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The Connectivity of Things
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking ...
Comics and Agency
This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.
The Server
A cutting‑edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic, which attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master? Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current‑day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
Bad Boys and Wicked Women
This volume assembles 13 essays as the result of a workshop for international doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in Old Norse studies, which was held at the Institute for Nordic Philology at LMU in Munich in December 2015. The contributions’ focus lies on different aspects of ›bad‹ or ›evil‹ characters in saga literature, and they give testimony to the broad literary variety such figures display in Old Norse texts. The “Antagonists and Troublemakers in Old Norse Literature” are here explored in their diversity, ranging from their literary psychology to their characteristics which often challenge gender norms. The contributions discuss the narrative strategies of presenting these characters to the audience, both positively and negatively. Furthermore, they analyse how the central paradox of evil and its dependence on context is realised in various ways in Old Norse literature.
Guides of the Atlas
How do digital media technologies shape or restructure social practice? And which transitions and demarcations of different forms of publicness arise in this context? Simon Holdermann examines this question in his ethnography of everyday life in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In order to approach the ongoing, historically situated social transformations of the region, he analyses a variety of media practices concerning the organizational work and transnational cooperation that take place there - in particular at the intersection of mountain tourism, NGO work, and local self-government.
The 'New' Documentary Nexus
In the last ten years, the field of documentary has been subject to substantial paradigm shifts due to the rise of digital media practices. This publication explores some central questions arising in this context: Who are the different interactors networking within the ‘new’ documentary nexus? How can we conceptualize interactive documentary practices as encounters and dynamic interactions within digital media culture and beyond? How can one methodologically approach this complex networked yet dynamic nexus in its constant flux? Developing a coherent and expandable operational set of methods to describe and analyse paradigmatic cases, this book addresses documentary theorists, (new) media scholars and students of media and communication studies who want to gain a survey of current developments in the field of interactive documentary practices.
Disruption in the Arts
The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence. The contributions conceptualize historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, which are concerned not just with the ‘narcissistic’ exhibition of art...
Actor & Avatar
What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of »technical others« and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material.
From Chaos to Catastrophe?
This book focuses on the tensions between processes of consciousness and their products like worldviews, theories, models of thought etc. Staying close to their technical meanings in chaos and catastrophe theory, chaotic processes are described in mainly neurobiological and evolutionary terms while products are delineated in their evolutionary logic. Given both a relative opacity of processes of the mind and of the outside world, the dramatic quality of the processes, a certain closeness to ‘hysterical’ and ‘schizophrenic’ tendencies and, within the context of the weakening orientating power of worldviews, an alarming catastrophic potential emerge. As a consequence, the book aims at ...
An Edgy Realism
Similar to the way in which the new waves of the 1960s and 1970s had been characterized by new forms of cinematic realism, cinema since the turn of the millennium has pointed into the direction of a new, edgy realism. Art film movements such as Dogma 95 and the New French Extremity, as well as shaky-cam horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, provide evidence of the fact that the proliferation of the digital since the 1990s has profoundly changed not only contemporary media culture and the social role of film, as seen, for example, in the case of amateur film and the phenomenon of mobile reporting and its distribution via YouTube and the like, but also notions of r...
