An introduction to MEDIA-BODIES: Matter and Imaginary

Abstract

The notion of media-bodies is proposed in this issue as a test, a gesture that congregates potentialities and an operative term that is being studied and experimented with in various realms of practice and thought, with a specific focus on frontier, complex and problematic bodies. Not just those deemed monstruous, but also the prosthetic, non-normative, hybrid bodies, the ones that tread the frontiers, marking out the limits of the human and of experience: fragmented and unifying of materialities. The category of an essentially medial body is therefore assumed; one that renders its own methodologies of embodiment and revelation epistemologically operative and makes it possible to give form to and imagine further and other bodies.

In today’s technoscientific experiments, it seems urgent to return to the subject of the bodies, their crossings, their languages and edits, in order to understand, first and foremost, that what is at play there is a tension and a power that are revelatory of the social, cultural and political circumstances: indeed, various inscriptions, mediations and utopias exist as a force at play within the bodies.

In today’s technoscientific experiments, it seems urgent to return to the subject of the bodies, their crossings, their languages and edits, in order to understand, first and foremost, that what is at play there is a tension and a power that are revelatory of the social, cultural and political circumstances: indeed, various inscriptions, mediations and utopias exist as a force at play within the bodies.

This edition brings together several essays that articulate hybrid methodologies that try to understand which media-bodies are being projected and what materials and imaginaries they claim.