“Rêver, c’est le bonheur, attendre, c’est la vie” – a truth once realized by Victor Hugo. Waiting is a consequence of the human condition and, at the same time, ubiquitous part of our everyday life. We wait at supermarket checkouts and counters, in railway stations and agencies; we wait for waiters (ironically) and mailmen, for vacation and for Santa Claus. In spite of all our efforts to avoid waiting time, we are continually compelled to wait, and we have to find ways and means of handling it.
To the DFG-Project "Waiting. Exploring a Social Phenomenon of Everyday Life"
The goal of the project "Scopic Media" is a comparative study of the production, functioning and consequences of scopic media for a theory of global social forms in areas such as global finance, the military, medicine, extreme sports and telepresence-based interaction. The areas of study were selected to represent global, collective-national, interactional and bodily levels of scopic media use. ‘Scopic media’ are screen-based technologies of observation and projection that render distant and invisible phenomena situationally present, unfold remote spaces and information worlds, and shift the boundaries between situation/system and the environment.