Rethinking Affordance

“Rethinking Affordance”, a special issue of the journal Media Theory co-edited by Ashley Scarlett and myself, is available here. The special issue is the final outcome of a long-term collaborative project that also included an international symposium at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2018, as well as a group exhibition co-curated by Ashley and myself.

The special issue revisits the ‘affordance’ concept and reconsider its relevance, functioning, and critical ends in the context of digital art.

It includes contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary mix of researchers, media artists, theorists, and designers: Olia Lialina, Laura Lotti, Shintaro Miyazaki, Maximillian Alvarez, Torsten Andreasen, Aline Guillermet, Michael Marcinkowski, Vendela Grundell, Mark Nunes, and Özgün Eylül Iscen.

The issue kicked off with an introductory essay, co-authored with Ashley, that surveys the conceptual histories of the affordance theory in the media art context.

Image credit: Jol Thomson, Deep Time Machine Learning (2018)