communication +1, 3(1): Afterlives of Systems (2014)

“Under the impression of today’s global crisis and the rise of ecological thinking, confronted with smart, ubiquitous technosystems and the impression of interconnectedness, there appears a new urge to excavate the remnants of the past. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.

The nine contributions ask how these debates and affective states survive and live on in today’s discussions of media ecologies, environmentalism, object-oriented philosophies, computer simulations, performative art, and communication technologies. In this sense, they take the renaissance of systems thinking in the late 20th and early 21st Century as an effect of various system crisis and explore new media technologies as stabilizing ‘cures’ against the dystopian future scenarios that emerged after World War II. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.”

With contributions by Etienne Benson, Rafico Ruiz, Katja Rothe, Niklas Schrape, Christoph Neubert and Serjoscha Wiemer, Sebastian Vehlken, Bruce Clarke, Jan Mueggenburg, and You Nakai.

Edited by Christina Vagt and Florian Sprenger
Publisher University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2014
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
c231 pages

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