Siegfried Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (2002–) [EN, ES]

16 December 2014, dusan

“Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old.

Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of ‘dreamers and modelers’ of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. ‘Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,’ Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others.”

Originally published as Archäologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und Sehens, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002.

Foreword by Timothy Druckrey
Translated by Gloria Custance
Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262240491, 9780262240499
375 pages

Reviews: Simon Werrett (Technology and Culture, 2007), Digital Creativity (2007), Simone Natale (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012), Stephanie Lam (n.d.).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (English, trans. Gloria Custance, 2006, 10 MB, updated on 2020-3-24)
Arqueología de los Medios. Hacia el tiempo profundo de la visión y la audición técnica (Spanish, trans. Alvaro Moreno-Hoffmann, 2011, 9 MB, added 2015-6-1 via Will, updated on 2020-3-24)

Olga Goriunova (ed.): Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing (2014)

14 December 2014, dusan

Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society.”

Texts by Andrew Goffey, Simon Yuill, Matthew Fuller, Luciana Parisi and M. Beatrice Fazi, Adrian Mackenzie, Michael Murtaugh, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Brigitte Kaltenbacher, Annet Dekker, and Olga Goriunova.

Publisher Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2014
New Media and Technology series
ISBN 1623560942, 9781623560942
285 pages

Software studies page on Monoskop

Publisher

PDF, ARG

Ada 5: Queer Feminist Media Praxis (2014)

25 October 2014, dusan

“Alexandra Juhasz’s work on feminist media praxis together with Aristea Fotopoulou’s work on contemporary digital media, feminism and queer studies structured the theme of this issue. We were interested in exploring what the concept of praxis could offer in our thinking about the intersections of gender, digital media, and technology. Praxis in both Marxist and in Arendtian political thought brings together theory, philosophy and political action into the realm of the everyday. Inspired from this premise, and continuing the conversations that started during the workshop, we focus here on the conditions for a queer feminist digital media praxis.” (from the Introduction)

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Issue 5
Edited by Aristea Fotopoulou, Kate O’Riordan, and Alexandra Juhasz
Publisher University of Oregon Libraries
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
ISSN 2325-0496

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