wall's staged photography as the recording of a sequence of involuntary shots, movements of a dehumanized, robotic, cinematic body. They reveal a staged recording that reinvents the photographic medium.

Beyond the only text Jean-Luc Nancy explicitly dedicated to it ('Rumoration' in La Ville au loin), rumor lurks in the background — under the surface — of any discourse on community, or on being-with. Following closely Nancy's thought process in 'Rumoration' (Nancy presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this article interweaves fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient Greek logopoios to today's 'fake news'. But rumor is precisely what evades genealogy, so although it can be thought of as an archimedium (pure mediality, as Maurice Blanchot suggests), its floating texture, made up of references to references, turns it into a kind of anarchistructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Nadja Hermann's uniquely inspiring webcomic Erzählmirnix (sometimes translated into English as 'Emoticomix'), approaching it from a theory of mediation. In recent years, this perspective has been developed into a fine-grained model for the analytical application in comic studies. Applied alongside or complementary to narrative-focused as well as art-focused perspectives, a view on comics as mediation puts into focus the interrelations of communicative-semiotic, material-technological and conventional-institutional aspects of a comic's production, distribution and reception. Erzählmirnix makes an excellent, intriguingly complicated test case, as it is at the same time incredibly influential in German-speaking countries while still being mostly neglected by research. 'Mediation' focuses on the distribution of agency between all the actors involved with (digital artefacts perceived as) comics: in a semiotic-communicative respect this refers to comic-specific 'narrative instances' (like narrators, perceived as distinct from authors or artists) as well as to affordances and limitations of genre traditions; in a material-technological respect it addresses the possibilities and constraints of platforms and material formats, while cultural-institutional perspectives take agency and conflicts distributed between countless personal, institutional or corporate actors into account. My article then discusses how the entangled agentic structures surrounding Hermann's minimalistic graphics and 'emoji'-pictures constantly bridge, undermine and negotiate distinctions between comics, cartoons, memes and actual social media commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized diverse fields, including art, raising questions about the authenticity and value of AI-generated artworks. This essay explores the legitimacy of AI art, examining whether these creations qualify as genuine art and how they integrate into the broader art historical context. It scrutinizes the theoretical debates surrounding the incorporation of AI applications in artistic creation, emphasizing the importance of understanding the creation and reception processes in evaluating the legitimacy of AI art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roberta Bassett Corson's Stepping Out of the Shadows: Naming and Claiming the Medial Woman Today is a study in discovering, recovering, and reclaiming a part of the soul that has been forgotten or neglected. By using the power of stories as vehicles through four companions as well as her own experiences of being wounded, ignored, and dismembered, Corson leads us initiates through the narrative restoration of five participants: Angela, Clelia, Elizabeth, Kathryn, and herself. Anchored firmly in Toni Wolff's Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1956), Corson then interviews each participant on a host of qualities indigenous to the medial archetype: empathy, broad-mindedness, healing, truth-telling, and imagination. Despite the medial woman's wounds, including being forgotten, marginalized, trivialized, devalued, and labelled as an outsider who does not belong in mainstream culture, Corson discovers in each narrative how the medial woman nonetheless learns to claim herself in her complex relation to the unconscious while living securely in the conscious world that must be negotiated in order to survive. The medial woman has a sixth sense of what the modern world needs but often does not realize: a counterbalance to logic and rationality, an ability to see-through, a connection with the divine, and a voice that can transform how the current anorexic myth is being lived out collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo nos proponemos pensar al cine como un arte cyborg, un punto de encuentro entre arte, ciencia y tecnología. Tomando la perspectiva de las “ontologías abiertas” u ontologías de la monstruosidad de Donna Haraway que son constitutivamente fronterizas y relacionales, buscaremos ver cómo se manifiestan en lo cinematográfico. Desde distintos teóricos del cine se lo plantea como un arte constitutivamente monstruo-so: André Bazin nos habla del cine como “arte impuro”, Alain Badiou lo retoma para pensar la operación de síntesis que va de lo impuro, el caos del mundo, a la pureza o síntesis. Edgard Morin resalta capacidad cinematográfica de metamorfosis, y Jean Epstein vincula el cine a la energía diabólica, ya que considera al Diablo como un gran inventor. También el cineasta chileno Raúl Ruíz comparte esta mirada al proponer un cine-chamánico y hechicero, y por último, Jean-Louise Comolli quien hace un elogio del cine-monstruo. In this article we propose to think of cinema as a cyborgart, a meeting point between art, science and technology. Taking the perspective of Donna Haraway’s “open ontologies” or ontologies of monstrosity, which are constitutively borderline and relational, we will seek to see how they manifest themselves in cinema. Different film theorists consider cinema as a constitutively monstrous art: André Bazin speaks of cinema as “impure art”, Alain Badiou takes it up again to think about the operation of synthesis that goes from the impure, the chaos of the world, to purity or synthesis. Edgard Morin highlights the cinematographic capacity of metamorphosis, and Jean Epstein links cinema to diabolic energy, since he considers the Devil as a great inventor. Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruíz also shares this view by proposing a cinema-chamanic and sorcerous, and finally, Jean- Louise Comolli, who praises the cinema-monster. Este artigo quer analisar o cinema como uma forma de arte cyborg, como ponto de encontro entre arte, ciência e tecnologia. O artigo quer ver como as “ontologias abertas” ou ontologias da monstruosidade de Donna Haraway (que são fronteiriças e relacionais) manifestam-se no cinematográfico. Alguns teóricos do cinema o propõem como uma arte monstruosa: André Bazin fala do cinema como “arte impura” e Alain Badiou toma esta afirmação para pensar uma operação de síntese que começa no impuro, o caos do mundo, à pureza ou síntese. Egard Morin falta da capacidade cinematográfica para a metamorfose e Jean Epstein conecta o cinema com a energia diabólica, ao considerar ao diabo como um grande inventor. Mesmo assim, o cineasta chileno Raúl Ruíz propõe um cinema xamânico e feiticeiro e, finalmente, Jean Luoise Comollu faz um louvo do cine-ma-monstro.

This article elaborates on Schön's model of design to address the material part of the "design conversation." Bringing in media and mediality studies, our research aims to support a broader understanding of the production of meanings and forms by addressing the difference between materials and mediums. While Schön used both concepts, we show that Dewey's influence on Schön can explain why speaking of mediums as a "system of formation" can better describe the multilayered semiotic working of the material conversation either foregrounding the support and allowing for a bodily experience or foregrounding the message and supporting an interpreting experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the study is to present Kant’s conception of copyright and publishing law. The author proceeds from two of Kant’s lesser-known texts, the article “On the Injustice of Reprinting Books” (“Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks“, 1785) and the treatise On Turning Out Books (Über die Buchmacherei, 1798), which he analyzes and interprets in relation to § 31 of Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), where Kant lays out and tries to answer the question “What is a book?” in the context of the discussions and conflicts of the period. On this basis, the author comes to the conclusion that Kant derives his conception of copyright and publishing law from his conception of the nature and function of the book as a manuscript and a printed text. It is further argued that the texts of Kant being scrutinized here can be additionally used for both historical as well as philosophical and systematic research of the issues related, on the one hand, to copyright and publishing law and, on the other, to the problematic of textuality and mediality, which is currently being discussed in the fields of systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy, including professional Kantian research.

This paper explores the logics of magazine re-uses through three case studies, by focusing on pictures produced and reproduced by way of photography. The first case study focuses on half-tone reproductions in the early phase of the development of news photography, using the example of Collier’s Weekly during the Russo-Japanese War. It offers a historical case of transfers between book and magazine. In our second case, examining the American and French editions of Vogue, internal re-uses of content demonstrate both collaborative networks as well as a certain amount of latitude for divergence, and therefore further distinction within the Condé Nast brand. Our last example analyses the re-use of film stills in popular illustrated film magazines. These magazines manage their dependency on existing visual material provided by distribution companies for free, while striving, simultaneously, to highlight their ‘profile’ through visual design. The specific ways in which each magazine re-used images shed light on how respective editorial identities are carved, as well as more generally on magazines’ mediality: the latter, we argue, is showcased, in highly competitive print markets, partly through distinct(ive) re-using practices.

Anne Carson's recent work has experimented with intermedia composition, leaving behind what one reviewer calls 'the medium of the ordinary book'. While her critical reception often considers these experiments in relation to new media, I argue that we understand Carson in the context of a reflection on the concept of medium as such. This kind of reflection on medium is evident both in contemporary poetic experiment and recent work in poetics which consider medium as the locus of historical practice. By articulating the constraints of her linguistic medium Carson introduces difference in her work. Medium emerges as a hybrid concept, encompassing apparatuses of mediation; conventions; and the mediality or impart-ability (Benjamin) of language as a social practice. The article charts these aspects of medium in Nox and Autobiography of Red, focusing on medium as a physical substrate, ekphrasis and translation, recurring elements in Carson's work concerned with mediality: the means of representation, address, figuration and communication. I conclude by suggesting that through these engagements with medium the historical nature of the work emerges, and, consequently, its means of differing from the present; this represents a resource against what Rosalind Krauss calls 'the deadening embrace of the general' in contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The necessary and sufficient conditions under which a Menger algebra can be isomorphically represented by medial n-ary operations are proposed. Since a Menger hypercompositional algebra can be regarded as a generalization of a Menger algebra, for this reason, the situation for medial hyperoperations is further examined and a representation theorem of Menger hypercompositional algebras by such concepts is proved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following contribution seeks to understand poetry as a genre situated between written text and performance. First, it presents instances of the systematic differences between performed and written poems, defining ‘performed poetry’ in a decidedly broad sense. The metaphor of ‘aggregate states’ is tested and critically discussed in order to describe poetry as a genre that not only is received in a state of exception but that in its very essence plays between substantially different media and forms. Due to the dearth of critical work addressing poetry as a performative art, a set of terms and tools for the analysis of performed poetry is proposed. After these brief theoretical remarks, two poems are examined, both of which are accessible as performance and as a written text. Their differences are considered in order to show the potential value of separating and comparing performative and written elements for individual analysis as well as for further conceptual discussion. Nora Gomringer’s „Dichtertreffen“ is presented by the author in the style of a classical reading (‚Wasserglaslesung‘), in which the artist, however, utilizes a full repertoire of performative channels and codes. As a result, the semantics of this performed variant differ significantly from those of the written text. The use of the body, objects, space, and voice alter the meaning of the poem even in a reading that, at first glance, does not conspicuously refer to performative art forms at all. Martina Hefter’s poem about the physical condition of lying („liegen“) focuses on the dance-like handling of body and space in its performed version, which has little in common with a classical reading. The discussion of two poems, written and performed, reveals the importance of considering both ‘aggregate states’ of the poem when working with texts and engaging in the recent debates of lyricology.

The existing set of media text modifications with their numerous contexts remains largely understudied in terms of text typology. There are no complex descriptions of the types of media messages. The article raises the problem of correlation between media genres and the compositional speech forms of journalism. The author interprets compositional speech forms as complex functional textual units that structure the thought and give it integrity and completeness. Genre approaches to classifications and current media text typology issues dominate in the contemporary text linguistics, despite the fact that the genre remains its central category. The Germanic studies have accumulated enough experience to generalize the existing points of view and cover all possible journalistic representation forms (journalistische Darstellungsformen). From the standpoint of text linguistics, it is the genre variety of media proposals that confirms the priority of the term Textsorte, which covers homogeneous text classes that are hierarchically the same. This article focuses on the term Textsorte, since it covers the whole variety of media genres and fixes the hierarchical principle of the text function in the system of communicative speech classifications. Therefore, Textsorte is the main operational reference point in German genre studies and the basis for multidimensional classifications of media texts.

This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a 'mesoscale' intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of 'repetition' and 'mediation', to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal 'metapattern' of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directed graphs without multiple edges can be represented as algebras of type (2, 0), so-called graph algebras. A graph is said to satisfy an identity if the corresponding graph algebra does, and the set of all graphs satisfying a set of identities is called a graph variety. We describe the graph varieties axiomatized by certain groupoid identities (medial, semimedial, autodistributive, commutative, idempotent, unipotent, zeropotent, alternative).

This article presents an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s story “The Vane Sisters” in the light of Jan Mukařovský’s concepts of semantic gesture and unintentionality (nezáměrnost). At the same time, medial implications of Nabokov’s text are recognized, forcing a certain modification of the aforementioned concepts, taking into account the phenomenon of medial self-reflectivity.

The article examines aspects of mediality in the relationship between Russophonia and travelogues in the works of the contemporary Russophone writers Alexander Genis and Peter Vail. Both emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US and have been active in various media, including radio and television, not only literature. Both leave postmodernity and the notion of a national language and culture behind. Instead, their travel sketches explore aesthetic as well as entertaining formats, continuing the dialogue with literature but also merging it with other media. Their primary reference system for the Russian language provides stability with intermedial and plurimedial effects. "Mediality" denotes the interplay of several media in the communication process with the audience. First, the article looks at their co-authored book Amerikana (1991), in which they describe American everyday culture by way of a subtle comparison to Soviet life. Next, it examines Vail's Slovo v puti (2010), focusing on his intertextual sketch "Armenia," which reproduces the idea of eclectic time layers. Finally, the analysis shifts to the phenomenology of slow movement through cities, villages and nature in Genis's Strannik (2011). Genis's and Vail's travel sketches connect the US, Europe and Russia, and also their different medial perceptions of the 20th and 21st centuries. They preserve the Russian language as a reliable lingua franca used by émigrés of all nationalities from the former Soviet Union. By suggesting an anachronistic subject determined by biography, history, hedonism and desire for knowledge, documentary literature departs from the post-Soviet aphasia (S. Oushakine), which described society after the shockwaves around 1991. Digital formats seem ideal for a globally interactive Russophonia as well as for the highly intermedial genre of autobiographical travelogue. Nevertheless, both authors avoid digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung (ZQF) is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mounting evidence in re search points to the social bonding effect of community singing and it is now safe to say that it is evident that singing together is an effective way of connecting people and building a sense of community. However, the question of just how this effect occurs remains underexplored. Exactly what is it about singing that affords social bonding? In this article we pursue this question by bringing attention to the two crucial medialities involved in singing: words and music. Firstly, we review empirical evidence of social bonding in singing. This provides the basis for a theoretical discussion, mainly consulting music and ritual studies. Finally, we include as a case study the influence of N.F.S. Grundtvig on Danish community sing ing culture. On the basis of these three steps we propose an interpretation of the medial conditions for social bonding in singing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection is inspired by a discussion among leading intermedialists organized by UNISC, Brazil, fall 2021. It included contextualization and conceptualization, i.e. setting the current research within the context of the discipline's development and the synchronic study of culture, proposing new concepts or defending old ones. The key term 'in-between' expresses both a trend in art, and in the self-reflecting intermedial methodology. It becomes obvious that intermedial research opens up wide to analyzing issues of social importance. In our exposition, we assess the debated concepts in terms of their analytical and educational potential in literary and cultural studies, and relate the debate to the Czech environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Swedish film Orca (2020) was both conceived and produced during COVID-19. As such, it is also about the pandemic and its own becoming. Making use of the proliferation of current screen cultures, including the split screen, writer and director Josephine Bornebusch invigorates old-fashioned ensemble acting while also putting current mediality on display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political protests involving clashes with police are often delegitimized by governments for using "uncivil" and "violent" means. Drawing on a creative video clip ("Breaking Billboards") made by a group of Gezi protestors, this paper theorizes an alternative response, which refuses the dichotomy between peaceful and violent struggles and instead seeks to transform the field of judgement. The protestors in the clip, by echoing a verse originally written by poet Cemal Süreya, reconstruct destructive activity – breaking billboards – playfully and detached from its presumed ends. Placing their performances in conversation with Giorgio Agamben's theory of mediality – means without end – I argue that the clip reconstructs political action in play-form, corroding the significance of the means-ends relationship. In doing so, it frustrates the usual grounds of judgement within which the meaning and value of protest activities are arbitrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At least since the practical complexity of media landscapes is growing, the theoretical complexity of media communication has to be widened (horizon and frame) and deepened (focus) — especially when fulfilling the mission and the quality of science: generating complexity on a level of logical theory towards a subject that is not an object by itself but a culturally programmed metaphor of description: communication, culture, society etc. The complexity of communication, media or society is not a character of those constructs themselves but a complexity of thinking, in practice hopefully reduced, in theory hopefully produced. Facing communication (more) as a cultural performance of humanness and of social practice and facing media (more hermeneutically than technically) demands to conceptualize those constructs as models of knowledge, as culturally programs in search of mindful meaning and meaningful relevance of social /societal life. Therefore, there is need of a shifting paradigm from functional, objectivist concepts to hermeneutically open concepts — not only, but also to generate a wider frame of analysis and interpretation of social and cultural change referred through the mediality character of communication and society. So called social media are not new media but show the possibility as well the challenge and chance of change of media orders. Of course, that demands other (new) competence concepts of social practice.

This article sets out to illuminate two intermedial Dante references in the artwork of the Chinese-western artist Ai Weiwei: the music album The Divine Comedy (2013) and the Lego portrait Dante Alighieri in LEGO (2016). By paying special attention to surfaces, the “surface reading” presented in this article seeks to interrogate the function of these references. However, in place of Why? the question in this article is shaped more by How? Due to Dante's inherent mediality, the intermedial Dante references function as a social medium. The article demonstrates, how mediality becomes evident through two operators: seriality and combinatorics. By placing the artist on one of the two sides of mediation, this article implicitly reverses the role long reserved for Ai Weiwei: that of the cultural mediator.

This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Brian O’Nolan’s œuvre. It briefly examines Myles na gCopaleen’s play with posthuman hybrids in Cruiskeen Lawn, seeing his vignettes as extravagant, humorous depictions of the ways our bodies and symbolic order are determined by the mechanical. It then maps the movement between typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.

"Chiasm, Flesh and Nature. Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Mediality". The notion of flesh, belonging to the last stage of Merleau-Ponty's thought, occupies a decisive place in specialized research on the author. However, few publications highlight the immense influence of the latter in current thought, especially in the post-humanist and materialist currents of contemporary philosophy. We propose, in the pages that follow, to analyze this category from the point of view of a philosophy of relationship, interpreting it from the figure of mediality or relating them to a notion of medium. For this, in the first part, we will elucidate the notion of medium used in Phenomenology of Perception and the postulation of experience as a starting point. In the second part, we will specify the multiple dimensions in which the notion of flesh unfolds in the late philosophy of the author. Once the epistemological, phenomenological and ontological aspects of the ontology of the flesh have been addressed, its philosophical potential will be analyzed, projecting the treatments for the problems of nature, an issue that we consider of vital importance for current philosophical reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung (ZQF) is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)