Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

The humanities seem to be in a never ending crisis of downsizing and increasing irrelevance. This may partly be due to its rear view approach to subject matters. Humanistic disciplines primarily perform an analytical understanding of their objects and entities, and often only after the event. While adequate in traditional humanities research, this form of ‘hindsight’ is deadly in the context of digitalization. Core humanistic disciplines focus their attention on objects created by others, be it a painting, a novel, a movie, an institution, economic systems, or actions and events in history. Even successful disciplines like digital humanities tend to reside in this post factum position, often employing digital solutions primarily as new analytical tools. How may the humanistic disciplines meet this challenged and develop methods and techniques to alter its relationships to invention and innovation in digital domains in general, and location–based media (spatial computing) in particular? How may classical rhetoric provide an ‘architectonic productive art’, a method for how media studies as a humanistic discipline could provide proactive procedures for digital design? A series of augmented reality applications examples will be presented and discussed in order to show how theory and analytical concepts may serve as topoi for invention of new prototyped genre examples.