Immediation II

edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

  • Immediations
  • Published: 2019
  • ISBN: 978-1-78542-024-5
  • PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-025-2

A shudder instantly runs down the spine, calling each vertebrae to attention! Would ‘immediation’ not return us right away to direct perception of the world; what is given in experience; the simplicity of the present and all the attendant (historical) problems? It is necessary to revisit the notion of “mediation,” enshrined in the very term “the media”, which is everywhere today. All “media-tion” stages and distributes real, embodied – that is, immediate, events. The concept of immediation entails that cultural, technical, aesthetic objects, subjects, and events can no longer be abstracted from the ways in which they contribute to and are changed by broader ecologies. This book seeks to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action. Immediation I and II ask otherwise: what are the thinking-feeling imperceptibilities that colour, contour and condition relational experience today? All 25 contributors explore qualities of relationality, spacetimes of the event and transversal fields of thinking-making through expanded research. Together and apart, they generate novel concepts for immediating. Contributors to Immediation II: Lone Bertelsen, Nicole de Brabandere, Erin Manning, Mattie Sempert, Sher Doruff , Justy Phillips, Gerko Egert, Michael Hornblow, Jonas Fritsch, Jondi Keane, Brian Massumi. Contributors to Immediation I: Andrew Murphie, Ilona Hongisto and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Toni Pape, Thomas Lamarre, Stamatia Portanova, Andrew Goodman, Erik Bordeleau, Pia Ednie-Brown, Nathaniel Stern, Anna Munster, Alanna Thain, Julia Bee, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Christoph Brunner.

“Truly, Immediation is a rhizome. And yet, even as the tendrils make off in so many different, fascinating directions, the relationship between the chapters in each “movement” is indisputable: the essays address, reiterate, echo, scrutinize, reflect and “preflect” each other.
Gregory Flaxman – Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director of Global Cinema Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“…a palpable sense of controlled yet innovative experimentation.”
John Protevi – Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University

Editor Bios

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless, The Minor Gesture (2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (2014).

Anna Munster is Professor at the School of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her book, DeepAesthetics: On Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning (Duke, 2025) is the winner of The Anne Friedberg, Innovative Scholarship award and received an honorary mention for the 4S Fleck Prize, Outstanding Book, 2026.

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen is a professor in culture and media specialising in film and interfaces at Scandinavian Studies, School of Communication and Culture, Arts, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is leader of the Danish research project Affects, Interfaces, Events (2015-2020) and was leader of the Nordic research project Globalization and Nordic Art (2008-11), and of the Danish research project Reality, Realism, the Real in Visual Context (1999-2002). She chairs the board of School of Authors in Denmark (2016-2020), and is a committee member of the Swedish research fund, Vetenskapsraadet from 2016. She was Deputy-Editor-in Chief (2013-15) and Editor-in-chief of Journal of Aesthetic and Culture (2017-2019). Her recent books and editorships in English are: Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram (Aarhus University Press, 2018), From Sign to Signal.