‘Media’ is a very complex term – usually denoting ‘something mediating’ or ‘carrying a message’, derived from the ancient Greek ‘meson’, which means not only ‘the middle’, but also ‘public’ and ‘common good’ and was adopted in Latin as ‘center(-point)’, but also continued as ‘public’, as well as becoming ‘something mediating’. The term is used in numerous contexts, from biology to spirituality.

The term ‘culture’, however, has a similar meaning to the term ‘media’; it also has a very wide range of meanings: Derived from the Latin ‘cultura’, it encompasses the field of meaning ‘(dwelling)’, which points towards the everyday world,- the field of ‘cultivating, adorning, training’, which denotes ‘things of higher value’,- then also ‘worshipping, adoring, celebrating’ with a view to ritual and religious aspects’,- as well as “practising agriculture”, which we find again in terms such as “cultivated plant” or “bacterial culture”. An SWR documentary (2021) aptly used the hashtag #cultureiseverything. Like any very comprehensive concept, ‘culture’ is of course also problematic, if only because the definition itself is a cultural definition and the question naturally arises as to when we speak of culture in the singular and when of cultures, and how these can be distinguished from each other and from the counter-concept of ‘nature’.

Media culture is therefore made up of two concepts that are almost impossible to define. It can also be about culture mediated by media, about culture that deals with media or develops around media, or about the question of how media are created or used in a specific cultural context.

With a Centre for Media Culture, we have therefore set ourselves a major challenge. Our aim is to approach media culture from an interdisciplinary perspective and to promote co-operation between different specialist traditions and actors from the fields of practice, art and science. In our work, traditional scientific and innovative or artistic approaches should be given equal consideration.