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Welcome to the 7th edition of the e-journal

MAP - Media | Archive | Performance

MAP #7 Media / Performance: On Gestures

Looking at the interrelations between media studies and performance studies, this special issue, edited by Barbara Büscher and Jana Horáková, takes up the notion of ‘gesture’ as a key word for intertwining both fields. Gestures are the focal point as they combine the materiality of movements and the immateriality of utterances and meanings, the subjective impression and the communicative expression, the interface with the apparatus and the program. As Vilém Flusser – who repeatedly returned to this issue in different ways – said, gestures are hints to decipher the world. They allow us “’to read’ the existential changes we are currently undergoing”. Flusser also understands them as indexes (symptoms) of freedom, as the ability of humankind to overthrow the pre-programmed rules implemented into apparatuses. To break the rules, or to transcend the apparatus order, means to be able to awake from the passivity of automatization and to reflect upon it.

With the following contributions, this issue focuses on two gestures, which, albeit not being at the core of Flussers’ consideration, seem to us crucial for today’s media reality. The authors examine if and how Flusser’s ideas, concepts, and investigations can be activated and continued. The two gestures are the gesture of programming (and its effects) and the gesture of listening (and its implications).  [...]

... MAP #7 >>

We thank the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig (Academy of Music and Theatre Leipzig) for support in the publication of this issue.