The Media Matters symposium took place at the end of June and it has taken this long to gather my thoughts sufficiently well to make some useful comments on the event. At first, I thought my inability to write a coherent text was due to a lack of understanding of the finer points of complex media theory, but over the last couple of weeks I have stopped feeling quite so inadequate and begun to shift the blame elsewhere. In fact, I think it’s Friedrich Kittler’s fault. In his keynote lecture at Tate Modern the German media theorist whose breathtaking intellectual acrobatics weave together theoretical and methodological moves from Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and Mcluhan - was searching for love.

This talk by Kate Southworth was delivered at the Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition Conference at Tate Britain in 2010. It is in the context of my research into the emergence of the 'distributed form' within contemporary art that I should like to talk about how artworks and exhibitions are radically shifting in response to the emergence of non-hierarchical networks such as the Internet.