Presented as part of a residency with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, organized in conjunction with the 2012 Generational. With special guest: curator/art theorist Gunalan Nadarajan, Vice Provost of Research and Dean of Graduate Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art.

Let’s bring certain things back to the table: media/mediation, technology, collaboration: things between things. Mediation is everywhere, we realize. It is not restricted to new media or electronic forms. The sea is a medium for trade and piracy; an organization like CAMP is a medium for what “messages” it can produce; electricity is a medium for energy, personal consumption, and family life, as well as global battles around raw materials and distribution.

How to make an art that nestles in such a world and attempts to transform it? Our own approach has been to work with the ideologies, affordances, and breaking points of “media” (ranging from cycle rickshaws, wooden ships, state records, web browsers, and basic infrastructures like water and electricity, to institutional environments like CCTV control rooms and archives. The capacities of the medium are called upon to transmit, evoke, or construct a larger, less instrumental world, despite the medium’s own tendency towards invisibility.

This talk, screening, and discussion consists of five proposals for undoing the impoverished metaphor of "networks” and asks what a more full-blooded love of technology could mean, for art, collectivity, and politics.