Metamethods II | Post-media Communities: social research processes and new art practices

Marina Gržinić, philosopher, artist and researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, is invited to take part in the research group Post-media Communities: social research processes and new art practices within the Research Project Metamethods II at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona.

The main purpose of this research project is the relationship between new artistic practices and social research within the so-called post-media art practices; namely those which articulate critical discourses in relation to mediation and mediatisation of our lives, located in time and space defined by new communication technologies in the global era.

Within this framework, the experiences that most interest us, to which we will pay special attention, are those who understand audiovisual practices and digital culture as a new field of conflict, as a complex scenario for creation, where the artistic abandon definitely the epistemology of an individual subject and moves towards becoming a collective subject. A new creative subject that makes from everyday life and available technologies a force capable of appropriating any sign, reinterpret, alter and return it back again into the circulation transformed in a fully active social tool.

The research methodology that we will apply is transversal and relational. We will place our research work in the political, social and cultural context of postmedia condition, in the nineties and early twenty-first century, with the intention to seek and construct new genealogies.

Bibliographic references and audiovisual materials with which we will work, will be selected for their competence when analyzing the lines that traverse different areas to establish critical imaginary, able to return to art some of its social functions. We will draw parallels between different modes of research within the artistic production, the use of new devices and narrative structures, both, in projects dedicated to create communities around an artistic experience, as well as these audiovisual practices concerned with the identity and its various critical forms and social processes that defines it.

The objective of this research and analysis of these materials is to define the emerging field where digital production is creating new political aesthetics that is socially engaged.

Gržinićs interest in this project is grounded in the common interest to establish connections between different contexts and conditions of artistic research and production within the European space, as well as in re-thinking new forms of knowledge production at the intersection between theory and practice.

She will as well participate in this year's symposium, organized by the Research Group Metamethods I that will take place in September 2012, when researchers from different countries and disciplines will gather in order to exchange their research methodologies and teaching experiences within the field of art.