We treat media less as material traditions or genres (painting, photography, film, journalism) and more as processes of mediation.

As such, media are not simply means. Media are not solely ends.

Metamedia are media understood as both means and ends; media experienced as iterative processes; media lived as modes of engagement.

Metamedia begins with the awareness that media are rich assemblages of both ideas and things, which are part of what it is to be human. The 'meta' signals this recharacterization of what media are.

"Meta-" because our lab doesn't aim to be an environment for learning media skills, such as photography for archaeologists, or video for anthropologists.

"Meta-" because we are interested in questions concerning mediation itself, questions about the practice of translating the past into a story or image, or performance.

"Meta-" because we are asking questions like "what happens when you record a place as a map?" "what does it mean to take a photograph of a performance?" "how important is narrative in making experience come alive?"

Media as modes of engagement - an essay from Michael Shanks