PhD-conference 13th & 14th of December 2012, Expression, sensation, mediation Two major approaches can be identified in modern art studies and cultural analysis. One concerns the ways cultural artifacts are organized expressively, another how they affect their audiences. In the first, focus is typically on the appearance of an artifact, its form and expression, its signification, and its social historical conditions of production. In the second, focus is rather on how an artifact is sensed by an audience, how its potentials for making sense are actualized, how it is used, and how its historical and geographical reach can be characterized in terms of socio-cultural reception. In this seminar we will consider possible ways to reconnect and combine these approaches, theoretically as well as methodologically, so as to open up different analytical vistas. One way to do this is to explore the performative mediatory events and acts at stake between works and audiences. We may observe medial interplays between expression and affect, sense and sensation, values and ideologies. We can see how fantasies may be triggered and practical challenges offered in processes that are dependent on and conditioned by the media at work, along with their material forms and associated practices. Here it is not least of interest to investigate how artistic and cultural expressions can be analyzed as medial forms operating on and with the senses. Special emphasis will be put on historicizing these issues. In a time when new media technologies make mediation seem ubiquitous, and our lives appear to be intensely networked, it becomes increasingly important to historicize how modes of cultural expression and sensation both co-evolve with mediatory and technical processes. We invite participants from all areas of art and cultural studies to participate and present aspects of their work relevant to the discussion on how the medialities of artistic and cultural artifacts contribute to the ways we come to sense them as expressions and, conversely, how our sensorium is moulded through such medially informed encounters. The seminar solicits contributions to discussions of a wide array of artistic and cultural forms and genres, old and new media, and to an ongoing theoretical and methodological discussion of the research questions presented.