Paolo Granata
PAOLO GRANATA is an Associate Professor in Book and Media Studies at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. He joined the University of Toronto in 2017 after spending fifteen years at the University of Bologna, Italy, where he almost entirely established his own academic career in research, teaching, and public engagement.
Nurtured by the centuries-old tradition of his Alma Mater, Professor Granata’s research and teaching interests lie broadly in the area of Aesthetics, Medium Theory, Ethics of Technology, Heritage Communication, Print and Visual Culture. He has authored a number of essays and book-chapters published in Italian, English, French, and Spanish. His main books are: Arte in Rete (2001), Arte, estetica e nuovi media (2009), Mediabilia (2012), and Ecologia dei media (2015); his latest works is the forthcoming Introduction to Media Ecology (2021).
From 2015 to 2017, he was Visiting Professor and Program Curator at the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology, University of Toronto.
Currently, he is the Coordinator of the Book & Media Studies program at St. Michael's College, Faculty of Arts and Science at UofT, Curator of the McLuhan Salons series (www.mcluhansalons.ca) presented by St. Michael's College, and Chair of the Toronto School Initiative (www.thetorontoschool.ca) at the University of Toronto.
He is the vice-president elect of the Media Ecology Association (www.media-ecology.org) and conference chair of Media Ethics: Human Ecology in a Connected World global conference taking place in Toronto, June 27-30, 2019 as the 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (www.mediaethics.ca).
As a cultural strategist and champion of urban sustainable development, he is also involved in the designation of Toronto as UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts (www.torontocreativecity.ca).
Professor Granata aims to raise public awareness about the role that Universities should play in the 21st century: to provide an environment of social cohesion; to create the conditions for human development; and to strength participation in cultural life.
Address: Dipartimento delle Arti
Piazzetta G. Morandi, 2
40128 Bologna (Italy)
Nurtured by the centuries-old tradition of his Alma Mater, Professor Granata’s research and teaching interests lie broadly in the area of Aesthetics, Medium Theory, Ethics of Technology, Heritage Communication, Print and Visual Culture. He has authored a number of essays and book-chapters published in Italian, English, French, and Spanish. His main books are: Arte in Rete (2001), Arte, estetica e nuovi media (2009), Mediabilia (2012), and Ecologia dei media (2015); his latest works is the forthcoming Introduction to Media Ecology (2021).
From 2015 to 2017, he was Visiting Professor and Program Curator at the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology, University of Toronto.
Currently, he is the Coordinator of the Book & Media Studies program at St. Michael's College, Faculty of Arts and Science at UofT, Curator of the McLuhan Salons series (www.mcluhansalons.ca) presented by St. Michael's College, and Chair of the Toronto School Initiative (www.thetorontoschool.ca) at the University of Toronto.
He is the vice-president elect of the Media Ecology Association (www.media-ecology.org) and conference chair of Media Ethics: Human Ecology in a Connected World global conference taking place in Toronto, June 27-30, 2019 as the 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (www.mediaethics.ca).
As a cultural strategist and champion of urban sustainable development, he is also involved in the designation of Toronto as UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts (www.torontocreativecity.ca).
Professor Granata aims to raise public awareness about the role that Universities should play in the 21st century: to provide an environment of social cohesion; to create the conditions for human development; and to strength participation in cultural life.
Address: Dipartimento delle Arti
Piazzetta G. Morandi, 2
40128 Bologna (Italy)
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Books by Paolo Granata
Superando la convinzione secondo cui i media sono semplici mezzi o strumenti per comunicare e interagire, l’ecologia dei media propone una visione sistemica in base alla quale questi sono concepiti come veri e propri ambienti, un insieme di forme culturali, tecnologiche e comunicative al cui interno l’uomo si trova a vivere e ad agire. L’ambiente dei media è perciò considerato un ecosistema coeso, aperto e dinamico in cui hanno modo di manifestarsi le tante forme espressive della cultura umana.
Con un approccio sintetico e strutturato, il volume offre un quadro organico dei più autorevoli protagonisti – Mumford, Postman, McLuhan, Bateson, Ellul, per citarne solo alcuni – delle principali scuole di pensiero – New York, Toronto, Chicago – delle discipline coinvolte e dei concetti chiave attraverso cui tracciare una mappa storiografica di questa tradizione intellettuale diffusa nel contesto nordamericano ma radicata anche nell’ambiente culturale europeo.
Una serie di riferimenti antologici, il taglio introduttivo e un ricco apparato bibliografico fanno di questo testo un punto di partenza essenziale per quanti – studenti, studiosi, ma anche non specialisti – vogliano accostarsi a questo nuovo campo di studi.
Through a series of impressive matches, the spirit of the Six Memos takes the form of a new interpretative plot that reveals the sensory component of the art and media world, and casts light and shadows on the facts of aesthetic art and technology of our time, open to the postmodern horizon. Bringing the aesthetic discourse back to its etymology, to the diverse cultural and material facts affecting the sensory and intellectual spheres, the new media appear for what they are: processes of mediation to the world, mechanisms of formation and aesthetization of experience.
The field of aesthetics and the media come together within a single project where one builds upon the other. In the interdisciplinary pattern that define the boundaries of this research, the traits of the “Digital World” emerge. This is how the new media will appear in all their Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, Visibility and Consistency. "
Papers by Paolo Granata
Moreover, he develops his concept of culture from a strictly ecological perspective or the idea that it results from the special connection between man and his environment. Hall’s approach combines and mixes within a systemic view of culture both the cultural ma- terialism advocated by Harris and White and the cognitivist tradition founded by Boas. This article shows the essence of Hall’s ecological approach according to which culture is conceived as a whole: a dynamic system, a coherent process of mediatization within which all the elements are deeply connected and therefore co-dependent.
The spirit of the Six Memos, their rich interweaving of references, speculations and quotations, the fascinating rhetorical insights they offer, are nothing but the evocation of characters and assonances that clearly express, with a clear-headed and mature awareness, the sense of the challenge declared by Postmodernism, which is clearly recognizable in the features of the so-called digital world.
Indeed, these six 'memes', and the brilliant insights they offer, are surprising as they seem to anticipate the current scene of the media ecology, precisely defined by the characters of Lightness, Exactitude, Quickness, Visibility Multiplicity, and Consistency.
For these reasons, in order to capture the essence of McLuhan’s encyclopedism, it is first of all necessary to consider the function the different disciplinary fields perform within his thought system, just like it is necessary to look for the relations, or reactions, the different disciplines express when they connect with McLuhan. Only in this way, could a serious survey be similarly developed about McLuhan’s peculiar contribution to enlarge the borders of a specific discipline, or about what might be the effects of applying McLuhan.
The case this essay intends to consider is that of aesthetics, and its reinstatement, according to McLuhan’s sophisticated interpretation, into the media realm. First of all, it should be recognized that combining aesthetics and media means defining a disciplinary field that in many ways is still untapped. Therefore, new functions emerge when aesthetics is read through McLuhan, just like untapped reactions and relations emerge when aesthetics, and in this a certain primacy should be recognized to McLuhan, is applied in the media field. If one reads his works in the light of this preventive consideration, or of the attempt to survey the relations between media and senses – aesthetics’ specific domain – McLuhan clearly appears as the one thinker who first recognized such connection. For this reason, I provocatively propose that this great belletrist is awarded yet another label, that of “aesthetician”.
Superando la convinzione secondo cui i media sono semplici mezzi o strumenti per comunicare e interagire, l’ecologia dei media propone una visione sistemica in base alla quale questi sono concepiti come veri e propri ambienti, un insieme di forme culturali, tecnologiche e comunicative al cui interno l’uomo si trova a vivere e ad agire. L’ambiente dei media è perciò considerato un ecosistema coeso, aperto e dinamico in cui hanno modo di manifestarsi le tante forme espressive della cultura umana.
Con un approccio sintetico e strutturato, il volume offre un quadro organico dei più autorevoli protagonisti – Mumford, Postman, McLuhan, Bateson, Ellul, per citarne solo alcuni – delle principali scuole di pensiero – New York, Toronto, Chicago – delle discipline coinvolte e dei concetti chiave attraverso cui tracciare una mappa storiografica di questa tradizione intellettuale diffusa nel contesto nordamericano ma radicata anche nell’ambiente culturale europeo.
Una serie di riferimenti antologici, il taglio introduttivo e un ricco apparato bibliografico fanno di questo testo un punto di partenza essenziale per quanti – studenti, studiosi, ma anche non specialisti – vogliano accostarsi a questo nuovo campo di studi.
Through a series of impressive matches, the spirit of the Six Memos takes the form of a new interpretative plot that reveals the sensory component of the art and media world, and casts light and shadows on the facts of aesthetic art and technology of our time, open to the postmodern horizon. Bringing the aesthetic discourse back to its etymology, to the diverse cultural and material facts affecting the sensory and intellectual spheres, the new media appear for what they are: processes of mediation to the world, mechanisms of formation and aesthetization of experience.
The field of aesthetics and the media come together within a single project where one builds upon the other. In the interdisciplinary pattern that define the boundaries of this research, the traits of the “Digital World” emerge. This is how the new media will appear in all their Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, Visibility and Consistency. "
Moreover, he develops his concept of culture from a strictly ecological perspective or the idea that it results from the special connection between man and his environment. Hall’s approach combines and mixes within a systemic view of culture both the cultural ma- terialism advocated by Harris and White and the cognitivist tradition founded by Boas. This article shows the essence of Hall’s ecological approach according to which culture is conceived as a whole: a dynamic system, a coherent process of mediatization within which all the elements are deeply connected and therefore co-dependent.
The spirit of the Six Memos, their rich interweaving of references, speculations and quotations, the fascinating rhetorical insights they offer, are nothing but the evocation of characters and assonances that clearly express, with a clear-headed and mature awareness, the sense of the challenge declared by Postmodernism, which is clearly recognizable in the features of the so-called digital world.
Indeed, these six 'memes', and the brilliant insights they offer, are surprising as they seem to anticipate the current scene of the media ecology, precisely defined by the characters of Lightness, Exactitude, Quickness, Visibility Multiplicity, and Consistency.
For these reasons, in order to capture the essence of McLuhan’s encyclopedism, it is first of all necessary to consider the function the different disciplinary fields perform within his thought system, just like it is necessary to look for the relations, or reactions, the different disciplines express when they connect with McLuhan. Only in this way, could a serious survey be similarly developed about McLuhan’s peculiar contribution to enlarge the borders of a specific discipline, or about what might be the effects of applying McLuhan.
The case this essay intends to consider is that of aesthetics, and its reinstatement, according to McLuhan’s sophisticated interpretation, into the media realm. First of all, it should be recognized that combining aesthetics and media means defining a disciplinary field that in many ways is still untapped. Therefore, new functions emerge when aesthetics is read through McLuhan, just like untapped reactions and relations emerge when aesthetics, and in this a certain primacy should be recognized to McLuhan, is applied in the media field. If one reads his works in the light of this preventive consideration, or of the attempt to survey the relations between media and senses – aesthetics’ specific domain – McLuhan clearly appears as the one thinker who first recognized such connection. For this reason, I provocatively propose that this great belletrist is awarded yet another label, that of “aesthetician”.