Abstract- High Art/Low Culture - the future of media art sciences?

The gap between fine art and popular culture, ‚high art oeuvres' and ‚industrial media products' has been a point of discussion since Lesli Fiedler's canonical text "Cross the border close the gap" from 1969 and its renaissance in the early 90s. As a matter of fact, games, e-toys, photo blogs, mobile phone interfaces or the environments for imersive interaction in theme parcs are not pure entertainment but rather inscribe themselves into the contexts of cultural and aesthetic techniques and research processes. The panel intends to refresh and discuss the question of historicity and actuality of so called postmodernist positions concerning art and media sciences, parallelizing it with new perspectives and tendencies in the field of media development and its institutionalization. How did and do change game & game studies, theories of interactivity and participation, concepts of cyberstudies, cyber- and media feminism or indigenous media the scientific approach on current media cultures? How can productive relationships be established between media art, popculture and sciences?