30 Years After Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory

17.03.2015, 17:00

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard …

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Accidental Archivism

11.05.2023, 19:58

In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema’s futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema’s public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as …

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Action at a Distance

01.08.2020, 19:46

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 …

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Affective Transformations

01.10.2020, 20:54

The Affective Turn has lost its former innocence and euphoria. Affect Studies and its adjacent disciplines have now to prove that they can cope with the return of the affective real that technology, economy, and politics entail. Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technological innovations such as affective computing, …

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Affektökologie

02.04.2017, 18:08

Das Denken des Humanen wird in besonderer Weise von den medientechnologischen Verschiebungen des 20. Jahrhunderts berührt. Affekt wird hier zu einem neuen Schwellenbegriff, der den Körper medientechnisch und politisch auf neue Weise anschlussfähig macht. In einer relationalen Neu-Organisation verdichtet sich das organische und technische Leben auf neue, intensive Weise zu einer Ökologie des Affektiven. Dieses …

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Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes

02.03.2021, 20:47

Simultaneously speculative and inspired by everyday experiences, this volume develops an aesthetics of metabolism that offers a new perspective on the human-environment relation, one that is processual, relational, and not dependent on conscious thought. In art installations, design prototypes, and research-creation projects that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact subjective experience the author finds …

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Algorithmic Authenticity

29.06.2023, 21:40

What makes information feel true or compelling in our contemporary digital societies? This book brings together different disciplinary understandings of “authenticity” in order to find alternative ways to approach mis- and disinformation that go beyond contemporary fact-checking and its search for the “authentic” truth. Patterned under the algorithmic flows of digital capitalism, authenticity itself is …

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Alleys of Your Mind

03.11.2015, 19:11

What does thinking mean in the age of Artificial Intelligence? How is big-scale computation transforming the way our brains function? This collection discusses these pressing questions by looking beyond instrumental rationality. Exploring recent developments as well as examples from the history of cybernetics, the book uncovers the positive role played by errors and traumas in …

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Beyond the Flow

18.07.2019, 14:33

In the wake of the so-called digital revolution numerous attempts have been made to rethink and redesign what scholarly publications can or should be. Beyond the Flow examines the technologies as well as narratives driving this unfolding transformation. However, facing challenges such as the serial crisis, knowledge burying or sudoku research the discourses and practices …

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Boundary Images

27.01.2024, 11:14

How are images made, and how should we understand the capacities of digital images? This book investigates images as well as the technologies that host them. Its three chapters discuss the boundaries that images cross and blur between humans, machines, and nature and the ways in which images are political, material, and visual. Exploring these …

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Citizen Lobby

20.07.2015, 19:41

The Internet holds endless opportunities for exchange and dialogue and the promise of developing a better democratic model. Day-to-day politics are largely driven by economic lobbies in the interest of what Habermas calls their „generalised particularism,“ the threat to take jobs and tax revenues elsewhere. Citizens’ influence over politicians is twofold: they are asked for …

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Communication

17.01.2019, 23:03

Machine communication—to interact not just via but also with machines—has transformed contemporary communication. It puts us not just in conversation with one another but also with our current machinery. By analyzing the alienness of this computational communication, through a close reading of interfaces and a field study of software development, this volume uncovers what it …

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Counter-Dancing Digitality

11.03.2023, 6:46

Digitality is imposed upon us! To change this, we should not turn away from it, but look carefully into its transformative power and make operable alternatives such as counter-algorhythms and solidarity-oriented commoning. The aim is a world where profit and property no longer exist, but instead where a cooperative dance – between all the needs …

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Deine Kamera ist eine App

27.01.2024, 9:23

Der vorliegende Band untersucht systematisch das Verhältnis von digitalen Kameras und ihren softwaretechnischen Grundlagen, die wir unter „Apps“ zusammenfassen. Als konzeptuelles Framing in der Auseinandersetzung mit dieser medialen Verbindung aus Kamera/App wählen wir das ästhetische wie theoretische Spektrum aus Techniken des Appropriierens und Applizierens und damit verbundene Theorietraditionen der Filmwissenschaft sowie der Software, Platform und …

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Die verschiedenen Modi der Existenz

21.04.2015, 13:27

„Wäre die Philosophie auch nur eine Stunde der Mühe wert, wenn sie uns nicht für das Leben rüstete?“ Gezielten Schrittes entwirft der französische Philosoph Étienne Souriau in diesem dicht gedrängten Buch eine Grammatik der Existenz. Im Fokus steht nicht nur ihre Theorie, sondern auch die tatsächliche Ausübung der „Kunst des Existierens“. Wie Gilles Deleuze und …

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Digital Activism in Asia Reader

28.07.2015, 13:29

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what …

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Digital Energetics

30.06.2023, 21:21

Media and energy require joint theorization as they are bound together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Digital Energetics traces the contours of a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic of media across the cultural, environmental, and labor relations they subtend. Focusing specifically on digital operations, its authors analyze how data and energy …

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Distributed Productivities

13.06.2023, 22:00

Digital distribution produces new global cultural flows from urban centers like Lagos, Mumbai or Seoul. But it also enables new forms of distributed production in which cultural entrepreneurs cooperate across continents and challenge and expand established notions of cultural and political space. In the “new world order of cultural production” (Fatima Bhutto) cultural specificity is …

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Diversity of Play

22.07.2015, 13:14

The early days when digital games were new, harmless and niche are long gone. Today’s games can simulate battlefields, predict disaster, and crash markets. We are faced with a diversity of play and the ubiquity of games, making them not only a popular medium, but the leading medium of contemporary society. Based on the keynote …

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Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times

02.03.2021, 20:11

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times offers a critical exploration of the Anthropocene concept. It addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch. How are we to rethink landscapes, such as river deltas, oceans, or outer space? How can we create spaces for resistance and utopic dreaming? This volume confronts …

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Ecology of Affect

22.04.2017, 14:17

The way we conceive the human today is particularly affected by the shifts in media technology during the 20th century. Affect emerges as the new liminal concept that renders the body compatible in novel ways with the technology and politics of media. By ways of a relational reorganization the organic end technological life is condensed …

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Ein Medium namens McLuhan

12.12.2020, 14:54

„If you don‘t like my arguments, I‘ve got some more.“ (Marshall McLuhan) Wie aber steht es um den Klassiker der Medienwissenschaften im 21. Jahrhundert? Diese Frage diskutieren 37 zeitgenössische Medienwissenschaftler_innen. Ihre Antworten stehen in einem reizvollen Kontrast zu Interviews, die 2007 entstanden und jetzt online zugänglich gemacht worden sind. Viele der ursprünglich Befragten sind erneut …

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Explorations in Digital Cultures

02.05.2020, 16:59

Digital media are transformative: they (re)shape the ways of communicating, relating, doing, knowing, and living as much as they are themselves subject to continuous transformation. The contributions in this volume explore these contemporary shifts in and of digital cultures by analyzing a wide range of topics: from data, infrastructures, algorithms, logistics, economies, politics, identities, collectives …

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Fahrradutopien

15.05.2022, 16:23

Das Fahrrad ist ein Medium sozialer Veränderung. Seine vielfältigen utopischen Potenziale ergeben sich nicht zuletzt aus seinen ebenso vielfältigen und häufig übersehenen medialen Qualitäten: Es vermittelt, es verbindet, es übersetzt; es modifiziert Wahrnehmung und Organisation von Raum und Zeit, von Körpern und von Sozialität. Umgekehrt kann auch das medienwissenschaftliche Denken fahrradmedial verändert werden. Das Fahrrad …

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Ferocious Logics

10.09.2018, 22:34

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic …

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Format Matters

12.12.2019, 8:07

From TIFF files to TED talks, from book sizes to blues stations—the term “format” circulates in a staggering array of contexts and applies to entirely dissimilar objects and practices. How can such a pliable notion meaningfully function as an instrument of classification in so many industries and scientific communities? Comprising a wide range of case …

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Foucault, digital

27.02.2022, 18:48

Mitte der 1960er Jahre hat Michel Foucault die Methode der „Diskursanalyse“ in die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften eingeführt. Besonders in der Archäologie des Wissens hat er dafür plädiert, die Geschichte des Wissens und der Wissenschaften zum Gegenstand diskursanalytischer Untersuchungen zu machen. Über ein halbes Jahrhundert später ist im Bereich der Informatik ein zunehmendes Interesse an der …

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Frictions

22.08.2023, 21:44

Frictions is a collective invitation to embrace the space of difference that both connects and separates techno-scientific discourses from their actual implementations—or even, from their non-implementations. Through a series of case studies focused on cybernetics, systems research, and some of their more contemporary inheritors, this book argues that such a middle space, the topology of …

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Guantánamo Frames

25.09.2022, 23:11

For the last twenty years, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp has not just been a military prison and security facility, but also a site of media production. Films, photographs, and documents have continued to emerge from the camp and become the focus of fierce legal and political battles, as well as intense moral anguish. This …

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High Definition

17.09.2020, 18:10

Dieses Buch zoomt in informationsreiche und pixeldichte Welten in HD. Digitalbildliche Hochauflösung ist hier ein Potenzial, das es ermöglicht, mit und an Bildern Wirklichkeit zu erforschen und zu befragen. Dokumentarfilme, Videokunstarbeiten, Galaxiefotografien, Blockbuster, Pressebilder und Netflix-Serien bestellen diese visuelle Kultur in HD und zeigen auf, dass Bilder und Wirklichkeit nicht in fixierten Rahmen sitzen, sondern …

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In Catastrophic Times

26.11.2015, 11:13

There has been an epochal shift: the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us. Pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities – these are all problems that can no longer be treated separately. The effects of global warming have a cumulative impact, and …

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Interferences and Events

30.09.2017, 12:11

Computer simulations are omnipresent media in today’s knowledge production. For scientific endeavors such as the detection of gravitational waves and the exploration of subatomic worlds, simulations are essential; however, the epistemic status of computer simulations is rather controversial as they are neither just theory nor just experiment. Therefore, computer simulations have challenged well-established insights and …

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Interventions in Digital Cultures

08.11.2017, 18:10

By engaging in social, political, and economic contexts, interventions attempt to interrupt and change situations—often with artistic means. This volume maps methods of interventions under the specific conditions of the digital.

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Introduction to a Future Way of Thought

21.04.2015, 12:58

“Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference; the point is to think the world and interpret the changes in its unfathomability, to perceive and experience the difference binding being to the nothing.” Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first …

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Kritik postdigital

01.02.2023, 22:55

Die realpolitische Affirmation der Universalität des Digitalen geht mit einer regelrechten Abwehr der kritischen Reflexion seiner scheinbaren Axiome einher. Umso dringlicher ist es zu fragen: Was sind die Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten von Kritik am Digitalen und seiner Kulturen? Wie lässt sich die drängende Notwendigkeit politischer Haltung und kritischer Praxis mit einem wissenschaftlichen Einsatz verbinden, der …

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Library Life

09.03.2015, 12:18

Wie und wo entsteht kulturwissenschaftliches Wissen? Im Kopf? In der Bibliothek? Am Schreibtisch? Inspiriert von den Laborstudien der Science & Technology Studies ging das Autor*innen-Kollektiv des vorliegenden Buchs diesen Fragen nach. Aufgesucht wurden die persönlichen Schreiborte von Kulturwissenschaftler*innen verschiedener Disziplinen. In ihren Beiträgen eröffnen die Autor*innen vielfältige Perspektiven auf bislang kaum erforschte Praktiken kulturwissenschaftlicher Wissensproduktion. …

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Life and Technology

01.12.2015, 9:36

The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon has reinvigorated contemporary thinking about biological and technological beings. In this book, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy takes up Simondon’s thought and shows how life and technology are connected by a transversal theme: individuation. In the first essay, Barthélémy delivers a contemporary interpretation of Simondon’s concept of ontogenesis against the backdrop of biology …

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Machine

24.04.2019, 14:55

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine. “‘The machine’ proves that …

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Markets

17.01.2019, 19:52

Markets abound in media—but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes …

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Material Trajectories

28.12.2023, 7:26

Material Trajectories: Designing With Care? turns towards material-driven design processes with the aim of relocating technoscientific trajectories. Concerned with new forms of caretaking, it combines positions from the extended fields of design research and humanities scholarship including practice-based approaches. The contributions explore current ecological conditions through multiple acts of making-with and seek to complicate questions …

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Media and Management

13.10.2021, 21:55

Management is enabled by media, just as media give life to management. Studying the management innovations learned through media uncovers the evolving relationship between workers and employers. With a view to history, Media and Management shows the interdependence of hardware, software, and human experience adjusting to algorithmically defined rhythms. “This timely collection reminds us how …

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Mediale Teilhabe

12.08.2023, 22:44

Gesellschaftliche, politische und wissenschaftliche Forderungen nach mehr Beteiligung, Zugang und Mitwirkung sind ebenso allgegenwärtig wie spannungsgeladen und durchzogen von Ambivalenzen. Mediale Teilhabe fragt nach den medialen Ermöglichungs- und Austauschprozessen, als deren Effekt Teilhabe/Nicht-Teilhabe entsteht. Entlang der Modalitäten Verschalten, Temporalisieren und Teilhabende Kritik entwickeln die Beiträge einen differenzierten Blick auf Teilhabe im Spannungsfeld von Anspruch und …

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Medien verstehen

30.09.2017, 11:38

Medien in ihrer historischen und technischen Vielfalt zu verstehen, das war das Versprechen, das Marshall McLuhan vor über fünfzig Jahren mit Understanding Media gegeben hatte. Unsere digital veränderte Gegenwart erfordert, das Buch heute erneut zu lesen und vor dem Hintergrund aktueller technischer Entwicklungen zu hinterfragen. Gegenstand des Sammelbandes sind u. a. McLuhans Idee von Medien …

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Medium, Format, Configuration

23.11.2019, 23:15

In contrast with media constructed as vast, ontologically homogeneous, non-localized systems, formats show material networks of interoperability and exclusions, inscribed in local specificities, and involving precise conditions for the circulation of images and sounds. Formats, institutionalized as standards, frame the “technical networks” defined by Gilbert Simondon, that unfold technical objects into economically and politically structured …

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Nonconscious

23.09.2022, 18:01

Growing numbers of nonhuman companions (smart objects, technical environments, sensor technologies used to augment the human body) are creating affective synching between human and nonhuman agency. Unlike the unconscious of psychoanalysis, this book argues, the resulting nonconscious is no longer coupled to a subject grounded in language, instead acting as an affective link between technical, …

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Non-Knowledge and Digital Cultures

18.04.2018, 6:57

Making available massive amounts of data that are generated, distributed, and modeled, digital media provide us with the possibility of abundant information and knowledge. This possibility has been attracting various scenarios in which technology either eliminates non-knowledge or plants it deep within contemporary cultures through the universal power and opacity of algorithms. This volume comprises …

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Organize

26.11.2019, 22:07

Organize interrogates organization as effect and condition of media. How can we understand the recursive relationship between media and organization?

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Ökologien der Erde

28.03.2018, 15:34

Ökologien der Erde bestimmen die Gegenwart. Dabei gewinnt die in den 1970er Jahren von James Lovelock gemeinsam mit Lynn Margulis entwickelte Gaia-Theorie heute neue Erklärungskraft. Wenn Gaia bei Bruno Latour sogar zum allgemeinen Modell der Welterklärung im 21. Jahrhundert wird, gilt es, nach der Plausibilität zu fragen, die die Rede von Gaia aktuell entwickelt.

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Pandemic Media

14.10.2020, 22:00

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these “pandemic media” reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting …

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Pattern Discrimination

05.11.2018, 22:47

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist …

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Politik der Mikroentscheidungen

21.04.2015, 14:08

Ob beim Aufrufen einer Webseite, beim Versenden einer E-Mail oder beim Hochfrequenzhandel an der Börse: Auf ihrem Weg durch die Weiten digitaler Netze durchqueren Bits zahlreiche Knoten, an denen eine Reihe von Mikroentscheidungen getroffen werden. Diese Entscheidungen betreffen den besten Pfad zum Ziel, die Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit oder die Priorität zwischen den ankommenden Paketen. In ihrer vielschichtigen …

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Post-Cinematic Bodies

25.02.2023, 14:37

How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as …

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Preferable Futures

01.02.2023, 22:34

Preferable Futures delves into the question of possible, probable, and desirable futures amidst the pressures of climate change and digitalization. Through a diverse range of perspectives, the book explores ways to negotiate and create desirable futures using the concept of transformation design in theory and practice, economic business simulations, and recent humanistic theories. This thought-provoking …

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Profile

05.08.2017, 10:14

Profile haben Konjunktur. Seit der Verbreitung von Social Networking Sites sind sie alltäglicher Ort der Selbstdarstellung. Doch die Praktiken und Techniken der Profilierung sind keineswegs neu. Schon lange beschreiben Profile potentielle StraftäterInnen. Nun bestimmen sie auch die potentielle Kreditwürdigkeit. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Profil und Profilierung nehmen die Beiträge aus Medienwissenschaft, Soziologie, Geschichtswissenschaft und Informatik die …

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Really Fake

18.07.2021, 20:37

With anchors in feminist theory, queer discourse, and digital politics, Really Fake rescues “fakeness” from the morass of “fake news” and rejuvenates “fake” as a material and tactical reality. This book treats fakeness as a media object itself: “Fakes” are things that travel and circulate through our bodies, sociality, and the technologies that envelop them. …

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Records of Disaster

22.10.2022, 6:21

Records of Disasters: Media Infrastructures and Climate Change explores how environmental disasters manifest and inscribe themselves in infrastructures. By turning to infrastructures, their logic and functioning, collapse and malfunction, the volume reveals their potential as fragile material witnesses to and of disasters. As climate change is unequally distributed across continuous dynamics and events, time scales …

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Remain

24.04.2019, 16:20

In a world undergoing constant media-driven change, the infrastructures, materialities, and temporalities of remains have become urgent. This book engages with the remains and remainders of media cultures through the lens both of theater and performance studies and of media archaeology. By taking “remain” as a verb, noun, state, and process of becoming, the authors …

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Rethinking Gamification

10.03.2015, 13:42

Other than one would expect at first sight, gamification is not an invention of the 21st century, it is not here to make life more fun or easier, and it is often a pain in the neck. So much more will we have to look at gamification as a new form of ideology carefully and assess it critically.

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Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia

25.07.2021, 10:19

French critic Serge Daney was a central figure in film, television and media criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film culture. This collection …

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Symptoms of the Planetary Condition

16.01.2017, 18:08

This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book’s 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical …

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Szenen kritischer Relationalität

10.02.2024, 7:00

Kritische Relationalität interveniert in Ordnungen des Denkens, die Kritik als Operation des Trennens und Auseinanderhaltens entworfen haben.

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Tacit Cinematic Knowledge

25.07.2021, 13:32

Moving images are increasingly finding their way into laboratories, dentist offices, clinics, airports and gyms. In these places and institutions film and moving image technologies serve to advance knowledge, to show how things are done, to train, teach, educate, mobilize people, as well as to imagine complex social facts and visualize dynamic models and schemes …

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Tactical Entanglements

21.03.2021, 9:04

How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of creative agency, authorship, and ownership? Offering a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary digital art practices, philosophical and technical considerations of AI, posthumanist thought, and emerging issues of intellectual property and the commons, this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of “creative AI.” It …

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Technopharmacology

07.08.2022, 19:58

Technopharmacology is a modest call to expand media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma. “Technopharmacology hits a sore but absolutely crucial spot: the pharmacologization of media and the mediatization of pharmacology. A must-read in the chaotic post-pandemic …

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The Cyborg

21.05.2015, 9:55

Born on the pages of science fiction comics in the 1920s and 30s, the cyborg lives in popular imagination. As hero of the cyberpunk epic, in its brief but intense history, the cyborg has followed and anticipated the rapport and conflict between man and machine.

In the post-fordist era of digital networked media the cyborg unfolds itself in the dissemination of multiple bodies: on the Internet, in the shift of individual identity, in the new collective aggregation connected by software. It bridges virtuality and concreteness, possibility and necessity. The cyborg thus becomes a field of social conflict, one of the new figures in which the bio-political perspective is embodied.

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The Political Structure of UK Broadcasting 1949-99

20.07.2015, 12:51

In 1999 David Elstein delivered a lecture series examining the evolvement of UK Broadcasting policy from 1949 to 1999. His sharp analysis is a valuable contribution to the post-war development of the British broadcasting system and unfolds many topical issues in current media policy debates. Nobody is better placed than David Elstein to add to broadcasting history a challenging analysis of …

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The Politics of Micro-Decisions

21.04.2015, 14:15

Be it in the case of opening a website, sending an email, or high-frequency trading, bits and bytes of information have to cross numerous nodes at which micro-decisions are made. These decisions concern the most efficient path through the network, the processing speed, or the priority of incoming data packets. Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions …

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There is no Software, there are just Services

15.06.2015, 9:12

Is software dead? Services like Google, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, or Social Media apps are all-pervasive in our digital media landscape. This marks the (re)emergence of the service paradigm that challenges traditional business and license models as well as modes of media creation and use. The short essays in this edited collection discuss how services …

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Touchscreen Archaeology

11.01.2021, 23:05

The touchscreen belongs to a century-long history of hands-on media practices and touchable art objects. This media-archaeological excavation examines the nature of our sensual involvement with media and invites the reader to think about the touchscreen beyond its technological implications. In six chapters, the book questions and historicizes both aspects of the touchscreen, considering “touch” …

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Tracks from the Crypt

30.08.2019, 17:52

David Bowie’s 2015 Blackstar has been understood by critics and fans alike to have a certain valedictory status. For them, perhaps for us, it is a 39-minute and 13-second farewell. A long goodbye. My angle is different. By situating the Bowie/Renck collaboration on “Lazarus” in the context of a meditation on the question once posed …

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Trick 17

29.06.2016, 15:38

Der Zauber der Medien speist sich aus ihrem Geheimnis: Den Usern von heute sind Laptop, Smartphone oder Tablet eine Blackbox, die ihre Sinne im Bann hält und die Techniktricks im Inneren hinter einer opaken Oberfläche verbirgt. Doch solche Verzauberung ist nicht neu. Um ihr auf die Spur zu kommen, nähert sich dieses Buch der Mediengeschichte …

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Uexküll’s Surroundings

08.02.2022, 19:01

With its diversity of possible Umwelten or environments for living things, Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory has been hailed by many readers as the first step toward an innovative, pluralistic conception of nonhuman life. But what is generally ignored is its structural conservatism, its identitarian logic in which everything should remain in its place and nothing should …

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Uexkülls Umgebungen

18.09.2021, 14:01

Die Lehre Jakob von Uexkülls wird oft mit anerkennendem Blick auf die Vielfalt möglicher Umwelten und als erster Schritt zu einem anderen, pluralen Nachdenken über nicht-menschliche Lebensformen gelesen. Ihr struktureller Konservatismus, ihre identitäre Logik, nach welcher alles an seinem Platz bleiben und sich nichts vermischen soll, und ihre Nähe zum Nationalsozialismus bleiben dabei in aller …

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Undoing Networks

10.04.2021, 10:05

How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the …

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Unterwachen und Schlafen

27.03.2018, 15:39

Anthropophile Medien durchdringen zunehmend unsere lebensweltliche Realität, sei es im Ambient Assisted Living, als Pflegeassistenzsysteme, in den Arbeitsszenarien einer Industrie 4.0, als behagliche Interfaces des Affective Computing oder als Lifetracker der Quantified-Self-Bewegung. Verbunden ist damit der Einzug menschlicher Befindlichkeiten, Werte und sozialer Routinen in das Design medialer Agencies. Über 40 Jahre nach dem Erscheinen von …

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Von Open Access zu Open Science

11.01.2018, 17:41

Mit der Digitalisierung geht der Ruf nach freiem Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Forschungsergebnissen und einer Öffnung des Forschungsprozesses einher. Open Access und Open Science sind die Leitbegriffe dieses Transformationsprozesses, der von den einen euphorisch begrüßt und von den anderen heftig abgelehnt wird. Auf der Grundlage einer quantitativen Erhebung und eines reflexiven Experiments gibt das Buch Einblick in die aktuellen Debatten über die Chancen aber auch Hindernisse der Öffnung der Wissenschaften.

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Who Owns the Images?

22.05.2021, 8:38

Digitization carries the utopian promise of archival access unlimited by constraints of space and time, and with it, of new forms of research and historiographies. In reality, digital image archives pose a complex set of technical, legal, ethical and methodological challenges, particularly for film and media studies and adjacent fields. In a series of studies …

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