Video Conferencing: Practices, Politics, Aesthetics

The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts.

Axel Volmar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center »Media of Cooperation« at the University of Siegen. He published on the history and theory of digital media, sound studies, format theory, and digital temporality.
Olga Moskatova is an assistant professor for media studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her fields of research include theory and aesthetics of visual media, materiality of media, networked images and media of immunization.
Jan Distelmeyer is a professor of media history and media theory in the European Media Studies program of Fachhochschule Potsdam and Universität Potsdam. His current research focuses on the relationship between mediality and digitality with a special interest in interface processes as well as questions of automation and autonomy.