Netstructures: Cultural history of verbal-linguistic, visual and technical networks.
In the idea of the net, structure und material, model, metaphor as well as medium converge and partly synthetize. We understand net as a fabric, as social associations, as means of communication and traffic, technical connections, structures of language and knowledge. In nets, we believe, one can get lost or cleave new ways (out), one can get netted or fall through the meshes. Net as a metaphor has been a booming concept! As today s predominant medium of communication the internet has established the net irrefutably as the dispositive of perception and thinking. It has developed into the realm in which we order our knowledge of and about this world. Its advancement is especially interesting in view of the contested relationship between technical-medial concretisation and collective fantasies which encompass the current medium internet. In his seminal work on the wishful thinking constellations ~ Wunschkonstellationen Hartmut Winkler for instance has shown that to free thinking from the restrictions of linearity and causality as generated by (the occidental habit and technique of) writing governs one of the central discourses about the net. While the medium of writing has forced us to represent complex phenomena in linear ways the net as paradigm had already been inscribed into the medieval textus ( Gewebe ) as well as into the multicrossing and overlayered polysemantic formations and configurations in the architecture of the gothic cathedral. Apart from that, though, the material realisation of technical networks has to be differentiated from the symbolic usage of the net-concept. Striving to contribute to a cultural history of netstructures, the interdisciplinary conference with representatives from the fields of German medieval studies, media theory, linguistics and information science is aimed to confront the different disciplines and respective perspectives on and dimensions of verbal-linguistic, visual and technical nets.
Possible topics are: communication networks in the past, present and future, iconography of netstructures, netstructures of language, netstructures of knowledge, netstructures of images, netstructures in manuscript culture, netstructures in print culture, technical networks, arboreal and rhizomatous structures, netstructures in (church) architecture, social nets and networks
Wenzel, Horst Prof. Dr. phil. (Details) (Early German Literature / Literature of the High Middle Ages)
Financer
Volkswagen-Stiftung (VW)
Duration of project
Start date: 07/2004
End date: 07/2004
Publications
http://www.perspicuitas.uni-essen.de/sammelbeitraege.htm
