Culture Machine, 17: Thermal Objects (2019)

“This special issue of Culture Machine addresses thermal processes, bodies and media. When heat and cold appear in the humanities and social sciences, they are often treated exclusively as metaphors—think of Ferdinand Tönnies’s description of the modern, urbanized society as a cooling process that freezes the warm, authentic community; or Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media. While thermal metaphors turn out to be useful—perhaps even constitutive—tools that make abstract notions imaginable and tangible, recent discussions on the materiality of the social offer a productive background for new theorizations of temperatures that exceed their metaphorical valences.

This special issue aims to rethink the relation of metaphor and materiality: How can we theoretically account for thermal mechanisms as balance, transfer or collapse? What does it mean to perform hot or cool critical theoretical interventions? These and other questions will be investigated across three temperature-related dimensions: the senses, thermic media and thermopolitics.” (from CfP)

With contributions by Elena Beregow, Wolfgang Ernst, Erhard Schüttpelz, Samir Bhowmik, Paula Schönach, Nigel Clark, Nicole Starosielski, Niall Martin, John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, Hilary Bergen, Gunnar Schmidt, and Agustina Andreoletti.

Edited by Elena Beregow
Publisher Open Humanities Press, April 2019
Open Access
ISSN 1465-4121

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Solvejg Nitzke, Nicolas Pethes (eds.): Imagining Earth: Concepts of Wholeness in Cultural Constructions of Our Home Planet (2017)

“While concepts of Earth have a rich tradition, more recent examples show a distinct quality: Though ideas of wholeness might still be related to mythical, religious, or utopian visions of the past, ‘Earth’ itself has become available as a whole. This raises several questions: How are the notions of one Earth or our Planet imagined and distributed? What is the role of cultural imagination and practices of signification in the imagination of ‘the Earth’? Which theoretical models can be used or need to be developed to describe processes of imagining Planet Earth? This collection invites a wide range of perspectives from different fields of the Humanities to explore the means of imagining Earth.”

Contributions by Gabriele Gramelsberger, Angela Krewani, Bruce Clarke, Timothy Morton, Hania Siebenpfeiffer, Nicholas Pethes, and Solvejg Nitzke.

Publisher transcript, Bielefeld, 2017
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License
ISBN 9783837639568, 3837639568
172 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

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Culture Machine, 18: The Nature of Data Centers (2019)

“This special issue of Culture Machine brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines such as anthropology, architecture, media and communication studies, and fine arts, who have engaged with data and cloud infrastructures in their academic or artistic work. Taking data centers as technological apparatus as a starting point, this issue aims to discuss the cloud’s philosophical, political, social, and environmental impacts and maps the diverse sociotechnical assemblages which emerge in the course of cloud infrastructuring processes. How do the infrastructures of the cloud integrate into local political contexts and industrial landscapes? How do the cloud’s technologies relate to the emergence of specific forms of subjectivity, sociality, and urbanity? How can the barely visible and secret industrial spaces of the cloud be made visible and opened up for public engagement? And what does the study of data centers tell us about our current social moment?”

Contributions by Adam Fish and Bradley L. Garrett, Alix Johnson, Anthony M Levenda and Dillon Mahmoudi, Vicki Mayer, Matt Parker, Anne Pasek, A.R.E Taylor, Julia Velkova, Asta Vonderau, Sean RM Willett.

Edited by Mél Hogan and Asta Vonderau
Publisher Open Humanities Press, March 2019
Open access

HTML, PDFs (updated on 2019-7-8)