The mediality of transmission and the materiality of communication result today more than ever in “acting at a distance” – an action whose agency lies in a medium. This book provides an overview into this crucial phenomenon, thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality.

What is without a doubt, however, is that this “Letter from the Editors” is the place to express wholehearted gratitude to the artists and writers who worked on making the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien a real thing over the past four years, and just as much, to those whose contributions expanded the scope of this volume – each part of a magic circle beneath the institutional surface, an experiment in institutional forms and collaborative practices located at an unmarked street corner in Wien...