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Cultural, social and economic production is always medially constituted, since it is formed through processing, storage and transmission of certain data or materials. This is why the concept of mediality can be used to stress the performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of techniques conversely interacts with the mediality in question. The contributors focus on a given cultural medium's genuine structure as a particular deployment without falling into some kind of hardware determinism, therefore considering culture beyond textuality.
How »family« is construed on a material and discursive level has gained increasing interest among educational and social work professionals. The contributors to this volume address that question in relation to the diverse everyday practices of »doing family« by its heterogeneous members. The contributions build a transdisciplinary bridge between research on family life on the one hand and research on the formatting of family in welfare state contexts on the other. Fundamental to this is a decentred and fluid understanding of family that conceives itself as a contested set of relational activities in people's everyday lives that are socially recognized as »familial«.
Cold War Museology is the first volume to bring together interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading practitioners and academics specialising in Cold War museology. Bringing the most recent historiography of the Cold War into conversation with museological theory and practice, chapters within the volume analyse the current condition of Cold War museology. By unpicking some of the unique challenges facing museum specialists dealing with the Cold War, this book takes a lead in developing the collection, display and interpretation of this history. The chapters question what makes a Cold War object; address the complexity of Cold War time; face up to questions of Cold War race...
The volume investigates the socio-material dimension and media practices of cooperation – before, during and beyond situations. Cooperation is understood as reciprocal interplay operating with or without consensus, in co-presence or absence of the involved actors in distributed situations. Artefacts, bodies, texts and infrastructures are the media that make cooperation possible. They enable and configure reciprocal accomplishments – and are themselves created through media practices in cooperative situations.
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.
»Yes, No, Perhaps« are the most written words in Mary Bauermeister's artworks. Together they stand for the concept of many-valued aesthetics in the German artist's oeuvre - an aesthetic that Bauermeister developed using many-valued logic. Hauke Ohls brings the artist's central groups of works in context with each other as well as with the neo-avant-garde of the post-war period in Europe and the USA. He shows that the development of Bauermeister's art may appear disparate, but her canvas and relief works, drawings and writing pictures, lens boxes and stone pictures are characterized by a reciprocal relationship of combinations and interconnections. Through the ubiquitous use of meta-references, the entire oeuvre ultimately appears as an interconnected assemblage.
How the computer became universal. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi grou...
The emergence of a global and technological world and its accelerating, dissemination before the beginning of the 21st century does not only give rise to technological, economic, social, environmental, political, and educational tasks. Significant philosophical questions, epistemic reflections, and cultural debates result. The aim of this book is to provide information about epistemic, ethical, and cultural implications of sustainable development on an interdisciplinary and international level.
Infrastructure comprises a combination of sociotechnical, political, and cultural arrangements that provide resources and services. The contributors to this volume show, in their respective fields, how infrastructures are both generative forces and the materialized products of quotidian practices that affect and guide people's lives. Organized via shared conceptual foci, this volume demonstrates infrastructuralist perspectives as an important transdisciplinary approach within the humanities.
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 ...