Can an algorithm be democratic? And how can we understand algorithms not only as technical, but also as social and political phenomena? Democratic Algorithms offers theoretically and empirically informed perspectives on how…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

„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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…