Technologos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology & the Computational Machine

Description

Wolfgang Ernst's new work, Technologos in Being, in its explicit media-scientific approach, aligns with the politics of the thinking media series to publish innovative works that advance media studies towards the 'new sciences.' Ernst's invites readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies: the conviction that an extended understanding of "medium" needs to include a concept of materiality that focuses on "non- human" agencies as well. The book grounds media analysis radically in the technological apparatuses, relays, transistors, hard- and software, to precisely locate the scenes, operations and frictions where reasoning logos and 'informable' matter interfere.

Wolfgang Ernst is Full Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of The Delayed Present (2017), Digital Memory and the Archive (2012), and Chronopoetics (2016).

Wolfgang Ernst offers a contrarian vision for media studies that circumvents two of the major streams of the field over the past decades: the ecocritical expansion of the media concept and the politically engaged cultural studies approach that asks about what affordances media yield to people. Instead he focuses on the material logics and artifacts by which thought is rendered concrete and hardware is rendered intelligent. He brings a vast technical knowledge of different kinds of technical machines and their context in the history of technology and their basis in mathematics. His approach is bracingly hardcore as opposed to sentimental. Technologos in Being offers a distinct voice in a crowded landscape and will help all of us figure out how better to live with the so-called smart machines that are our devices-and ourselves. * John Durham Peters, Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies, Yale University, USA *