Indrek Ibrus

I am currently a researcher at Tallinn University Estonian Institute of Humanities and also an advisor to Estonian Ministry of Culture on audiovisual arts and media.

As a researcher my field is media studies with a special focus on the phenomena and processes of media innovation, crossmedia production, the evolution of cross-platform and ubiquitous web and the broader evolution of modern ‘creative industries’. In theoretical terms I’m interested in a variety of evolutionary approaches to media change – especially Yuri Lotman’s semiotics (as extended and complemented by, among others, Sebeok and Danesi, Kress and Van Leeuwen, Umberto Eco, et al.), but also evolutionary economics, systems theoretical sociology, complexity theory, media archaeology, ‘cultural science’, etc. My approach is, nevertheless, critical – that is, I see all the above having some relevance for the modern approaches to the political economy of media. I have undertaken conceptual work for investigating the possibilities for dialogues among these approaches with the purpose to work towards a transdisciplinary approach to ‘media innovation’.