‘Creative Media between Invention and Critique, or What’s Still at Stake in Performativity’

This special issue of Culture Machine on Creative Media emerges out of a call-for-papers which was at the same time a call-to-arms and a call-to-arts. It was aimed at intellectuals, writers, philosophers, artists, analysts, scientists, journalists and media professionals who were prepared to say something about the media that extended beyond the conventional forms of media analysis. Our initial search for creative media projects was thus also an invitation to enact a different mode of doing media studies. Taking seriously both the philosophical legacy of what the Kantian and Foucauldian tradition calls ‘critique’ and the transformative and interventionist energy of the creative arts, we were looking for playful, experimental yet rigorous cross-disciplinary interventions and inventions that would be equally at home with critical theory and media practice, and that would be prepared and able to make a difference – academically, institutionally, politically, ethically and aesthetically.