To browse Academia. A mass of activity fits into a span of 20 years Change has been an obvious and constant identifying characteristic for the lab throughout its history. The lab has remained faithful to its Mission Statement that we jointly compiled in the mids: "The mission of the Media Lab is to explore, discover and comprehend the new digital technology and its impact in society; to find and exploit the possibilities it opens to communication, interaction and expression and to evaluate, understand and deal with the challenges it poses to design and creative production.
In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro background environment β actively accessible by only a small coterie of scientists, experts, and state or corporate agents β to pervading and augmenting our lives at an increasingly micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know from direct experience that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects in need of constant reckoning.
The Post-Media Lab offers a space in which to examine, reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried perspective.
The Lab aims to build a place where the aesthetic and utopian moments of ubiquitous media can be recaptured, and the multilayered forces and textures of media space become newly legible. We take up 'post-media' as an inherently critical notion adequate to the media strategies of scenes, movements and collectives β rather than the individualities and normativities produced by commercial media β which construct and intensify social agencies, help develop new forms of relation and generate counter-meanings.
Guiding principles of the Lab will be to maintain a wide historical perspective and to scrutinise established programmatic and strategic positions; the concepts, experiments and radical promise of past engagements with telecommunications, digital media and aesthetics will be kept in mind, as much to reprise their energies and enthusiasms as to create a gauge for where we find ourselves today.
