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We regularly touch and handle media devices. At the same time, media devices such as body scanners, car seat pressure sensors, and smart phones scan and touch us. In Horn, Henning Schmidgen reflects on the bidirectional nature of touch and the ways in which surfaces constitute sites of mediation between interior and exterior. Schmidgen uses the concept of "horn"—whether manifested as a rhinoceros horn or a musical instrument—to stand for both natural substances and artificial objects as spaces of tactility. He enters into creative dialogue with artists, scientists, and philosophers, ranging from Salvador Dalí, William Kentridge, and Rebecca Horn to Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan, who plumb the complex interplay between tactility and technological and biological surfaces. Whether analyzing how Dalí conceived of images as tactile entities during his “rhinoceros phase” or examining the problem of tactility in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Schmidgen reconfigures understandings of the dynamic phenomena of touch in media.
This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of “lost time” by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust. Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a “frog drawing machine,” Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers. When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.
A social history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence," a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surve...
The creation and processing of visual representations in the life sciences is a critical but often overlooked aspect of scientific pedagogy. The Educated Eye follows the nineteenth-century embrace of the visible in new spectatoria, or demonstration halls, through the twentieth-century cinematic explorations of microscopic realms and simulations of surgery in virtual reality.
This book develops the so-called “solaristic ontology” of film by building a philosophical system based on an inquiry into the nature of film, being and reality. This “solaristic system” appropriates the aesthetic ideas and principles of thought present in the 1972 sci-fi movie Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky. This movie is the main center of analysis here since it is highly symptomatic of the medium’s philosophical self-reflexivity and its intriguing correlation with reality and being. The “solaristic science” is a fictional science introduced in the movie’s diegesis and dedicated to the investigation of the planet Solaris, an unattainable challenge. In this sense, the solaristic system closes the film’s narrative by telling a philosophical story on the planet Solaris. The book thus details a philosophical form of concept art, and, at the same time, builds on previous results of film philosophy, as well as the speculative turn in contemporary philosophy.
Steege explores Helmholtz's significance within a historical shift in the theory and practice of listening in nineteenth-century European culture.
In The Will to Predict, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė demonstrates how the logic of scientific expertise cannot be properly understood without knowing the conceptual and institutional history of scientific prediction. She notes that predictions of future population, economic growth, environmental change, and scientific and technological innovation have shaped much of twentieth and twenty-first-century politics and social life, as well as government policies. Today, such predictions are more necessary than ever as the world undergoes dramatic environmental, political, and technological change. But, she asks, what does it mean to predict scientifically? What are the limits of scientific prediction an...
Pt. 1. Literatures and sciences -- pt. 2. Disciplinary and theoretical approaches -- pt. 3. Periods and cultures.
This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
New laboratory buildings are currently being planned all around the world. Are they different from or even better than their predecessors? To answer this question, the authors of this book have journeyed into the past and present of laboratory architecture. They discuss the images of the research scientist and the laboratory that have been purveyed since the natural sciences were institutionalised in the nineteenth century. They also examine contemporary architectural solutions in the light of influential laboratory architectures of the latter half of the twentieth century, thereby discovering a great variety of approaches, historical and contemporary - for both the functional interrelation of spaces and the tension between symbolic façades and internal structures can take very different forms.