Peter Krapp: Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (2004)

Referring to a past that never was, déjà vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of déjà vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichid celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time.

Disturbances of cultural memory-screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions-disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, dij vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp’s analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner M]ller, this exploration of the effects of dij vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol’s work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet.

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2004
ISBN 0816643342, 9780816643349
218 pages

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Florian Cramer: Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (2005)

“Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.”

Editor: Matthew Fuller, additional corrections: T. Peal
Published within Media Design Research programme, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, Rotterdam
GNU General Public License 2; GNU Free Documentation License 1.2; Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.0
141 pages

Review: Tomáš Javůrek (Joinme, 2018, CZ).

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Sequel: Exe.cut(up)able statements: Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts (2011, in German).

Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005)

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems—understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as “things”—have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality—how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, “to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials.”

Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of “media ecology.” Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies—”taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously,” as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the “medial will to power” illustrated by “the camera that ate itself”; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in “abnormal” relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv—world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.

Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture “an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo.”

Published by MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 026206247X, 9780262062473
265 pages

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