Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology

Description

Making Media Theory is about the study, practice, and hands-on design of media theory. It looks at experimental research methods and engages in media analysis, inviting readers to respond to and shape the materiality of media while carefully considering the implications of living in a technoculture. The author walks readers through the creation of digital objects to think with, where critical design practices serve as tools for exploring social and philosophical issues related to technological being and becoming.

Marcel O'Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses in digital design and the philosophy of technology, at the University of Waterloo, Canada. O'Gorman has published widely about the impacts of technology on society, including his most recent book Necromedia (2015) and articles in Slate, The Atlantic, and The Globe and Mail. He is also a digital artist with an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.

O'Gorman's Making Media Theory provides a hands-on guide to making objects without screens that serve as vehicles for media theory. In celebrating "broken tools and misfit toys," he curates a series of creative exercises developed at the Critical Media Lab while also unfolding a larger philosophical meditation that challenges technoscientific false consciousness. This wise and whimsical how-to manual for understanding our current hyper-mediated state is essential reading for asserting the value of the arts and humanities and the pleasures of what Jack Halberstam has called "low theory." With tales of tofu robots, sentient rabbits, wobbly furniture, electrified play-dough, high-tech hot dog eating, and a disembodied pink tentacle wielding a Swiss army knife, O'Gorman invites us to think through and with a collection of weird and misshapen media objects. * Elizabeth Losh, Professor of New Media Ecologies, College of William & Mary, USA * Marcel O'Gorman's splendid book features rabbits, rabbit holes, 3D prints and prosthetic limbs, conductive play dough, and soil sensors; it features philosophy and thinkering, matters and mattering, a good dose of critical crapentry , and a labful of insightful media theory. That teaser list is just one way of saying: this book is a must-read that I recommend to use as an operating manual. * Jussi Parikka, Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics, University of Southampton, UK and FAMU, Czech Republic *