Chronopoetics
Chronopoetics

Author: Wolfgang Ernst

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-03-16

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1783485728

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Wolfgang Ernst has demonstrated that the knowledge of time-giving (‘chrono-poetical’) media and their temporal essence enriches the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of ‘time’. This book, a translated and abridged edition of Ernst’s two major volumes, Chronopoetik and Gleichursprünglichkeit, undertakes this on three levels: a close analysis of time-critical moments within media technologies; descriptions of how media temporalities affect and disrupt the traditional human sense of time; and questioning the traditional position of media time within cultural history. The book brings together two fields of inquiry: the technological analysis of media time processes and the venerable tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of time. Ernst argues that the scientific inquiry into the nature of time is enriched by the media-technological context. The book exposes a media theoretical approach to contemporary media culture that derives from the combination of philosophical reflection on the essence of technology and a close analysis of technological devices themselves. Ultimately Ernst addresses a fundamental concern of past, contemporary and future media culture: the position of technology in culture under the focused perspective of its tempor(e)alities.

Live Coding
Live Coding

Author: Alan F. Blackwell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0262372622

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The first comprehensive introduction to the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding. Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts through to computer science. Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice, and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multi-authored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice’s future forms.

Transcultural Perspectives in Literature, Language, Art, and Politics
Transcultural Perspectives in Literature, Language, Art, and Politics

Author: Aristi Trendel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1666956007

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Transcultural Perspectives in Literature, Language, Art, and Politics is a contribution to the field of transcultural studies that has been gaining ground since the turn of the twentieth century. Embracing the transcultural lens in the humanities and social sciences, it demonstrates how the relevance, necessity and wide range of this approach can better enhance our understanding of the contemporary world as well as the past. Though all the contributors have a humanities background, they work in different research fields such as literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, cinema, or intellectual history, and use a variety of theoretical frames. A transdisciplinary framework also seems to be the most practical one to meet the challenges that transcultural phenomena and developments present. In sixteen chapters organized in five sections (literature, translation and linguistics, cinema, communication and politics), the volume explores the dynamics of transculturality at a micro and macro level, its benefits and limits. These studies suggest that transculturality is not only used as an intellectual working tool but also as an identity in motion that may represent a glimmer of hope in a world that seems to be in the throes of unreason and on the brink of self-induced destruction.

Sonic time machines
Sonic time machines

Author: Wolfgang Ernst

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 904852847X

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Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. 'Sonic Time Machines' aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.

Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities
Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities

Author: Roger Whitson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1317509102

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Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.

The Delayed Present
The Delayed Present

Author: Wolfgang Ernst

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783956793400

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In the media theatre of contemporary culture, a drama unfolds: While the human sense of "the present" is challenged by the immediacy of analog signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non-)sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves. At that moment, human-related phenomenological analysis clashes with the media-archaeological close reading of the technological event, in an impossible effort to let the temporeal articulate itself. The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 04 Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum

Recursivity and Contingency
Recursivity and Contingency

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-01-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1786600544

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This book employs recursivity and contingency as two principle concepts to investigate into the relation between nature and technology, machine and organism, system and freedom. It reconstructs a trajectory of thought from an Organic condition of thinking elaborated by Kant, passing by the philosophy of nature (Schelling and Hegel), to the 20th century Organicism (Bertalanffy, Needham, Whitehead, Wiener among others) and Organology (Bergson, Canguilhem, Simodnon, Stiegler), and questions the new condition of philosophizing in the time of algorithmic contingency, ecological and algorithmic catastrophes, which Heidegger calls the end of philosophy. The book centres on the following speculative question: if in the philosophical tradition, the concept of contingency is always related to the laws of nature, then in what way can we understand contingency in related to technical systems? The book situates the concept of recursivity as a break from the Cartesian mechanism and the drive of system construction; it elaborates on the necessity of contingency in such epistemological rupture where nature ends and system emerges. In this development, we see how German idealism is precursor to cybernetics, and the Anthropocene and Noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) point toward the realization of a gigantic cybernetic system, which lead us back to the question of freedom. It questions the concept of absolute contingency (Meillassoux) and proposes a cosmotechnical pluralism. Engaging with modern and contemporary European philosophy as well as Chinese thought through the mediation of Needham, this book refers to cybernetics, mathematics, artificial intelligence and inhumanism.

Brainmedia
Brainmedia

Author: Flora Lysen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1501378732

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Will we ever be able to see the brain at work? Could it be possible to observe thinking and feeling as if watching a live broadcast from within the human head? Brainmedia uncovers past and present examples of scientists and science educators who conceptualize and demonstrate the active human brain guided by new media technologies. Drawing on original archival material, Brainmedia outlines a new history of “live brains,” arguing that practices of - and ideas about - mediation impacted the imagination of seeing the brain at work. Through five carefully researched and illustrated historical case studies, Flora Lysen shows the conceptual but also practical assembling of brains and media: from exhibitions of giant illuminated brain models and staged projections of brainwave recordings; to live televised brain broadcasts, brains hooked up to computers and experiments with “brain-to-brain” synchronization. By combining accounts of scientists examining brains in laboratories with examples of public demonstrations and exhibitions of brain research, Brainmedia casts new light on popularization practices, placing them at the heart of scientific work. The book argues that a vital part of brain research is the performing of knowledge with and through media. This means that the significance attributed to neuroscientific research today also much depends on the changing forms of fascination that ultimately allow for the persistence of promises of seeing the live brain at work.

Mediarchy
Mediarchy

Author: Yves Citton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1509533419

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We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions. In this major book, Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term ‘mediarchy’. To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us. We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time. This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today.