Kittler rises to Lev Manovich’s challenge: “if we are to focus on software itself […] it helps to practice what one writes about” (Manovich 2008: 8). Kittler not only knows about software, he has taught it and advocates programming as a practice (Kittler 1995, 2008). What is perhaps interesting is how he approaches software less …
Category Archives: objects
Kittler: discourse on discourse channel conditions and Pink Floyd
Geoffrey Winthrop Young characterises Kittler’s later work as a shift to dealing with “technological” as opposed to a “communication” medium. “Writing operates by way of a symbolic grid which requires that all ‘data pass through the bottleneck of the signifier’ 9Kittler 1999: 4), whereas phono-, photo- and cinematographic analog media process physical effects of the …
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Kittler: early, late but always media
For Friedrich Kittler too, the “subject’ is a core concern. This is obviously apparent in Discourse Networks, 1800-1900 (1990) where he draws connections between pedagogical techniques and the mergence of the modern subject through a merger between Foucauldian archaeology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For early Kittler biopower was at the heart of the discourse networks he …
Friedberg: metaphor and materiality
For Anne Friedberg, the frame is more than a metaphor. Although she starts The Virtual Window: From Alberti To Microsoft with “Alberti’s window metaphor” (2006: 12), and then goes on to discuss Windows and “the window”, she is looking to do more than simply show how Microsoft’s engineers and marketing teams used the metaphor to position …
Paper proposal… in process: photography and ontology
This paper seeks to approach the philosophical questions around digital photography through the lens of ‘speculative realism’. Taking Graham Harman’s reading of Bruno Latour’s Irreductions as a starting point and developments characterised as the “speculative turn” in continental philosophy as a framework, I seek to account for the enfolded position of the digital image and …
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James Burke’s Connections and media archaeology
In the 1970s James Burke hosted a TV series, Connections where the audience was taken on a journey from one technological object to another (Burke 1978). The programme started with Burke presenting an unlikely partnership: the manorial system and the carburettor for instance. What could be the connection, the audience was asked and then the …
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