Media and Cultural techniques

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

Das Working Paper nimmt den Zusammenhang von Vergleichen und Erzählen aus einer systematischen und historischen Perspektive in den Blick. Es befasst sich zum einen mit der Frage, wie und vor dem Hintergrund welcher theoretischer Annahmen Konvergenzen, Verflechtungen und Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Vergleichspraktiken und Erzählformen postuliert werden können. Beide Praktiken – so die zentrale These – lassen sich als Kulturtechniken begreifen, die zur Formierung übergreifender Netzwerke in Beziehung gesetzt werden können, welche nicht allein durch sprachoder bildgebundene Repräsentationsprozesse gekennzeichnet sind, sondern diese in umfassendere Dynamiken zeichenhafter Darstellungsformen, sozialer Akteure und materieller Artefakte einbinden. Die systematische Perspektive schließt auch die Frage nach der Verknüpfung von Kulturtechnikforschung und Praxistheorie mit ein. Zum anderen skizziert das Papier vier exemplarische historische Konstellationen, die die moderne Wissenschaftsgeschic...

Studie pojednává o estetice absence a zárodečně postmoderních strategiích uplatňovaných v povídce Richarda Weinera „Prázdná židle“ (1916), a to jak z hlediska narativní analýzy, tak na základě východisek filozofie médií a vizuální antropologie. V první části studie je osvětlena Weinerova diskurzivní strategie fingování, jež vykazuje společné rysy s postmoderní metafikcí a způsobuje cézuru mezi tím, co text říká a co skutečně dělá. Druhá část analyzuje ironizaci afektivního i tematického centra povídky a přináší nový pojem „dianarace“. Třetí část odkrývá intermediální afinity prázdné židle s portréty Vincenta van Gogha (1888) a zakladatelským dílem konceptuálního umění Josepha Kosutha (1965).
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This paper deals with the aesthetics of absence and pre-postmodern strategies as carried out in the short story “Prázdná židle [Empty Chair]” (1916) by Richard Weiner. Drawing on the methodological fusion of narrative analysis, media philosophy, and visual anthropology, I argue that Weiner’s text offers a specific “portrait of absence”, which is able to intensify the subject despite its physical non-presence. In the first part, Weiner’s discursive strategy of feigning, revealing common features
with postmodern metafiction and producing a rupture between what the text says and what it does, is explained. The second part analyzes an ironization of its affective and thematic center while bringing forth a new concept of “dia-narrative”. The third part explores the main figure of the empty chair in its intermedial relations with the portraits of Vincent van Gogh (1888) and the founding work of the conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth (1965).

This article surveys recent work in media archaeology, explicates the related theory of cultural techniques, and considers the utility of these recent developments in new German media theory to the analysis of medieval and early modern mediality. In doing so, the article also attends to disciplinary similarities between media studies and medieval and early modern studies. The aim of the article is neither to suggest a hybridization of these fields nor to systematize the approaches of media archaeology and the study of cultural techniques , but rather to highlight productive points of contact, contention, and possible exchange, and to indicate avenues for future research on insufficiently studied topics in medieval and early modern mediality. As a point of reference for this theoretical overview , the article focuses on Nicholas of Cusa's treatise On the Vision of God (De visione Dei, 1453) and mentions other examples from medieval German literature and culture where relevant.

This article deals with the mediality of empty chairs in the works by Vincent van Gogh, Richard Weiner, Egon Schiele, Joseph Kosuth and Eugène Ionesco. These empty chairs are explored as aisthetic-affective figures pervading historical periods and cultural boundaries that offer a specific portrait of absence, which is able to intensify the subject despite its physical non-presence. The argument is based on the dialectic process of dis/appearing, posthermeneutics and the theory of the supplement.

Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture.

In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into
discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray.

In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. He also demonstrates that Benjamin recognized in fashion a chronotechnics, allowing him to model temporality. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist..

Das kulturtechnische Potential von Medien zu skizzieren, ist die grundlegende Motivation der Beiträge in diesem Band. Im methodischen Zugriff sollen sie nicht als eigenständige und in sich geschlossene Gebilde aufgefasst werden, sondern hinsichtlich ihrer Interaktionen und Überschneidungen, die "Grenzerfahrungen" gleich ihre Wirkungsweisen offenlegen. Dabei wird das mediale Grenzwächtertum der traditionellen Disziplinen aufgegeben, der vielgestaltige Prozess der Transformation tritt in den Vordergrund. Was passiert, wenn Bilder durch Schrift erklärt oder in Kodes überhaupt erst errechnet werden? Was geschieht, wenn sich Wort und Zahl in den Ausprägungen von Schrift, Sprache und Visualität differenzieren?

Die Abgrenzungen zwischen Bild, Schrift und Zahl bleiben nie ohne Rest, in dem einen Medium finden sich stets Spuren des anderen. Vor diesem Deutungshorizont geht es darum auszuloten, in wie weit gerade die Bruchkanten und Überschneidungen selbst Orte kulturtechnischer Praxis situieren.

Im Blick auf unterschiedliche Disziplinen (Philosophie, Germanistik, Kulturwissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte) wird die mediale Verfasstheit des hergebrachten Materials kritisch befragt, um Bild, Schrift und Zahl als Kulturtechniken stringenter zu fassen.

Pellucid Paper offers a new history of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media practices in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.

This bibliographic article gives an Introduction to the field of media aesthetics, refers to General Overviews, Journals, and Book Series. It outlines the Background for media aesthetics in terms of History and Theory, explicates Basic Concepts, such as the media aesthetic conceptions of Media and Aesthetics, and presents a map of a variety of media aesthetic Research Interests, such as Media as Environment, Media as Embodied Experience, Media as Matter, Histories of Media Technologies, and Media as System.

The very first introductory paragraph is available here: Media aesthetics is an interdisciplinary arena for research on media technologies, aesthetics (sense perception), and mediation. It does not belong to any one discipline, but is rather a set of perspectives that may inscribe themselves into a great number of disciplines and has done so most notably in media studies, art history, film studies, and to a certain extent, comparative literature and humanistic informatics, as well. Media aesthetics grew out of earlier attempts at theorizing about the reciprocal relations between aesthetics, technology, and media, such as media philosophy (Friedrich Kittler), media ecology (Marshall McLuhan), medium theory (Joshua Meyrowitz), mediology (Régis Debray), and critical theory (most notably Walter Benjamin), and is influenced by current, aesthetic theories of what has been termed new media (Mark Hansen) and visual culture (W. J. T. Mitchell). Media aesthetics emphasizes the importance of understanding sensuous perception as culturally and historically situated and insists on the continuity between so-called old and new media. Media aesthetics ties into what has been called digital humanities and seeks to take into account the high levels of technological mediation of the world today. By redirecting our attention to material and physical practices it also shares some ideas with the largely German tradition of cultural techniques. Media aesthetics also has overlapping interests with the emergence of new materialism (Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti) and seeks to contribute to rethinking the relationship of science and the humanities, approaching the questions of the two cultures through studies of visualization in science and everyday life as well as through studies of the visual arts in relation to the physical and biological sciences. The field of media aesthetics is multidisciplinary and heterogeneous. Consequently, an overview of media aesthetics cannot be limited to academic works where this term has explicitly been used. It is important to recognize work that shares the same research interests even though their authors may have used other terms and the works also can be sorted into areas with overlapping ideas and interests.

В статье рассматривается жестикуляционная природа акта письма, то, как протекает и переживается этот акт, а также то, какие инструменты и материальность в этот жест вовлекаются или провоцируют и к каким последствиям (зачастую травматическим) эти медиаантропологические ансамбли приводят. На пересечении индивидуального жестякуляционного фантазма и наличной материальности письма конкретной исторической эпохи возникает всегда гетерогенный и нестабильный инструмент или аппарат письма. Наряду с кратким теоретическим обоснованием модели приравнивания инструментов письма к различным орудиям (и соответствующим действиям) в статье анализируется несколько конкретных кейсов таких инструментальных ассамбляжей и того, какого рода переговоры, уступки и конфликты (поломки и травмы) имели место между материальностью и антропологией письма.
В частности, в первой части статьи рассматриваются индустриальные жесты письма, всегда связанные с дефицитом медиума и мануальным усилием (и следовательно, расстройствами и травмами руки): рассматриваются случаи экспансивного письма и «писчей судороги» Роберта Вальзера и «аксиоматического» жеста броска костей Стефана Малларме.
Во второй части статьи анализируются постиндустриальные жесты письма, основанные скорее на чтении (и движении не рук, но глаз соответственно) и связанные, в свою очередь, с эффектом информационных перегрузок, переживаемых писателями и исследователями с начала XX века. В данном случае анализируются частичное продолженное внимание и техника просматривания текстов (reading at), выработанная в письме Гертруды Стайн, а также новейшая методологическая пластика и оптика гуманитарных наук на примере дальнего чтения Франко Моретти.

Das Working Paper nimmt den Zusammenhang von Vergleichen und Erzählen aus einer systematischen und historischen Perspektive in den Blick. Es befasst sich zum einen mit der Frage, wie und vor dem Hintergrund welcher theoretischer Annahmen Konvergenzen, Verflechtungen und Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Vergleichspraktiken und Erzählformen postuliert werden können. Beide Praktiken – so die zentrale These – lassen sich als Kulturtechniken begreifen, die zur Formierung übergreifender Netzwerke in Beziehung gesetzt werden können, welche nicht allein durch sprachoder bildgebundene Repräsentationsprozesse gekennzeichnet sind, sondern diese in umfassendere Dynamiken zeichenhafter Darstellungsformen, sozialer Akteure und materieller Artefakte einbinden. Die systematische Perspektive schließt auch die Frage nach der Verknüpfung von Kulturtechnikforschung und Praxistheorie mit ein. Zum anderen skizziert das Papier vier exemplarische historische Konstellationen, die die moderne Wissenschaftsgeschichte, die europäische Weltreiseliteratur, Vergleiche in Bild-Text-Objekt-Hybriden sowie kuratorische Praktiken in Ausstellungen betreffen, in denen Vergleichs- und Erzählpraktiken je spezifische Wechselwirkungen eingehen und in komplexe Operationsketten mit unterschiedlichen Akteuren eingebunden sind.

Fissare l’effimerità della voce in una forma permanente è una possibilità portata in dote dalle tecnologie del suono che l’Italia coglie in netto ritardo rispetto agli altri paesi europei, inaugurando la costruzione del “patrimonio fonico nazionale” soltanto nei tardi anni Venti del Novecento. Attraverso uno spoglio documenti originali e periodici dell’epoca, Voci d’archivio ripercorre l’istituzionalizzazione della fonografia a mezzo archivistico soffermandosi da un lato sulle vicende e sui dibattiti che portarono alla fondazione della Discoteca di Stato e dall’altro sui modi diversi in cui le potenzialità del nuovo medium vennero concepite e messe in opera dalle parti in causa. Uno sguardo ravvicinato a discorsi e pratiche che guidarono le prime applicazioni della fonografia, utile a riconoscere la natura tecnologicamente e culturalmente mediata di quella che chiamiamo memoria sonora.

In this paper, I define cultural techniques and discuss how food production may be analyzed from a cultural-technical perspective. Citing the work of Bernhard Siegert (2015; 2013) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1991;1970), I show that some of the same techniques which produce food have also been fundamental to the emergence of culture and the human as such: namely cooking, agriculture and animal husbandry, and techniques of eating. Though these techniques form the basis of what we know as food, they remain, to quote Levi-Strauss, “on the margin of the semantic field which embraces all food products” (1970:267). They escape representation, which arguably, is why food technologies are neglected by media studies, despite the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies in food production, processing, and distribution. This is what makes cultural techniques particularly suited to discussing food as an object of media theoretical analysis, food being something that is typically represented in the media, and not interrogated for its own ability to mediate, transmit, or reproduce culture on a technical level.

This paper scrutinizes the interrelation between technology and processes of bordering. In particular, it addresses the ways through which biometrics, dataveillance, predictive analytics, and robotics enlist the human body, networks, and human–machine assemblages in practices of inclusion and exclusion at the contemporary dislocated, and ‘smart’ border. Through a description of the sociotechnical apparatuses underlying biometric, algorithmic, and automated border work, the paper develops the term iBorder, and connects its specific affordances to an emergent late-modern regime of security. In introducing the notion of cultural technique, the paper argues that contemporary technologically facilitated practices of bordering coconstitute contingent, rather than simply process given, subjectivities and frames for practice.

Das kulturtechnische Potential von Medien zu skizzieren, ist die grundlegende Motivation der Beiträge in diesem Band. Im methodischen Zugriff sollen sie nicht als eigenständige und in sich geschlossene Gebilde aufgefasst werden, sondern hinsichtlich ihrer Interaktionen und Überschneidungen, die "Grenzerfahrungen" gleich ihre Wirkungsweisen offenlegen. Dabei wird das mediale Grenzwächtertum der traditionellen Disziplinen aufgegeben, der vielgestaltige Prozess der Transformation tritt in den Vordergrund. Was passiert, wenn Bilder durch Schrift erklärt oder in Kodes überhaupt erst errechnet werden? Was geschieht, wenn sich Wort und Zahl in den Ausprägungen von Schrift, Sprache und Visualität differenzieren?

Die Abgrenzungen zwischen Bild, Schrift und Zahl bleiben nie ohne Rest, in dem einen Medium finden sich stets Spuren des anderen. Vor diesem Deutungshorizont geht es darum auszuloten, in wie weit gerade die Bruchkanten und Überschneidungen selbst Orte kulturtechnischer Praxis situieren.

Im Blick auf unterschiedliche Disziplinen (Philosophie, Germanistik, Kulturwissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte) wird die mediale Verfasstheit des hergebrachten Materials kritisch befragt, um Bild, Schrift und Zahl als Kulturtechniken stringenter zu fassen.

My paper will argue that our food systems not only sustain life, but serve as a horizon for the understanding of what 'life' is. Food and how it is produced establishes the ontological position of the human visa -vis other beings. Our food systems continually break down, however, and communicable diseases (e.g. the avian flu) break the 'species-barrier.' As Mary Douglas observes, when such " monstrous births occur, the defining lines between humans and animals may be threatened " (Douglas 1980:39). However, the 'monstrous births' of any system are endogenous to them; according to Douglas, what appears to originate outside of the system is a product of the systematization process itself (1980:39). Indeed, humans have continually broken species-barriers in order to guarantee reliable food sources—we drink another animal's milk, for example, calling into question how these species-barriers are defined, and how feeble those definitions can be. Like the technologies of Dr. Frankenstein, appropriations of and interventions in nonhuman biology are intended to overcome the precarity of human life and our bodily shortcomings. This paper was in part inspired by the manga and anime series, Knights of Sidonia, where the human classes of a post-earth civilization are genetically modified to photosynthesize the majority of their energy needs. I ask, if humans are so changed that they no longer procure and eat food as they have done for millennia, will we be human anymore? In this sense, I consider food from a posthuman perspective, not only thinking the human to its endpoint through its relation to food, but also taking up the posthumanist project in decentering the human and considering the complex relationship we have always bore to other species and technology, troubling any essentialist notion of the human.

This article explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice.

Recent studies in psychiatry reveal an acceptance of trauma through the media.  Traditionally restricted to immediate experience, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is now expanding to include mediated experience. How did this development come about? How does mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its consequences? This essay addresses these questions through three cases: (1) ‘trauma film paradigm’,
an early 1960s research program that employed films to simulate traumatic effects; (2) the psychiatric study into the clinical effects of watching catastrophic events on television, culminating with the September 11 attacks; (3) reports on drone operators who exhibit PTSD symptoms after flying combat missions away from the war
zone. The recognition of mediated trauma marks a qualitative change in the understanding of media effects, rendering the impact literal and the consequences clinical.  What informs recent speculations about the possibility of trauma through media is a
conceptual link between visual media and contemporary conceptions of trauma.

By means of illustrative scenes from the media history of swarm research, this essay examines the significance of swarming techniques to current socio-technological processes. At the same time it explores how the procedures of swarm intelligence should be understood in relation to the concept of cultural techniques. Swarms are conceptualized here as zootechnologies that resist methods of analytical investigation. They first emerged as operational collective structures by means of the reciprocal computerization of biology and biologization of computer science. In a recursive loop, swarms inspired agent-based modelling, which in turn provided biological researchers with enduring knowledge about dynamic collectives. This conglomerate led to the development of advanced, software-based ‘particle systems’. Agent-based applications of this sort are used to model solution strategies in a number of areas where opaque and complex problems present themselves – from epidemiology to logistics, from market simulations to crowd control. Swarm intelligence has thus become a fundamental cultural technique for governing dynamic processes. It has also become an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of society, one that contributes a zootechnological dimension to the study of cultural techniques.

This paper scrutinizes the interrelation between technology and processes of bordering. In particular, it addresses the ways through which biometrics, dataveillance, predictive analytics, and robotics enlist the human body, networks, and human–machine assemblages in practices of inclusion and exclusion at the contemporary dislocated and ‘smart’ border. Through a description of the sociotechnical apparatuses underlying biometric, algorithmic, and automated border work, the paper develops the term iBorder, and connects its specific affordances to an emergent late-modern regime of security. With reference to the notion of cultural technique, the paper argues that contemporary technologically facilitated practices of bordering coconstitute, rather than merely process, contingent subjectivities and frames for practice.

This article examines early recordings of Georgian folk music and
their use by present-day singers through the dual lens of ethnography and
media archaeology. One song in particular, recorded in 1907 and re-created in concert in 2009, demonstrates a complex negotiation between changing ideals of vocal timbre and the desire to be faithful to all aspects of the original recording, even mistakes or idiosyncrasies. Throughout, Anzor Erkomaishvili looms large as a dominant figure: founder of the most famous ensemble in Georgia, archivist in search of old records, and elegiac narrator of a family saga at the heart of Georgian music history

The growing presence of studies focused on concepts such as materiality of communication has brought up two very particular types of approach. In this study, we focus on the specificity of new media and the reappearance of communication models based on Claude E. Shannon's Information Theory and Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. The convergence of media technologies and digital computation – indicated by Manovich – brought to the field of Communication a set of new research problems or the reorientation of classic problems that we have to face reflectively.

Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not only with theory in order to highlight parallels to reflections on cultural techniques and sociotechnical networks but also tries to assess its relevance as theory. My essay will, first of all, introduce the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques and show how cultural techniques are described in Remainder. The parallel agendas of cultural techniques research, I argue, converge in a shared interest in materiality, practices, and the seemingly banal details of everyday life but put them into different perspectives. I will then read Remainder as a contribution to the theoretical debate on cultural techniques and suggest that the novel draws our attention to a politics of detail in theories of practices, the everyday, and cultural techniques

Observed mainly in plants, phototropism names the chemical ability of certain cells and organelles to self-divide and to grow as a reaction to the exposure to light. It is one in the set of massively repeated operations that transform sunlight into the vast, rich and varied envelope of life that we know as the Biosphere. This paper deals with the planetary wide capacity of processing light, a capacity that is related to a pervasive presence of different types of interactions with light: the ones that produce the visible, within the eyes or, more noticeably even, within the far-reaching omnipresence of visual media.[1]

The interweaving of the seen and the seeded will be exposed through an account of different episodes of industrial agriculture where the role played by visual operations has been critical. In particular, two agrarian reforms and land settlement programmes that took place during the 20th-century will be addressed: the German Innere Kolonisation and the Spanish Colonización interior. Invisibility, the notion of empty space and the practice of aerial photography were essential to these developments, as it will be shown, and simultaneous with the growth of infrastructures such as irrigation networks or workers housing.

In this paper, the coupled performance of both visual apparatus and infrastructures on the ground will be considered from what Eva Horn has called a ‘medial a priori’: the “assemblages or constellations of certain technologies, fields of knowledge, and social institutions” (Horn 8) that become the conditions of possibility of processes, transformations or events. A medial a priori consisting of “discourse networks, cultural techniques and formations of knowledge” (Siegert The map is the territory 15) that, in the broadest sense, goes even beyond the technical assemblages, to deal with the flows of energy and matter that give rise to them. In this vein, the interweaving of operations of light that gives rise to the seeded and the seen steps into what Jussi Parikka has framed as an alternative deep time of media, where “any consideration of media should start not from media but outside it” (Earth Volumes 124). It is within this frame of reference this paper departs.

“Light fills and forms the world” (Cubitt 2), inside and outside our eyes. Outside our eyes, these inner colonisations changed the manner in which the encounter of light and soil took place on a large portion of the totality of the surfaces of the Earth. Their scale gave way to the Green Revolution, with its oversized agri-food corporations, and to contemporary information-based precision farming technologies. To what extent these colonisations of the encounter of light and soil also changed the way contemporary vision is produced, that is, the shape of the interaction of light with visual media, will be discussed at the end of the paper.

This paper explore the possibility of a critical philosophy of the cultural techniques developed by the image, stated in the work of Austrian Thomas Macho. The fundamental power of images lies in their ability to shape the future. The critical political value of the philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology are renewed, through this interpretation of the power of the image, in the context of cultural processes that give rise to a dispute for the future which decisively affects the transforming capacity of our societies.

En este artículo se investiga la posibilidad de una filosofía crítica de las técnicas culturales que se desarrollan con la imagen, en el trabajo del austriaco Thomas Macho. El poder fundamental de las imágenes se encuentra en su capacidad de modelar el futuro. La filosofía de la cultura y la antropología filosófica se renuevan, en su valor crítico político, por medio de la interpretación de esta potencia de la imagen, de cara a los procesos culturales por los que se establece una disputa del futuro que afecta decisivamente la capacidad transformadora y de transformación de nuestras sociedades.

To date, Czech-born Brazilian scholar Vilem Flusser’s arguments on technical image won its popularity worldwide and become one of major theoretical resources in discussing from photography to computer images. According to Flusser, unlike traditional image, the technical image generated by apparatus through certain programs. Although this Post-humanism idea seems rather convincing and prospective, its universality will be suspected for it is based on Flusser’s European experiences.
This research based on several cases on China’s visual experiences on technical images. Recently data visualization has been introduced into Chinas as Western media’s resolution for remedy against challenges from new media and widely accepted on Chinese mass media. As typical technical image generated through program from apparatus, Chinese data visualization apparently lack of aesthetic expression of non-western visual experiences. In another case, China is the leading player of the civic usage of drone and unmanned aerial photo, however the visual imagination of “eyes of the god” has been totally applied and promoted. Theoretically, the apparatus and programs exist in certain social and cultural conditions and should be cultural techniques with diversities. Any the cases in China shows, the apparatus and programs interweaved in complicated power structures need critical reflection.

Keywords: Flusser, Technical Image, Cultural Technique, Data Visualization, Drone photography

Optical media were instrumental in transforming the conception of facts, objectivity, and the »real.« This paper considers their role in structuring understandings of counterfactuals and states that could not be real. By returning to Ernst Mach’s photographic ballistics experiments, writing on thought experiments (a term he coined), and his dispute with Max Planck about the nature of the Weltbild, the article shows that, despite his legacy as a positivist, Mach’s epistemology of mechanical images opened a legitimate space of indeterminacy, contingency, and counterfactuality.

An essay commissioned for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt's Technosphere Magazine and its special issue "Substance."

This essay presents some thinking on the nature of substances, informed by both the Occidental traditions and those found in Chinese philosophical history.

Special attention is paid to the historical development of the medical definition of addiction in the nineteenth century.

Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, “Introduction: The Philosophy of Technology,” Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: New Perspectives on the Evolutionary History of Culture, by Ernst Kapp, Trans. Lauren K. Wolf. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Posthumanities Series, volume 47, 2018, ix-xliii.

Is hearing an eternally ‘archaic sense’, which ‘has not kept pace with technological progress’? (Adorno-Eisler, 1994; p. 20). Against Adorno’s well known statement, notions such as “hearing cultures” or “auditory cultures” have been surfacing the international debate in Media Studies during the last fifteen years, hindering what is still perceived to be a too visually-oriented historiical account of modernity. Given Michelle Hilmes’ definition of Sound Culture Studies as an academic field concerned ‘less with the sound in itself […] than of the cultural contexts out of which sound media emerged and which they in turn work to create’ (Hilmes, 2005: p. 249) one may be surprised to find out that someone already made similar claims eighty years before. In 1924 the first issue of the short-lived italian magazine Il Suono welcomed “the awakening of researches and of practical and scientific applications around aural phenomena”, hoping that “they will soon give way to the formation of a valuable public culture”. The journal hosted ethnographers’ and acousticians’ essays as well as repeated adresses for a proper musical education and technical guides on “how to build your own radio-set”. Starting from this criss-crossing of intellectual interests and technical practices, my paper will investigate how the transition of phonography from being a tinkering medium to its full establishment as a mass medium may be related to the shaping of a broader, interdisciplinary hearing culture. On the one hand, I will retrace how the Edison’s “talking machine” was increasingly invested with a cultural significance; on the other hand, I will outline some of its practical applications as an ethnographic or educational tool (see Gabriel, 1934), to demonstrate that the introduction of the phonograph contributed in re-structuring listening as an “operational acivity” for scientific and analytical inquiry. The final aim of the paper is to discuss hearing as a culturally and technologically mediated sense in respect to a given socio historical context and the way in which handling with the material aspects of phonography fostered the development of a larger set of cultural techniques as “operative processes that enable work with things and symbols” (Krämer-Bredekamp, 2013: p. 27).