Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

Home
United States
Princeton, NJ
Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

Architecture, art, film, photography, literature, philosophy, music, history, and all forms of electronic media from radio to video, to information technology.

Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University
Directors: Beatriz Colomina and Irene V. Small

The Program in Media and Modernity promotes the inter-disciplinary study of the unique cultural formations that came to prominence during the last century, with special attention paid to the interplay between culture and technology, centering on architecture, art, film, photography, literature, phi

losophy, music, history, and media from radio to information technology. It draws on the rich human and material resources that exist at Princeton and provides a focus and forum for research and teaching in the spaces, texts, media, and modernities of the 20th and the 21st century. The program offers a graduate certificate and collaborative teaching, learning, and research opportunities centered on team-taught seminars and cross-disciplinary colloquia. Graduate Certificate in Media and Modernity

The Graduate Program in Media and Modernity offers students from a wide range of fields — architecture to computer science, visual arts to anthropology, literature to political theory — the opportunity to enrich and broaden their study through participation in the interdisciplinary activities of the program. The Graduate Certificate in Media+Modernity is conferred each year to Princeton University graduate students that fulfill the requirements listed below. Ph.D. students may obtain the M+M certificate by fulfilling the following requirements: 1) Enrollment in at least three seminars cross-listed with MOD (Media and Modernity). 2) Regular attendance at M+M events held during the semester. 3) Participation in a dissertation colloquium led by the program's directors. Masters students may obtain the M+M certificate by fulfilling the following requirements: 1) Enrollment in at least three seminars cross-listed with MOD (Media and Modernity). 2) Regular attendance at M+M events held during the semester. Students qualifying for the certificate should send the following information (in a single document) to [email protected] no later than May 1 for awarding of the certificate in that academic year:

a) Full name, department, program, year, expected date of graduation, contact email;
b) Name and contact email of primary advisor;
c) A list of courses fulfilling the qualifications for the Certificate, as listed above. Each of these should include all course numbers under which the class was listed, course titles, instructor names, descriptions (as listed on the Course Offerings website of the University) and the grade option for which each class was taken;
d) Any further information that might be useful and is not covered by the points above. Please note: Students may not gain admission to the University through the Program in Media and Modernity. They may affiliate with the program and earn a certificate from it after having been admitted through a degree-granting department. The certificate does not appear on the official transcript.

04/16/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Lydia Kallipoliti
“An Unfinished Cyclopedia; Histories of Ecological Design”
[Response: Sylvia Lavin]
Tuesday, April 23, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia presents conflicting definitions and concepts of architects and designers and the parallel histories of their intellectual positions toward environmental thought from the 19th century to today. In 21 chapters and 3 periods [ I. NATURALISM, II. SYNTHETIC NATURALISM, III. DARK NATURALISM], the context is not exclusively examined chronologically, but also in connected worldviews, each rendering evolving perceptions of nature, its relation to culture, and the occupation of the planet by human and non-human subjects.

Throughout the book, there is an acknowledgement and a critique that ecological histories reflect, in one way or another, hierarchical modalities of domination; ones that are bent on controlling knowledge and shaping the physical and material world into ontological and scientific worldviews. Architects, designers, and thinkers have long been complicit in the hubris of the position that humans are the caretakers of the planet and that the self — as a distinct individual entity— possesses a sublime power to analyze the world, devise hierarchies, and construct ideological cosmologies that become norms.

04/03/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Benjamin Buchloh
“The Ends of a Critic”
[Response: Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster]
Tuesday, April 09, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

:: co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology ::

In The Ends of a Critic, Yve-Alain Bois will interrogate Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster on their new book, Exit Interview.

In Exit Interview, a conversation in three parts, eminent critics and art historians Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discuss the intellectual foundations and motivations of Buchloh, tracing an arc from family history to activist politics of the 1960s and ’70s to encounters with significant artists, including Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. Foster engages Buchloh on his education and ambitions; his time in communes in Berlin; and his experiences in London as an aspiring fiction writer; and his return to Germany in 1971 to work at art galleries, publish the short-lived but influential magazine Interfunktionen, and teach at the Dusseldorf Academy. Together they chart Buchloh’s path from Europe to North America, first to Nova Scotia, then Los Angeles, and finally New York, as a publisher, professor, curator, and critic. Building on years of collaboration and friendship, Foster and Buchloh’s compelling conversations move from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one’s critical life as a whole. Their discussion is a study in dialectical thought as they explore what Foster calls the “fascinating contradictions” that have structured Buchloh’s approach to culture. The interview retains the intimacy of a frank and generative dialogue, with close examinations of the connections between politics and art. Exit Interview closes with a postscript by Buchloh that reflects on his rigorous commitment to the potential of critical art, despite the relentless commodification of everyday life.

03/28/2024

Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Inaugural Branden Hookway Interface
Shannon Mattern and Olga Touloumi
Tuesday, April 02, 2024 ET
Betts Auditorium (School of Architecture)

::Event co-sponsored by the School of Architecture::

Interface 2024 inaugurates an annual lecture program given in honor of one of the brilliant graduates of the School of Architecture, Branden Hookway, who passed away in 2021. Inspired by his description of the interface as an “apparatus” that can “contest and conjoin,” the format of this annual event brings together two scholars working in different clusters of the many areas that informed Branden’s theoretical and historical writing.

Tables organize our everyday but also structure political representations in the public realm. We gather around tables – to share, talk, negotiate – but tables also keep us apart, as Hannah Arendt reminds us. In this conversation, Olga Touloumi will consider the diplomatic table as the political economy of assembly that marked postwar imaginaries of liberal internationalism. Shannon Mattern will consider various virtual tabular interfaces designed to facilitate both the assemblage of objects or concepts and the assembly of minds and bodies. The conversation will also look beyond the table to consider newer sites of virtual gathering — digital gardens, mesh networks, and solidarity infrastructures, for instance — that adopt alternative topologies in order to foster hospitality and cultivate a different politics of assembly.

03/20/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Samia Henni
“Colonial Toxicity”
[Response: Simon Gikandi]
Tuesday, March 26, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons programme, whose archives are still classified, occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together by the architectural historian from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.

03/13/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Ekow Eshun
“In the Black Fantastic”
[Response: Tina M. Campt]
Tuesday, March 19, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

:: co-sponsored by the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics ::

Ekow Eshun will explore the landscape of ideas and imagery that inform his recent book, In the Black Fantastic (MIT Books, 2022). Embracing the mythic and the speculative, In the Black Fantastic, recycles and reconfigures elements of fable, folklore, science fiction, spiritual traditions, ceremonial pageantry, and the legacies of Afrofuturism to shows how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender and identity. Standing apart from Western narratives of progress and modernity premised on the historical subjugation of people of color, In the Black Fantastic celebrates the ways that Black artists draw inspiration from African-originated myths, beliefs, and knowledge systems, confounding the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the scientific and the supernatural.

Writer and curator Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the winner of the Association for Art History Curatorial Prize 2023 and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun (Penguin 2006) shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and Africa State of Mind (2021) nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.

Tina M. Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

02/29/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Dennis Yi Tenen
« Literary Theory for Robots”
[Response: Grant Wythoff]
Tuesday, March 05, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

::Event co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities::

Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this talk, we will discuss the past and future of literary technologies: the necessity of research into the material conditions of textual production, and the surprising afterlife of Structuralist thought. A case study from the book will conclude the conversation.

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media. His research happens at the intersection of people, text, and technology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.

Grant Wythoff heads the graduate program of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. He is cofounder of a cooperative mesh network and digital equity organization called Philly Community Wireless and founding editor of a journal for experimental research in the humanities called Startwords. His latest book, Technique in the Age of Tech (University of Minnesota Press), is forthcoming 2025.

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.

02/21/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

Paul Chan
« Ars::longa”
[Response: Devin Fore]
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

It is traditionally understood that the first part of « Ars longa, vita brevis » means it takes a long time to master an art or technology. Another interpretation is that art lasts, perhaps longer than life. I suggest a new third reading: that art extends life itself. To support this reading, I consider the work of Chris Marker, Arakawa & Gins, and experiences from my own private research and development in the domain of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing. Hellenistic mathematicians Archimedes and Eratosthenes, who fused poetry with calculation to capture what is « unbounded » or « infinite » are invoked. Naturally, Faust appears.

Paul Chan is an artist based in New York. He founded the press Badlands Unlimited (2010-2018). « Breathers », a survey exhibition of his recent practice organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will travel to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in March 2024. Chan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2022.

Devin Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012) and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming this fall).

Image Caption: Paul Chan, Left Handed Stomachion, 2023 (detail)

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

02/14/2024

The Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:

M+M Doctoral Colloquium – Spring 2024
with Tairan An, Joe Bucciero, Clemens Finkelstein, and Julian Rose
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

The Doctoral colloquium is an exciting opportunity for Ph.D. candidates who pursue the M+M graduate certificate to share their research and receive feedback from faculty and colleagues across a wide range of departments.

Tairan An | Architecture
“Assailing the Sun: Expeditionary Outbuildings and Other Extempore
Artifacts of Solar Science in Sicily, c. 1870”
[Advisor: Sylvia Lavin]

Joe Bucciero | Art & Archaeology
“Highly Skilled Animals: Carl Grossberg’s Art of Distinction”
[Advisor: Hal Foster]

Clemens Finkelstein | Architecture
“Planetary Survey Architectures, c. 1902”
[Advisor: Spyros Papapetros]

Julian Rose | Art & Archaeology
“Modern Art in Wretched Sheds: Francis Fowke’s Painting Galleries for the South Kensington Museum of Science and Art”
[Advisor: Hal Foster]

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

02/01/2024

The Graduate Program in Media and Modernity announces its series of events for the Spring 2024 semester. All events take place in Room N107 (School of Architecture) at 5:00 pm, unless otherwise noted. Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

FEB 20
M+M PhD Colloquium

FEB 27
Paul Chan: « Ars::longa »
[res. Devin A. Fore]

MAR 05
Dennis Yi Tenen: « Literary Theory for Robots »
[res. Grant Wythoff]
::co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities::

MAR 19
Ekow Eshun: « In the Black Fantastic »
[res. Tina Campt]
::co-sponsored by the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics::

MAR 26
Samia Henni: « Colonial Toxicity »

APR 02
Shanon Mattern and Olga Touloumi
Inaugural Branden Hookway Interface
::co-sponsored by the School of Architecture::

APR 09
Benjamin Buchloh: « The Ends of a Critic »
[res. Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster]
::co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Archaeology::

APR 23
Lydia Kallipoliti: « An Unfinished Cyclopedia; Histories of Ecological Design »
[res. Sylvia Lavin]

M+M co-sponsors:

FEB 13
Hani Rashid, Daniela Fabricius, Josephine Meckseper:
« Scenario for a Past Future and Avant-Garde Immersive Worlds »
also co-sponsored by Princeton’s Humanities Council and the Center for Digital Humanities

Please visit M+M’s official website for details and current information.

Address

Princeton University
Princeton, NJ

Website

http://mandm.princeton.edu/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University: