Workshop of the AG Interfaces (German Society of Media Studies)

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Venue and date: Mainz, May 7 and 8, 2026

Be it on the screens of end devices, in the use of industrial machines or in the technical backend: interfaces shape how work is organized, perceived and carried out. However, interfaces are not just tools, but also determine the social forms of organization and cultural attributions of meaning of work. These conditions are realized in a double sense through interfaces: Interfaces serve processing, but are also the object of processing. In this sense, the performance of interfaces is not only a factor within processes of change in work, but also has an effect on the everyday social understanding of work (which can be seen in terms such as 'screen work'). This relationship can be spelled out with a focus on current work cultures, but also invites historical reflections on the transformation of work along media upheavals associated with interfaces.

The media studies debate on interfaces has increased significantly in recent years; in the theoretical debate, for example, a differentiated understanding of the operativity of interfaces has been developed. Nevertheless, the relationship to work has often remained underexposed. Against this background, the workshop of the AG Interfaces is dedicated to the various discourses, practices and artifacts that clause the relationship between interface and work. The focus is always on the interaction outlined here between work on and with interfaces, which is carried out under the conditions of the performance defined by the interface. Accordingly, interfaces should be understood as elements of media technology infrastructures that enable, structure and transform work – in both industrial and post-industrial contexts, from craft businesses to the platform economy.

The focus is on the following questions, among others:

How do interfaces shape the organization of work – e.g. through communication platforms such as Slack or Teams?
To what extent do interface dynamics affect different forms and places of work: from digital knowledge work to industrial and manual work to care work, which can also and especially take place in non-professional, domestic and intimate spaces?
What cultural differences are evident in the handling and design of interfaces? This also and especially concerns knowledge cultures (Knorr-Cetina 2002), which develop different ways of handling and patterns of interpretation in professional contexts.
How do interfaces mediate between implicit and explicit knowledge at work?
Who works on and with interfaces – and under what conditions and within which hierarchies?
How is work itself changing through interfacing – from historical developments to contemporary concepts such as gamification?
How do interfaces change the time and space structures of work?
What are specific processes of change in work that are shaped by interfaces (office work, sex work, violent work, etc.)?
How do AI-supported interfaces (such as chatbots, assistance systems, algorithmic filters and search tools) influence production and power relations?

Contributions are invited that address the previously posed and related questions theoretically or empirically. In addition to perspectives from media studies, contributions from Sociology, STS, design and HCI research or related fields are also welcome.

In addition to traditional academic lectures, we expressly welcome impulses from the field as well as artistic explorations of work and interfaces. A separate presentation format is offered for these contributions, which creates space for discussion-oriented, performative, creative or experimental forms. Contributions can come from the fields of (UX) design, programming and IT, arts or media production, for example, which open up new insights into the interplay of interface and work from their respective perspectives. Whether lecture performances, workshop discussions, demonstrators, UX studies, design workshops, media installations, generative art or experimental presentations - the aim is to bring theory and practice into productive conversation and make alternative approaches to the topic visible.

Please send an abstract (max. 5,000 characters) and a short biography (max. 500 characters) to info@ag-interfaces.net by November 7, 2025. When submitting, please be sure to indicate whether your contribution is academic or practice/art-based. If you do not have an institutional affiliation, you can contact the organization team regarding a possible covering of business travel expenses.

We look forward to your contributions!

Organizing team: Jana Hecktor (IZEW University of Tübingen), Marcel Thiel-Woznica (University of Mainz), Christoph Ernst (University of Bonn), Benjamin Doubali (University of Mainz), Sascha Dickel (University of Mainz)

The Büchner publishing house's website states:

We are delighted to finally be able to officially announce Laura Mücke as the winner of last year's Büchner Verlag Young Talent Award. Her doctoral dissertation Medien-Immersionen und ‚die Anderen‘. Feministische, kritisch-phänomenologische Perspektiven she successfully defended her thesis at the University of Vienna. The jury praised her "outstanding work on an exciting topic" and was impressed "by her combination of material and discourse". Our heartfelt congratulations!

Research Training Group 3064 "Technologies of Witnessing" investigates how witnessing as a media and cultural practice is changing in the 21st century.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) is establishing a new Research Training Group entitled "Technologies of Witnessing: Media and Cultural Practices" at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The interdisciplinary programme will investigate how witnessing is changing in the context of digitally networked media environments and current cultural and artistic discourses, while also examining the consequences this has for contemporary culture. From 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2031, the new research training group will offer 20 doctoral candidates and one postdoctoral researcher a structured and interdisciplinary research and study programme that also provides scope for the development of individual research profiles. The DFG is initially funding the research training group for five years with around 6.3 million euros. The JGU is contributing a further 550,000 euros.

"I am delighted about this success and congratulate all the scientists involved," said Clemens Hoch, Minister of Science for Rhineland-Palatinate. "The acquisition of a new research training group is an outstanding testament to the strength of research and training of young scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, especially in the cultural sciences and humanities. The new research training group will further strengthen the research profile of Mainz University."

How witnessing as a media and cultural practice is changing in the 21st century

"Whether we are talking about witness videos in social media, contemporary witness holograms, tribunals in the theater or forensic investigations and non-human witnesses in the arts - such phenomena point to a fundamental change in witnessing. They are representative of a dynamic and diverse field of research that requires new perspectives in media, cultural and art studies," explains GRK spokesperson Professor Dr. Chris Tedjasukmana, Professor of Everyday Media and Digital Cultures at JGU's Institute of Film, Theatre, Media and Cultural Studies. "We also want to emphasize the social relevance of the topic. After all, knowledge about technologies of witnessing also contributes to a reflexive clarification of practices that are crucial for coming to terms with cases of injustice, systematic human rights violations and traumatic historical events."

From this perspective, the RTG addresses the question of how witnessing as a media and cultural practice is changing in the 21st century, which specific technologies of witnessing are currently emerging, to what extent these techniques challenge passing understandings of witnessing and what influences these developments have on contemporary cultures. The aim of the research programme is to capture the multitude of changing media, cultural and artistic practices of witnessing that can be observed on the empirical level of phenomena, both in overarching problems and in specialization projects. Such a clarification process takes place in three research units, which are dedicated to three essential transformations of witnessing: firstly, the new formations and constellations of knowledge, secondly, the increasingly complex processes and arrangements, and thirdly, the changing relationships between man and machine.

Specialist perspectives in interdisciplinary exchange

In order to adequately investigate the multi-faceted subject and the multi-layered question, the Research Training Group brings together diverse expertise from the subjects of Media Studies, Film Studies, Theater Studies, Art Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. This composition guarantees the interdisciplinarity of the RTG and thus an exchange and complementarity of different specialist perspectives with a clear common focus on media, cultural and artistic practices of witnessing. The co-workers are able to develop discipline-specific projects that can also be linked back to the overarching topic of specialization of the RTG.

"The profile of the Research Training Group is characterized by an innovative approach to the dynamic research subject of contemporary witnessing practices, which are fundamentally changing against the background of digitally networked media environments as well as cultural and artistic discourses," Tedjasukmana sums up. "In this way, the RTG takes on a new scientific orientation by focusing on the technologies of witnessing, in particular knowledge constellations, processes and human-machine relations."

Research Training Groups are institutions of higher education institutions for the promotion and mentoring of young research talents, which are funded by the German Research Foundation for a maximum of nine years. Doctoral candidates work here within the framework of a thematically focused research program and a structured qualification concept. The aim is to prepare them for a career in science and support them in their scientific independence.

[This article was published on 16.06.2025 in the press releases of the Johannes Gutenberg University].

Understanding Video Activism on Social Media by Jens Eder, Britta Hartmann and Chris Tedjasukmana, published by Intellect 2025.

What political power do videos on social media have? In what ways do they exert influence, shape publics and change political life? And how can committed civil society actors in this field assert themselves against hegemonic discourses, commercial interests, anti-democratic agitation, and authoritarian propaganda? These questions are being debated intensely as social media increasingly dominate global information flows, and videos increasingly dominate social media.

Understanding video activism seems particularly relevant at a time when the internet is undergoing fundamental disruptions. The forms, practices, and opportunities of activism depend on its media environment, which now is changing rapidly and profoundly in terms of its technological basis, ownership, legal regulations, and governmental control.

The book is available via open access HERE.

JOINT EVENT "OPEN DOORS" of the Creative Media Lab and exhibition "Dissecting Gender" of the AMDK seminar "Geschlecht medial performen"
Mon, 27.1., 18:00, Medienhaus, Wallstraße 11

On March 6, an article about the event was published in the JGU closed stacks, you can read it here.

Fancy creative media projects? Then come along to "Open Doors". The focus is on student projects from the "Creative Media Lab" and "Geschlecht medial performen" courses. You can expect an exhibition on "Dissecting Gender", a radio play about an AI love affair, a web project about loneliness, a children's story about transience, a photo collage about home, a "Sa(r)gbar", short films about toxic masculinity and reels about emotions when listening to music. The event is free of charge. However, you can still sign up here so that we can plan better: Open Doors | WiSe24/25. Please bring your own headphones and a QR-enabled device. Drinks will be provided by the Film Studies student council. Drop by and get inspired!

More information:
GESCHLECHT MEDIAL PERFORMEN // "Dissecting Gender": Each medium contributes in its own way to the representation of the social, societal and systemic construction of gender and shows how gender is constantly renegotiated through different contexts and forms of expression. Through a queer-feminist approach to media studies, the exhibition questions assumptions about what exists as fact and what exists as a learned norm. It opens up spaces for alternative perspectives on stereotypes of binary gender, encourages people to reappropriate them and triggers deconstruction processes. The exhibition is organized by the seminar "Performing Gender in the Media", which is part of the research unit "Everyday Media and Digital Cultures" at the Institute for Film, Theatre, Media and Cultural Studies. The group has developed exhibition stations with titles such as "Making gender invisible", "Beyond the binary. Gender in dialogue", "disembodied bodies" "No tolerance in the first three rows" "Dancing like a man" "Shape yourself anew". Visitors will be invited at and between the stations to enroll themselves in the questioning of norms.

CREATIVE MEDIA LAB: How do you give topics visibility for a specific target group? Which item, which media channel or which combination is suitable for this? This is exactly what students are working on in the Creative Media Lab - a space for innovative, interdisciplinary projects at Johannes Gutenberg University and the higher education institution in Mainz. Here, young media professionals from various degree programs can develop new multimedia formats and creative media projects. With the courage to try things out.

Collection Bild | Kanäle. Zur Theorie und Ästhetik vernetzter Medienkultur (Published by Olga Moskatova and Laura Katharina Mücke, published by Königshausen & Neumann 2024).

Die ersten Auseinandersetzungen mit der Digitalisierung technischer Bilder waren vor allem durch ontologische Krisendiskurse gekennzeichnet. Ein Jahrzehnt später zeichnet sich ab, dass die Vernetzung und nicht der Übergang von Korn zu Pixel die eigentliche Zäsur des digitalen (Bewegt-)Bildes ausmacht. Von Netflix über YouTube bis hin zu Instagram und TikTok – digitale Bilder sind heute vor allem vernetzte Bilder, die ihre materiellen Träger verlassen haben und auf mobilen Small Screens konsumiert, distribuiert und geteilt werden. Ihnen wohnt ein Movens inne, der sie selbst zu Akteur* werden lässt, die netzwerkförmige Gefüge ausbilden: Die verteilten (Bewegt-)Bilder zirkulieren in materiellen Infrastrukturen, multiplizieren sich und sie inkorporieren gleichsam jede Spur ihrer Bewegungen. Eingebunden in regulative Plattformpolitiken einerseits und Praktiken des Sendens und Empfangens, Speicherns und Archivierens andererseits entwickeln sie ein soziopolitisches und kulturelles Eigenleben, dessen quasiorganische Verschränktheit mit Lebensweisen der vorliegende Band anerkennt. Er widmet sich in Fallstudien und theoretischen Perspektivierungen verschiedenen digitalen Bild-Anordnungen, indem er eben jene vernetzenden Bewegungen ins Zentrum stellt.

Mit Beiträgen von Olga Moskatova, Laura Katharina Mücke, Winfried Gerling, Elisa Linseisen, Irina Raskin, Laura Walde, Jens Schröter, Joachim Schätz, Petra Löffler, Maja Figge, Marc Ries, Katja Müller-Helle, Robert Dörre, Jana Zündel und Sabine Wirth.

The volume can be ordered from Königshausen und Neumann HERE.

With the conference theme "Gathering", the German Society of Media Studies (GfM) invites you to its annual conference at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from September 25 to 28, 2024. This year's thematic focus is on media, orders, forms and critical practices of gathering, which can relate to images and data, bodies and political collectives, archival collections and evidence, architectures and infrastructures. In many cases, how items and people are brought together proves to be a powerful process that creates realities and determines agency and visibility. The conference will also experiment with various types of gathering in practical terms: in addition to panels and individual lectures, media researchers will present their contributions in formats such as "Team Up", "Workspace", "Critical Friends" and "Encounters".

Further information can be found on the website.

„Alltag dokumentieren/ästhetisieren? Begegnungsversuche mit der semantischen Varianz von Tik-Tok-Videos“ von Laura Katharina Mücke im Sammelband DA camera is an app. On the media entanglements of applying and appropriating (Elisa Linseisen/Alena Strohmaier 2023, meson press)

Mücke's contribution deals with activist TikTok videos by women* that were created in the context of the civil protests in Belarus in August 2020. It uses them as an analytical foil to hold up a mirror to previous research on TikTok, which often uses traditional explanatory patterns: When TikTok is analyzed with terms or ontologies already established in film and media studies (such as 'genre', 'stylistic devices' or even 'aesthetics'), most of the heterogeneously moving videos there remain undiscussed. Instead, Mücke argues for a feminist-informed, discrimination-sensitive, canon- and binarity-critical approach to moving images in social media by reading TikTok theoretically as an "everyday medium".

The collection by Elisa Linseisen and Alena Strohmaier systematically examines the relationship between digital cameras and their software-technical foundations, which we summarize under "apps". As a conceptual framing in the examination of this media connection of camera/app, we choose the aesthetic and theoretical spectrum of Technics Departments of appropriation and application and the associated theoretical traditions of film studies as well as software, platform and app studies. With the programmatic finding 'Your camera is an app', four dialogical pairs of texts will explore the open thematic field between appropriation/application and its contemporary explosiveness and historical depth along overarching concepts such as participation, format and resistance. The volume sheds light on the connection between aesthetics and Technics Department, arts and software and, in addition to Film, also turns to the so-called Media Arts, documentary video formats, self-documentations and gaming.

(from the editors' descriptive text. The volume is available Open Access here ).

October 25-27, 2023 at the University of Hamburg, Center for Gender & Diversity

The necessary gestures of everyday digital life seem like easy finger exercises: everyday routines are consolidated in repeated, imitative and unconscious ways of typing, swiping and zooming. Regardless of the media environment in which the fingers move, a basic vocabulary has developed. The success of the finger exercises depends on whether and that they are easy to use. They seem to format everyday digital life and - according to the workshop's hypothesis - simultaneously precarize it.

For where finger exercises seem playfully simple, these small gestures create far-reaching, unstable and asymmetrical relations between platforms, users, data, hyper-capitalist corporations, displays, microphones, affects, places and times. They are not visible from the outside, the misguided, uncoordinated, stumbling finger movements - and they are not always easy. Rather, they call into question the forms of subjectivation and socialization that accompany them. Even if "Thumbelina's" finger exercises are a "declaration of love to the networked generation" (Michel Serres), for us the (condescending) trivialization that the finger exercise also implies marks the possibility of deconstructing such power relations.

The finger exercises of everyday digital life are political! They show a niche for "micropolitics of the medial" (Andrea Seier) and perhaps also the path to a new form of critique that starts at the level of a shifted subjectivity between ideology critique and affect critique. We believe that the technological imaginary of infinite progress and optimization, which Silicon Valley is still able to maintain, opens itself up to critical approaches and measurements when we look at the non-smooth, delayed, inefficient, wasteful everyday life that goes hand in hand with the distractions and distractions of the smartphone attention machine and the finger exercises it demands of us.

The often semantically enforced, the trying out, which is also contained in the term finger exercise, the search for explanations, for practice classes, for possibilities of understanding, serves us as a playful invitation to take a closer look: With our workshop, we question things that are taken for granted in digital media culture. In our search for possible answers to the question "What is digital everyday life?", we want to draw on feminist and queer theory, cultural and postcolonial studies, for example, which have already recognized pre-digital everyday life as an actual political forum. With the help of critical theory formation (gender, race, class and dis/ability), we want to think about forms, practices and routines in everyday digital life in order to weave relational networks between meanings and structures, to pick up threads that have already been lost and weave them further.

The dialogical exchange that a workshop format entails seems to us to be the appropriate format, because everyday life manifests itself in particular in the way we communicate with each other and negotiate the world. We want to leave it up to the contributors whether they want to approach everyday digital life from a theoretical, praxeological, historical or experimental perspective, whether they want to give a lecture or discuss a text excerpt. As little as "everyday life" can be ontologically claused and as differently as we all live (or experience) everyday life, such a form seems to us to be a necessary openness for an approach that is as polyphonic as possible.

The workshop is a cooperation between the University of Hamburg and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Program:

Thursday, October 25, 2023
5 pm | HI!
5:30 pm | MALIN KUHT Lecture Performance
Open threads. Anschlüsse zur cyberfeministischen Vergangenheit
8 pm | DINNER

Thursday, October 26, 2023
10 am | AUFWÄRMÜBUNGEN
10:30 am | BRIGITTE BARGETZ | MELANIE MALCZOK
Ambivalenzen der partizipativen Technikgestaltung: eine kritische alltagstheoretische Perspektive
12 am | LOUISE HAITZ | ANNE MEERPOHL
No Tears?! EXPOSED! Digitale Techniken der V/Ermittlung von Glaubwürdigkeit im Fall Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard | Kollektivität & Care — ein Handlungsbeispiel
1:30 pm | LUNCH
3 pm | SEBASTIAN ALTHOFF | DEBORAH WOLF
Jetzt leg’ doch mal das Handy weg: Grenzziehungen im Alltag
4:30 pm | COOKIES
5 pm | HEART OF CODE Workshop
Feministisch hacken, wie geht das?
7:30 pm | DINNER

Further information at:
https://files.cargocollective.com/c1354767/00_Konferenz_Fingeru-bungen-des-digitalen-Alltags.pdf

Please log in to:
elisa.linseisen@uni-hamburg.de

Whether social networks, news feeds, video chats, voice assistants or wearables - never before have digital items been so integrated into our everyday lives and culture. These items have to prove themselves in everyday life. As digital everyday media, they perform familiar, useful functions and at the same time change passing everyday cultures in a sustainable way. For example, maps and telephones are being further developed into "Google Maps" and "Google Pixel" through processes of convergence, datafication, commodification and selection. Such change is associated with far-reaching technical and cultural innovations, but is also accompanied by social, political and economic frictions.

The lecture series is dedicated to this gradual and radical change through case analyses, historical classifications, media-theoretical meditations and practical reflections on everyday life. On the one hand, we look at technical items from the perspective of their everyday use and examine them in the context of digitalization. In addition, we explore the question of the extent to which everyday life itself functions as an item that mediates between social structures and technical infrastructures on the one hand and individual actions and material devices on the other. In this way, the 'item of everyday life' shows whether and how new gadgets can establish themselves culturally.

All JGU students and employees are cordially invited to attend the lecture series.

Tuesday, 15.11.2022, 10.00 - 12.30 a.m.

Right-wing arguments, fake news and racist hate speech have become commonplace online. (Extreme) right-wing groups and individuals have long since appropriated social networks to position themselves in debates and thus shift discourse. This makes it clear how important it is to take a stand in various online situations and challenge right-wing demagogy, especially when it comes to seemingly harmless statements.

The online seminar provides an introduction to dealing with situations in virtual space: Whether discussions with friends, forum debates or student Facebook groups - the speakers will present which communication situations can be distinguished and what options for action they offer us. Discuss, position, display? Participants will sharpen their awareness of how they can and want to act appropriately in each of these situations.

At the argumentation level, a selection of typical right-wing argumentation patterns and own counter-strategies are dealt with, which can then be tried out.

The online seminar alternates between audiovisual inputs and various text-based discussion methods.

The number of participants is limited.

The event flyer including contact and registration link can be found here.

"At the end of 2020, an editor of this magazine [montage AV] posted two incorrectly distorted photos on her Instagram profile after her smartphone camera was suddenly only able to produce severely distorted images. While a third of the image area showed the photo subject cracked, pale, blurred and barely recognizable, the rest degenerated into a referenceless grid landscape, albeit a colourful one. In the midst of the glossy filtered photo collections that make the Instagram platform so popular, the two images seemed partly inappropriate, partly unexpectedly raw and unruly, perhaps artsy, but in any case somehow remarkable. Shortly afterwards, amused and concerned followers came forward, inquiring about the well-being of the crashed device and its owner or seeing the pictures as a symptom of the crisis-ridden pandemic year 2020.

However, the images (or rather the networked image practices of disruption, documentation, sharing and commenting that can be seen on the cover of this issue) cannot only be interpreted as an allegory of crisis. They also act as elusive phenomena of contemporary visual culture, which we would like to tentatively describe as messy. The establishment of broadband internet access, smartphones, apps and everyday forms of communication such as GIFs and memes since the beginning of the 21st century has not only given rise to a previously unimaginable number of images and image forms. As a result, the impression of a "new complexity" and "great disorder" (Stalder 2016, 114 ff.), which we attempt to further outline as the messiness of digital cultures, has also become more pronounced. We use the term messy images to describe certain types of images in the digitally networked media environments of the present that challenge visual orders. Messy images emphasize the moment of the disorderly and confusing, the ambiguous and exuberant, but also the inappropriate and unpredictable in the visual worlds of social networks, commercial video platforms and obscure image boards."

- from the editorial of the current issue of montageAV, edited by Laura Katharina Mücke, Olga Moskatova and Chris Tedjasukmana.

You can find an overview of the entire magazine on the montageAV website.

Thursday, 20.01.2022 & Friday, 21.01.2022

Conference of the research project "Attention Strategies of Video Activism on the Social Web", co-organized by Prof. Dr. Chris Tedjasukmana and others. The aim of the conference is to stimulate discussions between academics, artists and activists about the role that political videos and video activism in particular can play in current and future political discourses.
More information and the possibility to log in on the project's homepage.

Wednesday, 22.09.2021 - Saturday, 25.09.2021

Organized by the Institute for Media, Society and Communication of the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Chris Tedjasukmana contributes in the panel "More than academic freedom. Theoretical perspectives on the debate about 'cancel culture'"
More information, including registration, can be found on the event poster and on the website.

Guido Kirsten (ed.) & Chris Tedjasukmana (ed.):
Klassische Filmtheorien. Aktuelle Fragestellungen von der Stummfilmzeit über die Hollywood-Ära bis zum Nachkriegsfilm.

With contributions by Guido Kirsten, Karl Sierek, Chris Tedjasukmana, Margrit Tröhler, Daniel Wiegand, Matthias Wittmann and Barbara Wurm.
To order from Mainzer Ventil Verlag, all information on the publisher's homepage.

VL. Medien- und Kulturtheorien (Sommer)