"Paradigm Shift" Participants

ABSTRACT
Post media aesthetics is a controversial and at the same time an imperative topic in new media scholarship of late. New-media theorist, Lev Manovich who ‘places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marchall McLuhan,’ proposed a particular ‘direction’ which ‘substituting the concept of medium by new concepts from computer and net culture’ in order to develop discourse on ‘post-digital, post-net culture’ (2001:6). As he illustrated, the post media aesthetics, requires categories so as to ‘describe how cultural object organizes data and structure user’s experience of this data’ (p.6).
To highlight Lev Manovich (2001) key argument, he suggested that users, who must be the centre of consideration in post media aesthetics, follow a ‘particular patterns’ which he called ‘information behavior’ in a given culture’(p.9). Now, the question before us is how this new aesthetical insight can be traced visually in media art works. The aforementioned query, however, has not been touched upon in new-media scholarship. Considering the above mentioned argument about the nature of post media aesthetics on the one hand and recognizing the ever-increasing significance of media arts to our culture on the other hand, this paper aims to trace the visual evolution and changes in media arts with consideration of socio-cultural element. As per the methodological approach, Rose(2012) model of ‘critical visual methodologies’ would be utilized, therefore on this basis, by considering compositional modality as the central axis, this study would attempt to map the changes and/or pattern of evolution in visualization in Media Arts in three sites of production, image and audiencing. An important challenge before new-media researchers today is the question of the ‘Big Data’. However, instead of considering the real geographical or cultural map as data source, Media arts work will be selected from ‘UNESCO [virtual] City of Media Arts’.

BIO
Maryam Bolouri is a research student at Institute for Media Studies, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Her doctorate research revolves around ‘Visual Grammar of New Media’. She is the author of In Quest of Alternative Views on Theories of Communication: Excavating Thoughts of Sufism (2011). Her research interests include indigenization of communication theories, new media discourse, visual communication/art and Persian philosophy/art.