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Launch of Campus Medius 1.0

Campus Medius, the description of which was posted on the G+C Blog last year, has recently been published on campusmedius.net. The mapping project explores mediality as an experiential field by focusing on a historical chronotope of twenty-four hours in a metropolis. In the form of a digital topography, the first version of the website assembles fifteen events on the weekend of May 13 and 14, 1933, in Vienna as networks of human and non-human actors. The exemplary time-space is marked by so-called Turks Deliverance Celebrations held by the paramilitary Home Guards and the Austrian National Socialists. As the advance anniversary of the city's liberation from the Second Turkish Siege in September 1683, the rallies were oriented from the outset on processes of media communication.


In the project's second phase, the historical a priori of these actual media experiences will be studied: which forms of knowledge, relations of power, and modes of subjectivation pervade the events in Vienna on May 13 and 14, 1933? Following Michel Foucault, this narrative topology examines three dispositifs of mediation—firstly, sovereign signs leading from 1933 back to the divine heroes of 1683 and the classical age's representation; secondly, disciplinary gazes capturing life in modern institutions from prisons around 1800 to interwar cinemas; and thirdly, controlled transmissions as fostered in the 20th century, emerging in the form of target groups and public relations. The project team is working on genealogical tours of the chronotope that make use of "ontographs," which are photographs of pictures from the past in the present: the older images are oriented within the space in which they were taken years earlier and recaptured like a mise-en-abyme. Finally, the historical analysis will be the subject of a book written by Simon Ganahl, the scholarly head of Campus Medius and co-editor of the G+C Blog.


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