Having attended the seminar ‘Knowledge Transmission with the Lantern’ by Frank Kessler, Jamilla Notebaard and Nico de Klerk (24 Feb 2021), I note that with the advent of projection tools such as the optic lantern and photographic slides, there arose critical shifts not just in terms of how knowledge was transmitted, but indeed, how the…

It almost sounds like an item from a children’s book: ‘The Magic Lantern’. It evokes images of far off places, daring sword fights and magic carpet rides. In a way, these mental images are not far off. When listening to Frank Kessler, Jamilla Notebaard and Nico de Klerk in the Transmission in Motion seminar of…

Whenever a new communicative technology is invented, researchers and businesses are arguing its value in didactics. This is not only because media have long been playing an educational role in the history of civilization, but also because new media’s affordances are in line with the enthusiasm of the educational revolution in terms of further objectivity…

Artists make art, designers make everything else – or so Jon McKenzie announces, somewhat polemically, while discussing the Design Thinking central to his Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement (2019). This transmedial design practice, he writes, is “a method of human-centered design developed to tackle complex problems found in social and organizational contexts”…

After the last Transmission in Motion seminar, I felt inspired in thinking about the ways in which a digital community can offer back to the people that have been wronged, have had their rights violated, misunderstood, and eventually hurt by the media and the way they are portrayed. In a completely different case, the life…

While the buzz word ‘interdisciplinary’ is used by many university programs today, what does interdisciplinarity really mean and what does it entail? If looked at closely the divisions amongst different fields of study within universities is still very prominent. Humanities to this day orient their methodologies of teaching and classroom proceedings in a seminar style….

        “Systems of Oppression, Inequality, and Inequity are by design. Therefore, they can be redesigned.” Antionette Carroll, Founder of Creative Reaction Lab. In late January 2021, the Transmission in Motion Seminar was joined by Jon McKenzie, Lara Harvey, and Veronica Cinibulk from Cornell University. The event-seminar focussed on the emerging field of…

As the present-day reality is in constant motion, so are practices serving various ways of knowledge production. Academic knowledge, with the help of some of its creators, tries to escape the boundaries that have already proven to be limiting. Certainly, that does not mean that the production of academic knowledge is somehow outdated – on…

To quote Jon McKenzie from this seminar, “theory is the problem, not the solution”, (McKenzie, Harvey, and Cinibulk 2021). Emphasizing the importance for the academy to engage with the world, McKenzie suggests that we merge critical thinking with critical design, “becoming cosmographer or co-designer of worlds” (McKenzie 2019). Critical design in this case extends media-making…

It seems that Jon Mckenzie posits the gap between doxa and episteme as a productive negative space that can reveal new forms of knowledge. These terms differentiate between the entangled, contextual knowing that is placed against formal knowledge production. My studies in media, art and performance have shown that we can engage with meaning through…