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A series of events will be held in Budapest in 2011 to honor the centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. The participating Budapest institutions are the Ludwig Museum, the Kunsthalle, LABOR, Kitchen Budapest, the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and the Department of Media and Communications (Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies) at Eötvös Loránd University. The series includes projects, exhibitions, discussions, and actions. The Department of Media and Communications contributes to the series with a conference on “McLuhan’s Messages”.

The conference will explore how relevant McLuhan’s oeuvre is for contemporary media and communication research. In our time the networking and the interactive communication have far surpassed all the sixties’ expectations for the growth of information society. From this point of view it seems that Marshall McLuhan, like a prophet predicted in the idea of the global village the present way people get closer to each other through network systems and become next-door neighbours to each other in virtual communities. However, the technology as far as the history testifies, does not necessarily behave as a tame animal, at least not in every case. Our goal is to put the contemporary conditions of the McLuhanist idea on the agenda, and by doing this we make also the critical and/or affirmative tradition concerning McLuhan conjure up.

The scholars and experts who participate in our international and bilingual conference think rereading and adapting the works of McLuhan in the changing environment is timely. On the two days meeting there will be lectures on the connection between media and politics, media and culture, media and society, and on topics of new media, content producing and mediated subjects.

For more info: http://media.elte.hu/mcluhan/index-en.html