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Featuring 28 leading international media scholars,
Technics rethinks technology for the contemporary digital era, with cutting-edge theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions. The volume's contributors explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and Sylvia Wynter in conjunction with urgent questions concerning algorithmic media, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. An expansive collection of writings on media technologies in the digital age,
Technics is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media studies, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of technology.
List of contents
Editorial, Acknowledgements, PART I Questions Concerning Technics, 1. Technics: An Introduction - Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever, 2. Ten Statements on Technics - André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christophe Plantin, PART II Philosophies of Technology, 3. Machine Aesthetics: Animation through Technology, Animation of Technology - Gertrud Koch, 4. New Stars Were Rising in the Sky: On Benjamin's Concept of Cosmic Experience and Technology Around 1930 - Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, 5. Instructions for Use: Thinking Body, Machine, and Technicity with Simondon - Benoît Turquety, 6. Knowing, Studying, Writing: A Conversation on History, Practice, and Other Doings with Technics - Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Bernhard Siegert, PART III Theories of Media, 7. Protective Media - Francesco Casetti, 8. Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media - Yijun Sun and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, 9. Beyond Access: Transforming Ableist Techno-Worlds - Neta Alexander and Jonathan Sterne, PART IV Archaeologies of Media, 10. Coming to Terms with the Smart Phone - Wanda Strauven, 11. The Afterlife of an Optical Device, or Making the Lantern Kosher - Doron Galili, PART V Filmic Techniques, 12. Theories of the Frame and Framing in Cinema: A Genealogy - Ariel Rogers, 13. Split Screens: A Discussion with Catherine Grant, Malte Hagener, and Katharina Loew - Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever, 14. Specks of Time: Digital Editing and Verse Jumping in
Everything Everywhere All at Once - Kartik Nair, PART VI Digital Humanities, 15. Streams, Portals, and Data Flows: Digital Infrastructures of Film Studies - Malte Hagener, 16. Six Memos for the New Millennium: A Dialogue with Andreas Fickers on Epistemic Virtues in the Digital Humanities - Annie van den Oever.
About the author
Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of
Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism and coeditor of
The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933 and
Unwatchable. Annie van den Oever is a Professor of Film at the University of Groningen and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg (since March 2024). Recent books:
Doing Experimental Media Archaeology. Theory(De Gruyter, 2022, with Andreas Fickers); and
Visual Media, Distortions, and the Grotesque as a Dominant Format Today (AUP 2024, forthcoming).
