# Event Details - **Event Name**: A Return to Form? - **Event Start and End Date**: Fri, 17 Apr, 2026 at 09:00 am – Fri, 17 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm (-04:00) - **Event Description**: Materiality, Aesthetics, and Method TodayAbout this Event“Form” has reemerged as a central critical problem in recent years, as scholars re-examine what the humanistic practices of formal analysis, aesthetic description, and close reading can do in the age of machine reading, wearable AI, and continual catastrophe. As traditional formal analysis contends with distributed, operational, or procedural forms—databases, interfaces, networks, and algorithmic aggregates—a widely polemicized “return to form” has reopened questions of what form is and what formalism does.While critics accuse formalists of “abandoning the world,” proponents argue that reading for form is a way back into politics. Re-reading form encourages us to consider how strategies of description, surface reading, ekphrasis, and repair may advance goals previously associated with demystification, depth, criticality, and suspicion. Form mediates how meaning and affect circulate in the world, whether form is understood as material structure, as semiotics, or both.But did form ever really leave the picture?Building on the “Extractive Media” conference at the Center for Comparative Media (2024, Columbia University), we invite new approaches to thinking about the material politics of form. A Return to Form? proposes that form has been a tenaciously generative aesthetic-conceptual category that animates several interdisciplinary imaginaries, often in ways that are non-obvious. From studies of infrastructure and logistics, to the “biases” of communication systems and cybernetics, to archaeological histories of new media, there are multiple traditions within media studies that link poetics with techniques, aesthetics with political economy. This gathering seeks to chart the latent continuities of formalist inquiry across the heterogeneous terrains of history, materiality, ecology, the digital, and the political. We therefore invite scholars of literature, art, visual culture, film and media, and architecture to share what the term “form” materializes for them in their work, and what the so-called re/turn to form offers us collectively.-Organized by Debashree Mukherjee & Kartik Nair - **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/new-york/a-return-to-form/100001982614258618 - **Event Categories**: Art, Entertainment, Nonprofit, literary-art - **Interested Audience**: - total_interested_count: 0 ## Ticket Details - **Ticket Price Range**: min: 0, max: 0, currency: USD ## Event venue details - **city**: New York - **state**: NY - **country**: United States - **location**: Schermerhorn Hall - **lat**: 40.8086363 - **long**: -73.9605576 - **full address**: Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, United States ## Event gallery - **Alt text**: A Return to Form? - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events6/banners/c90cbe38ab93c3659e1f1192d87a27a3a847113d6166d67bcc3d80b27e0c86a9-rimg-w1200-h1553-dcffffff-gmir.jpg?v=1771747310 ## FAQs - **Q**: When and where is A Return to Form? being held? - **A:** A Return to Form? takes place on Fri, 17 Apr, 2026 at 09:00 am to Fri, 17 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm at Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, United States. - **Q**: Who is organizing A Return to Form?? - **A:** A Return to Form? is organized by Center for Comparative Media. - **Q**: Who is this event for? Is it right for me? - **A:** A Return to Form? is ideal for curious learners, students, and skill-builders looking to gain hands-on knowledge and practical expertise in a focused, interactive setting. Whether you're a first-time attendee or a longtime enthusiast in New York, this event is thoughtfully curated to deliver a standout experience worth every moment. 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We always have. From the body techniques that shape the way we run, write, or eat, to the technologies that configure our conceptions and experiences of time and space, technical media form our world. The Center for Comparative Media gathers scholars and students from diverse disciplines to map and interrogate our mediated world across expanses of time (history and archaeology), space (globalization), and across diverse media technologies and techniques from ancient scripts and contemporary codes to enclosed environments and expanded cinemas. Join our mailing listhere, or email us at comparativemedia@columbia.edu" } ] } ] ```