Making Sense of Media
The overarching focus of the text’s ten chapters is on the measures to control media content and contain potential meanings, from the printing press and podcasts to streaming services and social media sites. In varying ways, each chapter considers the diverse control and containment mechanisms. These include official church and state censorship, partisan press priorities, right to copy restrictions, state and federal court mandates, statutory restraints, movie, radio, and television formats and formulas, advertiser and public relations ploys, and the prevailing attention-selling prototype. A central consideration is how the profited-minded custodians of evolving media techniques and technologies—private corporations, hedge funds, and transnational conglomerates—affect depictions in news and entertainment fare of the rich mosaic of colors, cultures, and communities long comprising American society.

Prof. Ricardo Miranda’s collaborative web exhibit »Mutations« opens today (Sept. 24th). The goal of the »Mutations« web residency is to engage artist collectives working on the heterogenous theme of mutations – biological, sociopolitical, technological – in relation to the global digital divide. The five winners of this prize spent one month in Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Web Residency. The jury hopes that the grant will enable the artist, and activists to continue exploring and developing their proposed projects. The »Mutations« web residency culminates in a web exhibition with works from each of the five winners.

Prof. Ricardo Miranda has been awarded a 2021 Media Arts Assistance Fund from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm.  The grant provides support for the completion and/or public presentation of new works in all genres of sound and moving image art, including emergent technology.