However, the cultural technique of calculation has not only become “environmental” since the ubiquity of computation turned cultural techniques into environing techniques. Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything,” with the materialities of the media that define the environmental conditions of computability, as well as with practices of extracting, storing and transferring data. This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.

From Debris to Sediment addresses the rising relevance of these residues. From the perspective of media studies, geography, sociology, environmental sciences, and artistic research, the contributions to this volume deal with key sites and issues related to the mounting layers of anthropogenic refuse and explore sediments as a geo-philosophical figure of thought. What media, politics, and ecologies are implicated in accumulating “future fossils”? And how do they envision the new material cycles emerging from these growing deposits?

Contents

Introduction 7
Arianna Borrelli and Helena Durnová

[ 1 ] Synthetic Machines and Practical Languages: Masking the Computer in the 1950s 27
Mark Priestley

[ 2 ] Practical and Theoretical Objectives of Early Machine Translation in the 1950–60s 61
Jacqueline Léon

[ 3 ] Big Machines for Big Science: The Beginnings of Scientific Computing at CERN 83
Arianna Borrelli

[ 4 ] The Influence of Organization and Methods on Early Business Computing 121
Elisabetta Mori

[ 5 ] The Division of Mental Labor in Computing Practices: Presuppositions, Advances, Biases 147
Marie-José Durand-Richard

[ 6 ] Mainframe Computer or Programmable Pocket Calculator? Calculation Tools and Practices of Computing in Medieval History (1960s–1980s) 193
Edgar Lejeune

[ 7 ] Computing Practices, Data-Based Design, and Knowledge Cultures During the Post-War Period 227
Nathalie Bredella

[ 8 ] Tense and Temporality: Computing and the Logic of Time 255
Troy Kaighin Astarte

Authors 281

Broeckmann’s book provides the first comprehensive account of the preparation of this epochal event. It shows how the exhibition resulted from multiple, collaborative and interdisciplinary trajectories in such diverse fields as contemporary art, architecture, science, and network media. Based on extensive archival research, The Making of Les Immatériaux offers detailed insights into the curatorial process. Throughout its ten chapters, the book highlights the different forms of cooperation among the people involved in the conception of the exhibition, including Lyotard, Chaput, the team at the Centre de Création Industrielle, and their consultations with artists, theorists, and scientists.

Les Immatériaux marks a pivotal point in the history of exhibitions in the 20th century because it gave important impulses for the organisation, design and structure of interdisciplinary exhibitions. Broeckmann discusses the place of Les Immatériaux in the broader context of this history, examining the epistemology of exhibits, curatorial agency, and interdisciplinarity in research networks. The book takes up current questions about the relationship between materiality and immateriality, between subjectivity and thinghood, and shows how Les Immatériaux continues to offer a significant contribution to debates that over the last decades have become ever more urgent.

The collection is a collaboration of the DFG Graduate Research Program “Configurations of Film,” the Concordia University’s Platform Lab, and the Digital Cinema-Hub (DiCi-Hub).

The chapters in Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking traverse technologies, bodies, ontologies and imaginaries, reflecting on what different container technologies, containment strategies, and container metaphors tell us about ourselves and how we relate to our worlds. With common reference to Zoë Sofia’s (2000) foundational essay on container technologies, contributors draw on media and cultural studies, social history, architecture, and postdualistic approaches in philosophy and social science to explore liminalities of containment both as and beyond holding.

“Bouncing off W. J. T. Mitchell’s view of images as lively objects, this original, timely, and playful volume offers an intriguing analysis of the multiple lives of digital images—of the boundaries they cross and the ecologies they form.”
— Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London

“This inspiring, highly readable book positions energy as a core of any future media studies, any future sociology or political science, and any future material philosophy. It couldn’t be more timely.”

— Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne

Contributors: Anthony Glyn Burton, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Liliana Bounegru, Melody Devries, Amy Harris, hannah holtzclaw, Ioana Jucan, Alex Juhasz, D. W. Kamish, Ganaele Langlois, Jasmine Proctor, Christine Tomlinson, Roopa Vasudevan, Esther Weltevrede

The contributions to this volume trace such transports across Africa, Asia, and beyond.

Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.

The serendipitous genesis of the great archives of Arsenal in Berlin is a pure delight to explore. This volume records how a wealth of visual history accumulated as if by accident to form a fascinating whole which is so much more than its parts: a fragmented and recomposed visual archive of memories of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. A feast for any historian, artist and cinephile.

—Bénédicte Savoy, Collège de France/TU Berlin

Accidental archivism, creative spaces and the reaches of technology: the mix is a world of communication and artistic possibilities. Perhaps, equally significant, the mix does transform the cinema’s public into that quintessential wayfarer who takes a backward glance o’er travelled roads to better see the road ahead.

—Hyginus Ekwuazi, University of Ibadan, founding rector of the National Film Institute, Jos

A lively, hugely ambitious and generative collection, that is at once both reflective and provocative, offering a state of play and a call to action for those engaging with archives today. From manifestos to interviews, global case studies to personal accounts, this expansive collection of works expertly places in dialogue curators, artists, archivists and scholars (and the many that fall in between).

—Tom Rice, University of St. Andrews

Read the book online at archivism.meson.press.

Shintaro Miyazaki’s joyful book builds a media theoretical proposal for collective rhythms in computational culture. The mix of wonderful readings and insights offers alternatives to the depressing beat of capitalism, while maneuvering from cybernetics and computational modeling to play, from media archaeology to Marx and digital commons.

— Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University & Winchester School of Art

Endorsements

We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.

—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.

—Francesco Casetti, Yale University

Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.

—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley

Reviews

Throughout the book, Denson provides a sharp and lucid investigation into the influences of post-cinematic media on our bodies, providing us with profuse examples and objects for reflexion. From VR/AR to AI and machine vision, by way of smart exercise devices and ECGs, the reader is invited to question the pervasiveness and apparent innocuousness of the objects discussed, which are part of many people’s daily lives. Never alarmist, Denson scrutinises the social, political, aesthetic and metabolic stakes at play in the increasing entanglement between the body and the media. If the author concludes on a hopeful note for our future, he is upfront at every step of his writing about the already harmful biases and exclusions programmed in and perpetuated by post-cinematic media. Whether it is racial exclusion, gendered oppression or capitalistic exploitation, Denson reminds us that if the more general threat of human disembodiment through computational media discorrelation is real and should concern us on a philosophical level, then people are already subject to such violence.

—Emma Dussouchaud-Esclamadon, Film-Philosophy Vol. 28, No. 3

“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 world that big pharma and platform capital dominate.”

— Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples “L’Orientale”

“Technopharmacology explores the relation between media technologies and pharmaceutical agents — to overturn our understanding of both through compelling new perspectives.”

— Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago

“This timely collection reminds us how the latest forms of algorithmic management are extensions of the long history of industrialized labor. We can only understand the future of work when we contend with the patterns of the past and how they manifest around the world.”

— Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI

“This remarkable book critically probes hardware manufacturing practices and histories in the Asia Pacific, insisting media theory and management studies recompose in ways attentive to real-time labor regimes and the organizational force of global logistics.”

— Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University

“This original book links up Toyotism, just-in-time management, and platform capitalism, all in one volume. I especially liked the main geographical foci of the chapters being on non-western countries: Japan, China, and Central and Eastern Europe.”

— Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore

Covering areas of study beyond the cinema and non-theatrical films which have recently become a focus of inquiry, the contributions analyze the operations of tacit cinematic knowledge in objects ranging from political campaigns, medical and scientific devices, corporate communications, devices for the study of animal behavior and more.

For more information on the Tacit Cinematic Knowledge project, please visit tacit-histories.com.

Reviews

By offering … an …overview of the forms of knowledge tacitly influenced by cinematic techniques and apparatuses, the book makes a strong point to further investigate media immanence.

– Simone Dotto in NECSUS

Don’t miss the and in the title, for this valuable book has two objectives. On the one hand, it proposes a vital, much-needed analysis of Serge Daney’s thought, of his work as a critic, media theorist, and founder of the essential film journal Trafic, topics which all remain woefully under-discussed in English. On the other, it considers the implications of this work for queer studies, initiating a productive, cross-disciplinary dialogue around topics like aesthetics and queer biography, film history and feminism, media archeology and festival programming. The broader frame moves past Daney in order to remain close to him: by abandoning the self-sufficiency of a single approach for the vulnerability of the encounter, the editors maintain the commitments to alterity, mediation, and impurity at the heart of his understanding of cinema.

—Sam Di Iorio, Hunter College, City University of New York

This international anthology helps to construct a renewal of transatlantic discourses on cinema. The contributions not only attempt to read Serge Daney from a queer perspective today, but also to understand queer theory anew, stemming from the cinephilic image theory of one of the most influential French film critics, who saw the era of post-cinema dawning as early as the 1980s.

—Christa Blümlinger, Université Paris-8

This invaluable book steps in to help fill a glaring void: the lack of English-language scholarship on the most respected French film and TV critic of the post-WWII era, Serge Daney. It trains a queer and feminist lens on Daney’s writings, a task both fruitful and fugitive, Daney being a gay man who rarely wrote about homosexuality–either his own or in cinema. Given that he spent the majority of his career steeped in the masculinist-heterosexual culture of Cahiers du Cinéma, this book, by imaginatively unearthing the “queer potential” of his vast oeuvre, has produced an exciting contribution to the study of film criticism that pulses with contemporary resonance.

—Girish Shambu, Canisius College, Buffalo, New York

If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores non-usage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.

“This timely collection draws together a range of innovative formats to consider the opportunities for distance, agency, and control in an intimately networked world. Each perspective demonstrates the challenge of disconnection as a means to confront the power of networks while also offering tools for fundamentally rethinking relationality.”

— Melissa Gregg, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel

Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes is part of the series Future Ecologies dedicated to rethink the multiple ecologies that flourish and struggle on Earth and beyond.

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times is part of the series Future Ecologies dedicated to rethink the multiple ecologies that flourish and struggle on Earth and beyond.

2022 Limina Award Best International Film Studies Book

Read the book online at pandemicmedia.meson.press.

Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technological innovations such as affective computing, mood tracking, sentiment analysis, and social robotics all share a focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Secondly, recent developments in politics, social media usage, and right-wing journalism have contributed to a conspicuous rise of hate speech, cybermobbing, public shaming, “felt truths,” and resentful populisms. In a very specific way, politics as well as power have become affective.

Affect gets mobilized, fomented, unleashed. When the ways we deal with our affectivity get unsettled in such a dramatic fashion, we have to rethink our ethical, aesthetical, political as well as legal regimes of affect organization.

“This engaging volume provides readers with a historically rich and media-scientific focused introduction to the philosophical problematic of acting at a distance.”

– Jeremy Packer, University of Toronto

“An inspiring volume that invites reflection on a crucial issue in our digital cultures: the materiality of transmission.”

– Dawid Kasprowicz, RWTH Aachen University

Explorations in Digital Cultures is a growing publication that will be extended with further articles. The articles are available at explorations.meson.press. A print edition will be available soon.

Comprising a wide range of case studies on the standards, practices, and politics of formats from scholars of photography, film, radio, television, and the Internet, Format Matters charts the many ways in which formats shape and are shaped by past and present media cultures. This volume represents the first sustained collaborative effort to advance the emerging field of format studies.

Organize encourages us to think about media as a noun and a verb. The media mediates as an apparatus for organizing people and things, patterning actual and possible relations. Connecting media theory with organization theory, this book deserves to be widely read.”

— Martin Parker, University of Bristol

“This volume assembles some of the very thinkers who track the terms ‘media’ and ‘organization’—how they migrate, cross paths, and even double each other in digital cultures.”

— Keller Easterling, Yale University

This book gives voice to the important philosophical and political underpinnings of alternative archives, places of hands-on practice, and laboratories.

— Lori Emerson, University of Colorado Boulder

In showing that archives are more than mere ‘data,’ this book
performs a much-needed intervention: to re-pose the question of the archive as a key concern of contemporary thought and cultural life.

— Claus Pias, Leuphana University, Lüneburg

“What emerges in this short book is a theory of media as that which remains. Mediating deep time with temporarily fossilized moments in our cultural history, the book’s multivoice narrative raises important questions about human responsibility for matter and other matters.”

— Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London

“This book spells out the ways in which past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements.”

— Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University

“‘The machine’ proves that whoever said that the rise of data was going to cause the end of theory could not be more wrong. The new forms of digital automation of society, the question of the relationship with the animated machine, and the new cybernetics of ecosystemic governance provide rich instigation to philosophy, proving that machines can and do make us think new thoughts.”

— Tiziana Terranova, Naples Eastern University

“A significant contribution to the understanding and politics of the becoming of machines and techno-systems in the twentyfirst century.”

— Yuk Hui, author of On the Existence of Digital Objects

“How are humans shaped by machine communication? Anyone wanting to think through this complex and crucial question
needs to read this book, which offers a strikingly innovative, multifaceted, and concentrated analysis of the problem of communication in our present moment.”

— Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Using diverse methodological approaches and points of interest, this book invites us to rethink what, if anything, the concept of communication can mean in a moment when neither embodied minds nor clearly demarcated individuals are the subjects of the drama.”

— John Durham Peters, Yale University

“One of the great deficiencies of media theory has been an adequate account of markets. As new technologies evolve to secure the most recent gains in wealth accumulation, this collection shows what is at stake in overlooking or accepting the very first principles of capitalism.”

— Melissa Gregg, Research Director at Intel

“The technological media and infrastructures of markets and finance capitalism should be of utmost concern to cultural theory. In bringing together the critical history of economic thought and the media theory of money and markets, this book is a compelling and timely intervention.“

— Joseph Vogl, Humboldt University, Berlin / Princeton University

“Profound and provocative, this book demonstrates the enduring relevance of theory to contemporary digital dilemmas. Addressing platform capitalism, democratic decay, and the future of labor and play, the authors illuminate the alien intelligence of big data, pattern recognition, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.”

— Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland

“How are we to contend with the many forms of pattern discrimination in contemporary life? This book shows the complexity of the terrain and reminds us what is at stake.”

— Kate Crawford, AI Now Institute NYU

This volume contributes to the ongoing discussion on the epistemic position of computer simulations in a variety of physical disciplines, such as quantum optics, quantum mechanics, and computational physics. Originating from an interdisciplinary event, it shows that accounts of contemporary physics can constructively interfere with media theory, philosophy, and the history of science.

This book is also available in German.

With texts by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Rosemarie Buikema, Mercedes Bunz, Kári Driscoll, Yvonne Förster, Annemie Halsema, Birgit Mara Kaiser, Leonard Lawlor, Jacques Lezra, Sam McAuliffe, Timothy O’Leary, Bettina Papenburg, Esther Peeren, Asja Szafraniec, Melanie Sehgal, Kathrin Thiele, Sybrandt van Keulen, Veronica Vasterling, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor.

Our governments are totally incapable of dealing with the situation. Economic warfare obliges them to stick to the goal of irresponsible, even criminal, economic growth, whatever the cost. It is no surprise that people were so struck by the catastrophe in New Orleans. The response of the authorities – to abandon the poor whilst the rich were able to take shelter – is a symbol of the coming barbarism.

This book was co-published by Open Humanities Press and meson press as part of OHP’s Critical Climate Series.

With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe, and Ben Woodard.

Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia.

This reader crowd-sources critical tools, concepts, analyses, and annotations, self-identified by a network of change makers in Asia as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

The Editors

Nishant Shah, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Based on the keynote lectures held at DiGRA2015, Diversity of Play provides a critical view on the current state of digital games from theoretical, artistic, and practical perspectives.

With an interview with Karen Palmer and essays by Astrid Ensslin, Mathias Fuchs, Tanya Krzywinska, and Markus Rautzenberg, Diversity of Play explores the uncanny in games, the power of “unnatural” narratives, and the exceptions and uncertainties of digital ludic environments.

A more powerful model would therefore organise the efforts of the electorate in a way that both generates those reasoned arguments, which, as Habermas quite correctly pointed out differ from mere opinions, and delivers them to the elected politicians in a manner they can neither refuse nor ignore. This is what the Citizen Lobby intends to do.

Nobody is better placed than David Elstein to add to broadcasting history a challenging analysis of the state’s past attempts at cultural policy-making.

Stewart Purvis, Professor of Television Journalism, City University London. 

For many years, David Elstein has been one of the most rigorous and controversial commentators on British broadcasting. These lectures contain historical insights, which also have a great deal of contemporary relevance.

Martin Cave, Visiting Professor, Imperial College Business School.

David Elstein’s high level experience in advertising, subscription and publicly funded broadcasting gives his account of post WWII British broadcasting policy a unique authority. His finding that “broadcasting policy is determined more by the ebb and flow of politics and the activities of determined pressure groups than by ad hoc committees of the great and good” both persuades and provides a salutary challenge to conventional wisdoms.

Richard Collins, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Universities of Exeter and City University London.

David Elstein’s penetrating critique of the six post war inquiries into UK broadcasting is a real contribution to a history of flawed forecasts and missed opportunities.

Richard Tait, Professor of Journalism, Cardiff University.

The book includes an introduction by one of the series editors, Christian Herzog.

Contributors: Ned Rossiter, Jussi Parikka, Christoph Neubert, Liam Magee, Andrew Lison, Christopher M. Kelty, Anders Fagerjord, and Seth Erickson.

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.

Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics – and of our potential opposition to it. The current debates regarding net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s revelation of NSA surveillance are only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet as we know it.

This book is also available in German.

Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first published in 1966, by connecting the thought of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Marx famously declared that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. Heidegger on his part stressed that our modern malaise was due to the forgetting of being, for which he thought technological questions were central. Following from his study of Marx as a thinker of technology, and foreseeing debates about globalization, Axelos recognizes that technology now determines the world. Providing an introduction to some of his major themes, including the play of the world, Axelos asks if planetary technology requires a new, a future way of thought which in itself is planetary.

Edited by Stuart Elden.

This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years.

Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jean-Louis Boissier, Andreas Broeckmann, Thierry Dufrêne, Francesca Gallo, Charlie Gere, Antony Hudek, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Mackay, Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Bernard Stiegler, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.