Culture Machine, 17: Thermal Objects (2019)
Filed under book | Tags: · infrastructure, materiality, media, media theory, temperature
“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
International Journal of Communication, 8: Special Section: Media, Hot and Cold (2014)
Filed under journal | Tags: · climate, media, media studies, mediation, meteorology, temperature, weather
“The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life, temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the planet.
Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by new media—whether in our hands or in giant server farms; to the technologies used to measure, represent, and understand temperature; to the contribution of new media systems themselves to the problem of global warming. But this is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, media and mediation have been at the center of experiments in and beliefs about temperature and its relation to culture, gender, language, and life. In this special section, we take the 50th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media literally to ask “What are hot and cold media?””
Contributors: Alice Christensen, Wolfgang Ernst, Brenton J. Malin, Jessica Mudry, Dylan Mulvin, Lisa Parks, Rafico Ruiz, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, Marita Sturken.
Special section of the IJoC 8
Edited by Dylan Mulvin and Jonathan Sterne
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISSN 1932-8036
44 pages
PDF (single file)
PDFs (separate articles)