A series of events will be held in Budapest in 2011 to celebrate the centenary of Marshall McLuhan's birth. The participating 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 at Eötvös Loránd University's Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies. The series includes projects, exhibitions, discussions, and other events. The Department of Media and Communications contributes to the series with a conference entitled "McLuhan's Messages".
The conference will explore how relevant McLuhan's oeuvre is for contemporary media and communication research. Nowadays, networking and interactive communication have far surpassed all the sixties' expectations for the growth of the information society. From this point of view it seems that Marshall McLuhan as a prophet predicted the idea of the global village, the present way people get closer to each other through network systems and become next-door neighbors in virtual communities. However, technology, as 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 so, we can also bring to life the critical and/or affirmative tradition concerning McLuhan.
The scholars and experts participating in our international bilingual conference think rereading and adapting the works of McLuhan in the changing environment is timely. Over the two days there will be lectures on the relationship between media and politics; media and culture; media and society; and on topics of new media, content producuction and mediated subjects.