Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka: The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022)

“From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.

Organized by interpretive categories such as space, infrastructure, and imaginaries, The Lab Book uses both historical and contemporary examples to show how laboratories have become fundamentally connected to changes in the contemporary university. Its wide reach includes institutions like the MIT Media Lab, the Tuskegee Institute’s Jesup Wagon, ACTLab, and the Media Archaeological Fundus. The authors cover topics such as the evolution and delineation of lab-based communities, how labs’ tools and technologies contribute to defining their space, and a glossary of key hybrid lab techniques.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, March 2022
ISBN 9781517902179, 1517902177
x+333 pages

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Amodern, 8: Translation-Machination (2018)

“Amodern 8 explores the contexts and implications of translation as mechanism, media, technique, and transmission. Our tethering of “translation” to “machination” marks our intention to move beyond the habit of situating MT and computer-generated language in the familiar crisis poses of fakery, treason, and inauthenticity. Rather than regarding the machine as marking the limits of translation – an assumption that risks walling off translation practice from media and communication studies concerns, while still absorbing its products – our aim is to continue to investigate the possibilities and configurations of translation as machined, and translation as machining meaning, historically and in the contemporary moment.”

With contributions by Rita Raley, Otso Huopaniemi, John Cayley, Christine Mitchell, Tiffany Chan, Mara Mills, Jentery Sayers, Avery Slater, Quinn DuPont, Andrew Pilsch, Nick Montfort, Jane Birkin, Karin Littau, and Joe Milutis.

Edited by Christine Mitchell and Rita Raley
Publisher Concordia University and Lakehead University, January 2018
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License

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Annie van den Oever (ed.): Ostrannenie: On ‘Strangeness’ and the Moving Image: The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept (2010)

“Ostrannenie (‘making it strange’) has become one of the central concepts of modern artistic practice, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, and science fiction, as well as our response to arts. Coined by the ‘Russian Formalist’ Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, ostrannenie has come to resonate deeply in Film Studies, where it entered into dialogue with the Brechtian concept of Verfremdung, the Freudian concept of the uncanny and Derrida’s concept of différance. Striking, provocative and incisive, the essays of the distinguished film scholars in this volume recall the range and depth of a concept that since 1917 changed the trajectory of theoretical inquiry. European Film Studies ­ ‘The Key Debates is a new film series from Amsterdam University Press edited by Annie van den Oever (the founding editor), Ian Christie and Dominique Chateau. The editors’ ambition is to uncover and track the process of appropriation of critical terms in film theory in order to give the European film heritage the attention it deserves. With contributions from Ian Christie, Yuri Tsivian, Dominique Chateau, Frank Kessler, Laurent Jullier, Miklós Kiss, Annie van den Oever, Emile Poppe, László Tarnay, Barend van Heusden, András Bálint Kovács, and Laura Mulvey, this important study is a wonderful piece of imaginative yet rigorous scholarship.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010
The Key Debates series, 1
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9089640797, 9789089640796
278 pages

Reviews: Simon Spiegel (Projections, 2011), Lara Cox (Film-Philosophy, 2011), Sanna Peden (Studies in European Cinema, 2015).

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