NCCR Mediality. Historical Perspectives 2013–2017

The NCCR focuses on the historicity of media and mediality. It investigates forms of communication, transfer, and perception before the era of mass-media dominance and modern teleologically and technologically oriented media discourses. The aim of the NCCR is a historical mediology, which particularly examines change in communication practices, new dynamics in medial forms, and reflection on the conditions of communication.
In its third phase the limits of the medial are at the centre of the NCCR's interest. Sixteen individual projects will systematically analyze moments in which the display and the apparent breakdown of mediation are mutually entangled. The main terms in this context will be ostentation, already used in the previous project phases to denote phenomena of accentuation and highlighting, and implosion, indicating disintegration, the collapse of differences, and inner heterogeneity. Ostentation, referring to strategies,and implosion, applying rather to processes, are not considered as a pair of opposites. They serve to describe the tension between appearance and disappearance, the sayable and un-sayable, visibility and invisibility, conceivability and inconceivability. To look at the interplay between aspects of ostentation and implosion promises to disclose a qualitative dimension of the medial, which is neglected in current media-discourses.