Letter from the editors: Lost & Found

Abstract

This issue was found in the lost conversations of continent.’s Jamie Allen and guest editors Johannes Bruder and Felix Gerloff. It is the crystallization of interests in the empirical, in notions of ‘evidence’, and the act of ‘returning’ something from a site of investigation. Developed through the Swiss National Science Foundation project Machine Love?[1], a project by researchers from the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW[2] (Claudia Mareis, Johannes Bruder and Felix Gerloff), these articles and artefacts stem in part from a workshop (All Eyes on Method in Basel on the 4th and 5th of June 2015) attended by contributing authors Sarah Benhaïm, Hannes Krämer, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Priska Gisler and Stefan Solleder. We also sought to expand the constituency of this continent. issue through a discussion of the role that media artefacts and material objects play in empirical research more generally. We have reached out to thinkers and doers who have developed ways of productively navigating the ambiguities of losing and finding, forgetting and remembering, capturing and deleting. Works by Geraldine Juarez, Mara Mills, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor with a response by Nina Jäger and Bronwyn Lay, Natasha Schüll, and the Times of Waste research team further elaborate the thematic of ‘Lost & Found’ for this issue. We (re)present here attempts to (re)create experience, waving our flag of surrender at a world that is forever slipping through our fingers.