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?

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

“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

Fahrradutopien denkt vom Fahrrad aus und ergänzt dabei bestehende Ansätze zur Mobilitätsforschung um medienkulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Die Beiträge verbinden Medienwissenschaften und Forschungen zu Fahrradaktivismus mit der Liebe zum Radfahren. Fokussiert werden Fahrradfilme und -vlogs, Verkehr und Infrastrukturen, Virtuelle Realität und Fahrrad, Fahrradkollektive und Fahrradfeminismus.

“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

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.

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.

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

“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

Unterwachen und Schlafen stellt nicht das theoretische Programm einer vollautomatisierten Lebenswelt in Aussicht, sondern das Konstrukt einer nunmehr medialen Umsetzung anthropologischer Grundelemente wie Autonomie, Freiheit oder Vertrauen.

Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Profil und Profilierung nehmen die Beiträge aus Medienwissenschaft, Soziologie, Geschichtswissenschaft und Informatik die vielschichtigen Dimensionen dieses zentralen Phänomens der digitalen Medienkultur in den Blick: Wie verändern sich Bedeutung und Bewertung des Profil-Begriffs? Wie stehen Profile in Zusammenhang mit Subjektivierung und Machtkonstellationen? Welche Wechselwirkungen zwischen Profilen und Privatheit sind gegenwärtig relevant?

This book is also available in German.

Dieses Buch ist auch in englischer Sprache erhältlich.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In ihrer vielschichtigen Gestalt bilden solche Mikroentscheidungen eine bislang nur marginal beachtete Dimension von Kontrolle und Überwachung im 21. Jahrhundert. Sie sind sowohl die kleinste Einheit als auch die technische Voraussetzung einer gegenwärtigen Politik digitaler Netzwerke – und des Widerstands gegen sie. Die aktuellen Debatten um Netzneutralität und Edward Snowdens Enthüllung der NSA-Überwachung bilden dabei lediglich die Spitze des Eisbergs. Auf dem Spiel steht nicht weniger als die Zukunft des Internets, wie wir es kennen.

Dieses Buch ist auch in englischer Sprache erhältlich.