The Critical Media Lab Basel (CML) is one of the two central labs of the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. The CML is an idea, a set of activities and a community of students & researchers working at the intersections of design, media, arts & technology. It is a space of possibility where a plurality of processes, practices, and resistances are channeled towards collective projects that revolve around critical media.
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Our understanding of critical media is broad, and it is empirical and relational rather than conceptual. Subfields of media studies, such as environmental or elemental media studies have radically expanded the field of what can count as ‘a medium,’ conceiving substances, plants, environments, bodies, and even the Earth as communicative substrates. Here, the concept of mediation is disentangled from specific content or media (such as television or algorithms) and reconceived as a function that something acquires or is relegated to. No media are critical per se—they become critical in a specific temporal and geographical context, and for specific groups of people.
The „critical“ in Critical media Lab means:
- indispensable, crucial, decisive, having an agenda
- of, relating to, or being a threshold, a turning point, an important juncture
- life-affirming: what’s needed, what’s at stake.