Emmanuel Alloa (University of Fribourg, DGAE), Elke Bippus (Zurich University of the Arts), Christoph Brunner (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Steffi Hobuß (Leuphana University Lüneburg) 

Transculturality as a concept and program has emerged in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s in the shadow of post- and decolonial discourses and debates. Beyond a classic definition of interculturality, which a priori assumes a difference between cultures, transculturality is premised on interrelationships, overlaps, and their »transgressive potential.« Transgression here refers to questionable ties, such as nationality or membership in social categories (e.g., class or gender), and affirms an open and process-oriented understanding of cultural production. While transculturality has now established itself as a recognized paradigm, it is striking that media and aesthetic aspects have always remained marginalized. The opposite is true in the context of research on media aesthetics, where transcultural aspects have so far played a negligible role. The conference aims to interlink two debates that have previously existed side by side rather unconnectedly. In media aesthetic debates, too, the discussion has shifted from the assumption that each individual artistic medium is defined by a substantial media specificity to the description of diverse interrelationships, crossovers, and transmedia blends. What remains is the question of what role material qualities play in form-formation processes and to what extent the respective contexts of appearance significantly alter the circulation of signs. Can media aesthetic insights be utilized fruitfully for the debate on transculturality, and conversely, could the often location-independent reflection on media aesthetics be subjected to transculturalization? Representation and reproduction, visibility and invisibility, physicality and techne, production and reception need to be thought of in a new relationship.

It is important to clarify how a transcultural media aesthetics could be developed that identifies the following lines of problematization:

1) What role does representation through concepts, artifacts and actions play in a transgressive understanding of transculturality?

2) Which modes of perception and contexts of meaning arise on the basis of transcultural practices?

3) Does aesthetics hold a universalistic promise as a possibility for transcultural practice or does it thereby obscure the relevance of differences?

4) Do transcultural practices transform the basic understanding of aesthetic categories and concepts, such as culture, subject, perception, and art? Do they enable a critical relationship to hegemonic self-understandings of theory and, in particular, philosophies of the European tradition?

With a focus on critical concepts, practices, and media, the event aims to open up transcultural perspectives on aesthetics on a philosophical level. This not only aims to critically interrogate forms of knowledge and categories considered canonical, but also to consider aesthetics itself in its genealogical situatedness as a critical practice and the immanent critique of an epistemic positing. While a dialogic approach to intercultural philosophy usually dwells on the comparison of different understandings of aesthetics along cultural differences of geographical and/or ethnic provenance, a transcultural approach includes the proximity, proximity, and overlap of (micro-)cultural practices against the backdrop of globally and medially networked perceptual dispositifs. Such an approach requires locating concepts as fluid and within the field of these practices, and viewing these practices as always already embedded in media-based material forms of expression.