UPDATE: Please note that due to the limited space available at the venue, registration is now closed for this event.
About the Journal
Media Theory is an independent, online and open access journal of peer-reviewed, theoretical interventions into all aspects of media and communications. Resolutely international and interdisciplinary in scope, the editors encourage submissions that critically engage with the theoretical frameworks and concepts that tend to be taken for granted in national or disciplinary perspectives.
Although the journal privileges an emphasis on theory, the editors are not only concerned with theory for theory’s sake. Rather, we are interested in how theoretically-informed and -engaged interventions can contribute to the interpretation of empirical research and critique, as well as to the deprovincialization of theoretical debate – helping us understand, rather than dismiss or describe, objects of critique, and making us reconsider the validity, efficacy and legitimacy of our own particular methodological approaches.
With that in mind, we are keen to stretch the definition of ‘media’, and to receive articles that critically debate the necessity of an emphasis on ‘theory’, or which prefer to emphasise ‘theories’ or ‘philosophy’ instead. As an open access journal, we would also like to provide a forum for debates on open access, peer-review and the future of academic publishing.
Publisher & Partners
Media Theory is owned by the Media Theory Association, a nonprofit organization registered in France. It is published in Canada by Trent University Library & Archives. The Association is made up of the members of the editorial board of the Journal (currently 37 members). Members meet at least once a year in a General Assembly for the Association and Editorial Board meeting for the Journal. The Association elects the Council from among its members. The Council is made up of the two editors-in-chief of the Journal, who also perform the roles of president, secretary and treasurer of the Association, and who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the Journal. Currently, Joshua Synenko (Trent University, Canada) is treasurer of the Association, and Simon Dawes (UVSQ-Paris Saclay, France) is secretary and president of the Association.
Thank you for generous support:
Center for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto
Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, Trent University
Centre d’histore cullturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Universite Paris-Sarclay (UVSQ)
Canadian Communication Association
About the Conference
“Media theory seems eclipsed by the ubiquity of its objects” (Rossiter, 2017). This observation from the inaugural issue of our journal is no less relevant today. While Ned Rossiter’s focus was on the prevalence of fake news and on paranoia as a methodological tool, the installation of media forms in all aspects of life continues to present acute practical, cultural, affective, and epistemological challenges—perhaps more than ever. Automation, algorithmic governance, and ecological crises together with accelerationist billionaires and the declining influence of activist networks are all intensified by the unraveling of geopolitical order and resurgence of fascism worldwide. This reality presents significant risks and yet has become a commonplace feature of our daily existence.
The Media Theory journal was launched in 2017 to address these mounting challenges by way of deprovincializing the field of inquiry: to disentangle media theory from a predictable constellation of industries, disciplines, traditions, and regions, and equally to question what it means to theorize in a context where, as M. Beatrice Fazi (2017) writes, “high-speed computational operations are now driving both invention and discovery.” In addressing these critical needs, the journal was inspired by a further, and admittedly more speculative aim to move academic publishing towards radical alternatives and experimentation, to push the boundaries of what a journal can be, and ultimately, “to develop a transnational and transdisciplinary forum of debate on media theory and academic publishing” (Dawes, 2017).
Ahead of the journal’s tenth anniversary, we invite proposals for papers for the inaugural conference of the Media Theory Association, held on Friday November 7th and Saturday November 8th, 2025, at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.
Contributions in any aspect of media theory are encouraged, including the following:
– Rethinking definitions of ‘media’, ‘communication’ and ‘communications’;
– Rethinking distinctions between ‘theory’, ‘theories’ and ‘philosophy’;
– Transcending disciplinary boundaries and deprovincializing theoretical debate;
– Readdressing neglected theorists and proposing alternative histories of media theory;
– Critiquing blindspots in dominant approaches and critically engaging with alternative or marginalized perspectives;
– Debating openness, independence, open access, peer-review and the role of an academic journal.
About the Venue
39A Queen’s Park Cres E, Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
The Centre for Culture and Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the ways contemporary media shape contemporary forms of experience and our prospects for living together and relating to one another in an interconnected world. In this project, the Centre draws inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy. In his words, “The object of the Centre is to pursue by a wide variety of approaches an investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.” The Centre’s pursuit of this investigation is dedicated not only to contemporary media and its effects, but also to the contemporary critical approaches necessary for understanding our media: feminist, queer, decolonial, and antiracist.
Because humanistic media studies gets on in conversation with artists and their work, the Centre will not only pursue humanistic inquiry into contemporary media, but will also foster aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry. McLuhan taught that “media alter our sense ratios.” He also wrote that it is artists who are able to grasp such changes in experience, to bring news of such changes, and to make those changes matters of common concern. Taking this charge seriously, the Centre will support the production of and conversation about contemporary media art. It will also support the study of a wide variety of aesthetic media—fine art, literature, cinema, music, and so on—for their lessons in reckoning with contemporary media. It will, finally, support the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, promoting inquiry into the ways technological media shape contemporary experience, by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics.
The Centre offers both a setting and an institutional framework for this inquiry, providing space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA.
Schedule
| Friday, November 7, 2025 9:45-10:00: Welcome (Scott Richmond, Simon Dawes, Joshua Synenko) 10:00-11:00: Keynote: Renzi 11:00-12:30: Panel 1 12:30-1:30: Lunch 1:30-3:00: Panel 2 3:00-4:30: Panel 3 4:30-4:45: Break 4:45-6:15: Panel 4 6:45: Dinner | Saturday, November 8, 2025 8:30-9:00: Coffee 9:00-10:30: Panel 5 10:30-12:00: Panel 6 12:00-1:00: Lunch 1:00-3:00: Panel 7 3:00-3:30: Break 3:30-5:00: Panel 8 5:00-6:00: Keynote: Denson 6:00: Closing Remarks: Shields |
Coffee and snacks will be provided throughout the day in an adjacent room. Breaks have been scheduled, but conference goers are welcome to visit the breakroom at any time.
Lunches will be provided onsite each day.
Dinner on Friday is not provided by registration fees. Let us know if you’d like to join for dinner and we will make a reservation.
Presenters are asked to please keep their talks to no longer than 15 minutes to ensure that we keep to the schedule.
Keynotes
From Sensing to Sensemaking: Data’s Ontologies of Land and Life
Alessandra Renzi (Concordia)
This talk proposes a lens for theorizing media objects through their relations in physical space. Beyond algorithmic decision-making, logistical systems, sensing for resource extraction, and the urban utopias of digital twins, land and the environment are not mere backdrops for quantitative representation. Instead, their datafication positions them at the very center of sense-making, transforming them into crucial sites of technopolitical struggle. I shift the focus from data as a purely technical object to the processes of quantification, sensing and visualization that convert reality into data—and data back into reality. Meaning emerges relationally, not from discrete linguistic units but through assemblages that link data, things, and perception, as good old Deleuze would say. The signification that mediates the relation between land and what inhabits it is precarious yet continuously stabilized by practices that anchor the ontological status of data in knowledge, perception, and institutions. As a locus of mediation, data is not simply technical infrastructure. Its materiality also carries the potential for collective individuation, grounding processes of sense-making within social and environmental relations.
Alessandra Renzi is Associate Professor of Communications, Concordia University. Dr. Renzi’s interdisciplinary work explores the linkages and relays between media, art and civic engagement through community-led research, ethnographic studies and media projects. She has studied pirate television networks in Italy, the surveillance of social movements in Canada after 9-11 and housing and data justice in Indonesia and Canada. Her current research investigates how society’s increasing reliance on platforms, algorithms and AI is changing urban landscapes and community organizing alike. She is the PI of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant titled “On the Margins of the Platform Economy: Community-led Responses to Technical Gentrification,” with focus on Montreal’s Parc Extension neighbourhood.
AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity
Shane Denson (Stanford)
Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence often frame the technology in terms of “existential risk.” Yet such framings rarely pause to consider what existential might mean in the existentialist sense. In this talk I return to Heidegger’s account of the “worldhood of the world” and Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” to argue that the risk posed by AI is not confined to catastrophic scenarios of planetary survival, but lies more immediately in the reconfiguration of subjectivity itself. AI systems bypass conscious perception, modulating aesthesis—the sensory, affective, and preconscious conditions of experience—and in doing so recalibrate the orientations that make ethical deliberation possible in the first place.
Seen from this angle, the hazard of AI is not external to us but infrastructural, shaping our movements, postures, and affective attunements. At the same time, this hazard can be taken up as an opportunity: artworks that use machine learning to stage glitches, detours, or dissonances do not merely represent technological change but provide laboratories for inhabiting it, exposing how bodies and worlds are being rewritten. If AI marks an existentialist risk, it also opens an occasion to engage aesthetically with the reorganization of perception and orientation, and to confront the stakes of ethics where they begin—in the aesthetic, in the felt conditions of living and acting in a changing world.
Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives(Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016). See shanedenson.com for more information.
Panel 1: Mediations
Friday, November 7, 11:00am-12:30pm
Chair: Simon Dawes
| Ira Wagman and Liam Cole Young | Middles the Heuristic Mode in Media Theory |
| Piotr M Szpunar | Mediation and Sattelzeit |
| Ezra J Teboul | If Everything Is a Filter, Then Nothing Is: A Material and Discursive History of Signal Selection |
| Scott Wark | Media’s ends: On the necessity of understanding media in/as circulation |
1.1 Middles the Heuristic Mode in Media Theory
John Durham Peters recently reflected on the widespread expansion of the medium concept. We are in a moment, he suggests, in which communication theorists – himself included –consider things as diverse as clouds, neurons, and power grids as mediums. Such work, he argues, shares the premise that “[b]eing a medium is not a permanent state. It is being in the middle”.
Our contribution picks up Peters’ assertion to think productively about media by “reviving a middle voice, a grammatical in-between that is neither passive nor active, but almost reflexive”. We use the location of Media Theory’s inaugural conference, Marshall McLuhan’s Coach House in Toronto, Canada, as an invitation to think in middles about media-theoretical works operating in the Canadian context and as a heuristic to situate media in Canadian life.
Senses of middle-ness have been a prominent but underemphasized feature of foundational work and thinking that helped establish media theory as a viable scholarly endeavour in Canada and abroad. Major theorists in this tradition use a language of balance and of the in-between. Balance is central to, for instance, Harold Innis’s theorizations of space- and time-biased media, but beyond Innis, we see balance in Northrop Frye’s assessment of the function of criticism and in George Grant’s existentialist theories of technology. Such thinkers, Robert Babe argues, “recommended striving for a balance between the poles of the dialectic”. We further probe this theme to theorize “in a middle voice” about media in Canada in three ways:
- The first, middling, emphasizes notions of humility and what Paula Bielski terms the “good enoughness” that we argue characterizes much of Canada’s media landscape. Here we draw attention to certain objects, sites, and techniques in and by which media and tech work unfolds in, for instance, strip malls and industrial sectors of cities, and on “middling” projects like enterprise software development and maintenance. Such places and activities stand in contrast to conventional narratives that deploy language of “disruption” or “innovation” to describe media and tech development.
- The second, mediating, appreciates notions of position and place by taking a wider view of the importance of processing information, mediating conflicts, and sitting in-between. Activities such as consensus-building, consultation, and peacekeeping invite us to consider the theoretical stakes of these forms of mediation, offer analogues to similar activities present in Canadian intellectual traditions, but draw us away from notions of margins and borders that have been so prominent within our field.
- The third, muddling, focuses on the ethical stakes of media in the everyday life of Canadians and the pragmatic uses to which different kinds of media are put into the service of getting things done.
Taken together our effort advocates for a different register for thinking about Canadian media theory and institutions as “Mid”; it considers the place of mediating as a feature of Canadian public and political culture, and it appreciates how much of Canadian life involves forms of muddling through, individually and collectively.
Ira Wagman is an Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Carleton University. He researches, teaches, and writes in the field of media theory, media industry and policy studies, and media ethics. His current research explores the historical intersection between the arrival of television, transformations in the Catholic Church, and the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec.
Liam Cole Young is an Associate Professor & Program Head of Communication & Media Studies and Co-Director of the School of Journalism & Communication at Carleton University. He writes and teaches about media theory, infrastructure studies, and histories of data and information. He is the author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (AUP, 2017) and co-editor of “Into the Air” (Media Theory, 2021).
1.2: Mediation and Sattelzeit
Media theory is intricately intertwined with media history. There is a tradition within the field to divide that history into distinct periods, based on changes in materiality, power, operability, speed, sense, discourse, and so on (e.g., Couldry and Hepp, 2016; Galloway, 2004; Kittler, 1990; McLuhan, 1994; Mumford, 1932; Pettitt, 2011). Out of this tradition a curious pattern is emerging. In order to distinguish today’s new media from its predecessor (i.e., mass media), new media is likened to “ancient” (Peters, 2015) or pre-Gutenberg media (Pettitt, 2011). It is a comparison that ignores the unprecedented infrastructural heft, resource hunger, and computational complexity of digital media, highlighting the limits of periodization as a theoretical tool.
In this paper, I suggest an alternate route for media theory’s tie to history by way of a link to theories of history. This is productive not because the latter is also replete with practices of periodization, most notably François Hartog’s (2015) “regimes of historicity” whose diagnosis of presentism (a historical moment without a/the future) is echoed in media theory (Chun, 2016; Steigler, 2008), however much the details of the diagnoses differ. Rather, it is in the link between the concepts of mediation and Reinhart Koselleck’s (2004; 2018) sattelzeit.
Koselleck used the notion of sattelzeit or saddle time/period initially to describe a particular extended moment of historical transition (1750-1850). Yet, others have identified it as a useful conceptual theoretical tool, referring to the experience of being between two mountain ranges, looking both backward and forward in time (Angster, 2024). Here, the focus shifts from media as intermediaries across contemporaneous space or as stable, defined environments. Rather, in line with notions of radical mediation, “understood not as standing between preformed subjects, objects, actants, or entities but as the process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world” (Grusin, 2015: 129), sattelzeit asks not how media not only define a particular moment, but how they structure socio-political transitions, their pasts and their promises. The power of media here lies in how they operate as a hinge between (imaginary) epochs rather than simply being epoch defining. This operation is evident in the current debate and hype over AI, technology that more than anything signals a transition to a not yet defined future spoken in prophecies and probabilities. In fact, I argue that it is this feature of media that allows for the clearer understanding of the political efficacy of today’s wild visions of both doom and utopia.
The notion of sattelzeit provides productive avenues for thinking through politics, history, and media. How do media generate affects, experience, and intimations of being in between two epochs? How are media discursively positioned as bringing society into a new space not yet defined? How does centering the political function of media not on a clearly defined mountain top, but on the blurry gazes toward those peaks from the saddle open up understandings and contests to emergent repressive political formations?
Piotr M. Szpunar is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research centers on media, memory, and conflict. His current monograph (under contract with NYU Press) examines mediated futures, with a particular focus on temporality, space, and how futures are mobilized in altering public understandings of the past. His work appears in journals across disciplines including Memory Studies, Media Theory, Communication Theory, Security Dialogue, and Current Opinions in Psychology. He is the author of Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror (NYU Press, 2018).
Angster Julia (2024) ‘Sattelzeit’: the invention of ‘premodern history’ in the 1970s. History of European Ideas 51(2): 337-352.
Chun Wendy H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge University Press.
Couldry Nick & Hepp Andreas (2016) The Mediated Construction of Reality. Polity. Galloway Alexander (2004) Protocol: How Control Works After Decentralization. Cambridge University Press.
Grusin Richard (2015) Radical mediation. Critical Inquiry 42(1): 124-148.
Hartog François (2015) Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Columbia University Press.
Jordheim Helge (2012) Against periodization: Koselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities. History and Theory 51(2): 151-171.
Kittler Friedrich (1990) Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford University Press. Koselleck Reinhart (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Columbia University Press.
Koselleck Reinhart (2018) Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories Stanford University Press. McLuhan
Marshall (1994) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press.
Mumford Lewis (1934) Technics and Civilization. University of Chicago Press.
Peters John Durham (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press.
Pettitt Thomas (2011) Containment and articulation: Media, cultural production, and the perception of the material world. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Pettitt.pdf.
Stiegler, Bernard (2008) Time and Technics, 2: Disorientation. Stanford University Press.
1.3 If Everything Is a Filter, Then Nothing Is: A Material and Discursive History of Signal Selection
Recent work has highlighted the importance of the concept and object of the filter as a master metaphor in media studies and beyond (Mills 2022, Fuller 2022). In this presentation, I offer a material and discursive history of frequency-dependent signal processing from lightning strikes to machine learning which believe will clarify how this metaphor actually is grounded in literal process and effect similarities across multiple socio-cultural contexts and disciplines. By tracing the polyvalence of filtering as an “organizing concept” (Russell 2012) in electrical engineering (where it was accidentally discovered and originally called “loading” then “selection”), cybernetics, and digital signal processing, I document its rise to analytical power to the point where it effectively is coterminous with its better known contemporary, the black box (Rabiner et al. 1972). I elaborate on how buzzword frenzy has obscured the filter as the low-level building block of the family of technical objects we now call neural networks in both scientific and journalistic contexts. I conclude with examples of how clear, low-level understandings of statistical inference models clarify the interpretative work done not only in explicit discussions of historical and contemporary filtering, like Blom and Fuller’s 2024 essay, but also in critical understandings of how exactly contemporary AI terminology obscures actually existing digital signal processing processes generally.
Ezra J. Teboul is a postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology.
Blom, Ina, and Matthew Fuller. 2024. “A Filter Theory of Photography.” Media Theory 8 (1): 107–32. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v8i1.1070.
Butterworth, S. 1930. “On The Theory of Filter Amplifiers.” The Wireless Engineer 7 (6): 536–41.
Campbell, George A. 1901. “On Loaded Lines.” Doctoral Thesis. Cambridge, Massacusetts: Harvard University.
———. 1903. “On Loaded Lines in Telephonic Transmission.” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 5 (27): 313–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14786440309462928.
———. 1917. Electric wave-filter. United States US1227113A, filed July 15, 1915, and issued May 22, 1917. https://patents.google.com/patent/US1227113A/en?inventor=george+a+campbell&oq=george+a+campbell.
———. 1922. “Physical Theory of the Electric Wave-Filter.” The Bell System Technical Journal 1 (2): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1922.tb00386.x.
Carson, John R., and Otto J. Zobel. 1923. “Transient Oscillations in Electric Wave-Filters.” The Bell System Technical Journal 2 (3): 1–52.
Fuller, Matthew, presenter. 2022. A Society of the Filter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1yMn5qukdI.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2022. “Golden Age of Analog.” Critical Inquiry 48 (2): 211–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/717324.
McCulloch, Warren S., and Walter Pitts. 1943. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (4): 115–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478259.
Mills, Mara. 2022. “Everything Is a Filter: George Campbell and the Development of the Electrical Filter in the Bell System (1903-1915).” CCRMA – Stanford University, April 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ri9vM5n2iI.
Pauli, Rainer. 2002. “The Scientific Work of Wilhelm Cauer and Its Key Position at the Transition from Electrical Telegraph Techniques to Linear Systems Theory.” Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research EMCSR Cybernetics and Systems, 2 (May):934–39.
Rabiner, L., J. Cooley, H. Helms, L. Jackson, J. Kaiser, C. Rader, R. Schafer, K. Steiglitz, and C. Weinstein. 1972. “Terminology in Digital Signal Processing.” IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics 20 (5): 322–37. https://doi.org/10.1109/TAU.1972.1162405.
Rader, Charles. 2006. “The Rise and Fall of Recursive Digital Filters.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 23 (6): 46–49. https://doi.org/10.1109/SP-M.2006.248711.
Rosenblatt, Frank. 1958. “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain.” Psychological Review 65 (6): 386.
Steinmetz, Charles Proteus. 1893. “Complex Quantities and Their Use in Electrical Engineering.” In Proceedings of the International Electrical Congress, 33–74. Chicago: AIEE.
Zobel, Otto J. 1923. “Theory and Design of Uniform and Composite Electric Wave-Filters.” The Bell System Technical Journal 2 (1): 1–46. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1923.tb00001.x.
1.4 Media’s ends: On the necessity of understanding media in/as circulation
Online media are literally endless. What we call the web has been designed, through a series of choices informed by the capacity to keep users engaged, around the promise of endless novelty: each time your feed is refreshed, you’ll find new content to keep you captivated (Seaver, REF). While we might be able to provide an answer to the question, what are these media for?, it’s much harder to specify what these media are. They are “content,” which is to say, that which fills the interfacial containers engineered by our digital devices; at the same time, their interchangeability – which preexists, but has been exacerbated by, Generative Artificial Intelligence systems – renders the content of these contents secondary to their capacity to continue to keep us engaged. Though the web continuously generates new forms, genres, and styles of mediatic production, they, too, are always only a few mutations away from being consigned to the oblivion of yesterday’s viral content.
If online media have no ends beyond fulfilling the need for new content, how ought they to be theorised? In this paper, I argue that content’s formal contentlessness shifts the frame through which online media ought to be conceptualised. Proposing that we understand “content” as what I call an empty form, I argue that such media must be theorised in and through their circulation – and that to do so, we must develop a concept of circulation that is adequate to media.
Although frequently invoked in media studies and cognate fields, this paper’s contention is that circulation remains under-theorised as a concept of media. Too often, it’s conceived of as a secondary feature of what media are, what happens when they are transmitted. But the capacity to produce and circulate media in huge quantities online has created the conditions for the emergence of media that can only exist in and as they are circulated. Some internet-native media – internet memes, spam, and clickbait, for instance – could not exist if not for a technical milieu in which constant circulation is media’s basic state. Though their content might continue to change, such media can nevertheless be recognised as particular forms and in their particular iterations and/or mutations precisely because they continue to circulate. Using these examples, this paper argues that foregrounding circulation is essential for understanding digital media today. To frame its propositions, it draws on James W. Carey’s argument that media once fused “transmission” and “transport” (1983) and combines this notion with an understanding of media derived from Gilbert Simondon’s (2017) and Yuk Hui’s (2016) conceptions of “technical objects” to place circulation at the core of what digital media are and how digital culture operates.
It’s here, this paper concludes, that we find a potential theoretical fulcrum for understanding what’s novel about media produced using Generative AI. What’s been called ‘AI slop’ can be understood as media content further stripped of its content. With its proliferation, we may be witnessing the end of Web 2.0 and the emergence of something else entirely: a milieu in which media are unmoored from a particular form or instance and, in their reduction to personalised responses to specific prompts, serve only as iterations of a given model’s dataset: media ending, perhaps, in pure circulation for its own sake.
Scott Wark is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research combines an interest in theoretical approaches to media and culture with analyses of digital cultural phenomena, media infrastructures, data processing, artificial intelligence, and techniques of racialisation. He is co-editor of Figure: Concept and Method (with Celia Lury and William Viney; Palgrave, 2022) and ‘Pharmacologies of Media,’ a special issue of Media Theory (w. Yiğit Soncul).
Carey, James W. “Technology and ideology: The case of the telegraph.” Prospects 8 (1983): 303-325.
Hui, Yuk. On the existence of digital objects. U of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Seaver, Nick. “Captivating algorithms: Recommender systems as traps.” Journal of material culture 24, no. 4 (2019): 421-436.
Simondon, Gilbert. On the mode of existence of technical objects. Trans. C. Malaspina and John Rogove. Univocal, 2017.
Striphas, Ted. “Algorithmic culture.” European journal of cultural studies 18, no. 4-5 (2015): 395-412.
Panel 2: Environments
Friday, November 7, 1:30pm-3:00pm
Chair: Hannah Dick
| Malcolm Sanger | Environmental Communication |
| John Shiga | A Brief History of Underwater Media Theory |
| Thomas Pringle | A Natural History of Media Theory |
| Tero Karppi | Towards a media cosmology |
2.1 Environmental Communication
Peters, in The Marvelous Clouds, writes, “The apple trees in bloom have nothing to say and everything to mean” (Peters 382). Swarbrick, in The Environmental Unconscious, claims the opposite: environments might speak but cannot mean (Swarbrick 260). Reading Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and her influential rendering of “talking trees,” my paper considers environmental communication as communicating with environments, communicating about environments, and – crucially here – environments themselves communicating. Responding to settler anxieties about the silent indifference of the environment and climate anxieties about the status of life and the human in the doomed Anthropocene, Simard’s trees offer repair via the dream of communication, simple and smooth. The transfer of carbon and nitrogen atoms between trees becomes “talking,” “caring,” and “mothering”—an environmental version of the conventional history of communication: what once referred to the movement, transfer, and exchange of people and materials becomes the study of the symbolic exchange of information and ideas (Sterne). As a result, soil and the mycorrhizal fungi within it command attention as the medium at hand, or in the mouth. Finding the Mother Tree – complete with accounts of Simard’s childhood appetite for eating dirt as a prelude to “hearing” the trees – surfaces issues prevalent in recent efforts to rethink communication environmentally: belonging to land, language and the environment as gift, confusion between Life and Nonlife amidst climate change’s disruptions, and elemental, material, and ontological continuities at geological scales (Kimmerer; Povinelli; Woods).
At the centre of these considerations is the relationship between matter and meaning in communication. Inquiring after the ubiquity of communication rather than the ubiquity of communication theory’s objects and considering Simard’s remarkably popular suggestion that communication (by trees and with trees) is the solution to environmental problems, I ask what it means to say the trees are talking, and what that does to more standard accounts of “environmental communication” aimed at convincing us of the necessity of responses to climate change (Cox; Gunster). Demonstrating an attention to language itself via a close reading of Simard’s stories about dirt returns me to communication theory’s fundamental lessons – it’s complicated and material – and underlines their constitutive necessity of relations across difference. I argue the simplicity of Simard’s communications, the desire for the “trees to save us,” and/or for us to be “like trees,” bring her work towards a monist environmentalism that erases the differences that make relations mediated by communication necessary and possible. This is an issue with a wider contemporary environmental philosophy and politics concerned with continuity across scales that communication and media studies and theory has a head start on: for communication to occur, there must be difference, and so two, or even three. By considering the wider mobilization of communication in contemporary environmental thought, communication theory might help us confront climate change as a problem of “matter out of phase” (Walker).
Malcolm Sanger is a PhD candidate at McGill University. His dissertation “Communicating with trees in Canada” considers the infrastructures, labours, histories, and futures of planting trees and the science, theory, presentation, and politics of talking trees as contemporary responses to climate change.
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1st McClelland & Stewart ed. Toronto, Ont.: M & S, 1996.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Cox, Robert. “Nature’s ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” Environmental Communication 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2007): 5–20.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota, 1987. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a- thousand-plateaus.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Bush_Garden&oldid=1167295098.
Gill, Charlotte. Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. 1 online resource vols. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2011.
Gunster, Shane. “Engaging Climate Communication.” In Journalism and Climate Crisis, by Robert
A. Hackett, Susan Forde, Shane Gunster, and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, 49–76, 1st ed. Routledge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315668734-3.
How Trees Talk to Each Other. TED, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Kohn,
Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée Sauvage.” Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. London: Penguin Random House, 2016.
Parks, Lisa. “Stuff You Can Kick: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures.” In Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Boston: The MIT Press, 2015.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/uchi052/98050308.html.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Paperback edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University press, 2016.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2018.
Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest.
London: Allen Lane, 2021.
Simard, Suzanne W., David A. Perry, Melanie D. Jones, David D. Myrold, Daniel M. Durall, and Randy
Molina. “Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field.” Nature 388, no. 6642 (August 1997): 579–82. https://doi.org/10.1038/41557.
Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Som, Tathagata, and Kit Dobson. “‘I Struggled with Anthropomorphisms’: On the Problem of Metaphors, Happiness, and Forests in Finding the Mother Tree.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, September 3, 2024, isae048. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isae048.
Sterne, Jonathan. “Transportation and Communication: Together as You’ve Always Wanted Them to Be.” In Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communication, Transportation, History, edited by Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson, 117–35. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
Swarbrick, Steven. The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Walker, Janet. “Afterword: Climate Change as Matter out of Phase.” In Saturation: An Elemental Politics, edited by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver, BC, Canada: David Suzuki Institute, 2016.
Woods, Derek. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 2014, no. 83 (November 1, 2014): 133–42. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2782327.
2.2 A Brief History of Underwater Media Theory
Eva Horn (2008) argues that contemporary media theory is no longer primarily concerned with identifying the essence of media. Instead, it has shifted toward what she calls an “anti-ontological approach” – one that focuses on how certain elements or assemblages come to function as media in specific contexts, times, and places. Critical, historical, and ecologically oriented work on media in oceanic environments, much of which has emerged from environmental media studies, has been a key site for developing this anti-ontological disposition toward media. For some scholars, this shift is partly motivated by the realization that much traditional media theory has been shaped by what Melody Jue (2020) calls the “terrestrial bias,” mistaking characteristics specific to land-based media (such as the relative fixity of inscriptions) for universal qualities of media. In contrast, engagement with media in oceanic and underwater milieus, which are defined by fluidity and errancy, calls for a different theoretical lens. The epistemic disruption produced by thinking about media in and with underwater environments can help challenge predominant notions of what a medium “is,” relativize terrestrial-centric conceptualizations of media, and open new ways of understanding media as dynamic processes of becoming and functioning.
In this paper, I offer a critical historical account of underwater media theory that engages with ideas about media in aquatic contexts that long predate the rise of environmental media studies. On one hand, my interest in underwater media is partly driven by a desire to imagine what an alternative to terrestrial-centric media theory might look like. On the other hand, many of the key figures in this history (scientists, oceanographers, military engineers, and whale researchers) approach underwater media with the goal of making them legible or useful through terrestrial media frameworks. Their work often reconfigures watery environments to fit established notions of media shaped by solid ground, visuality, and inscription. This paradox – the attempt to domesticate the oceanic through terrestrial media logics – is central to the story of underwater media theory.
This paper focuses on three key developments which attempted to explain how underwater media function and how they may be integrated into terrestrial media: (i) media-as- interface (between transmission in air and in water); (ii) media-as-maintenance (of human- nonhuman relations); and (iii) media-as-calibration (the ocean itself as a calculable and governable system). The paper offers a brief sketch of the development of these different and sometimes conflicting approaches to underwater media and retraces the institutional, technological and cultural contexts which shaped them. These approaches reveal that, while underwater media have the potential to challenge terrestrial assumptions of media theory, they have historically served as instruments in the ongoing project of sensing, managing, and remaking the ocean through the logics of technoscience and capital.
John Shiga is a Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto
Metropolitan University. He also serves at the Director of the Media & Design Innovation PhD program. His research engages with a range of topics including intellectual property, the history of audio media, musical memory, media and the environment, intellectual property, interspecies communication, ocean sound and Cold War military-science. His current research and creative projects focus on the politics of underwater sound in the context of the Cold War.
Anderman, N., and J. Shiga. “Deep-Sea Sound System: Scientific Listening, Ocean Heat, Colonial Power.” Journal of Environmental Media 5.1 (2024): 61–85.
Camprubí, Lino, and Alexandra Hui. “Testing the Underwater Ear: Hearing, Standardizing, and Classifying Marine Sounds from World War I to the Cold War.” In Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality. Edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, 301-325. New York, 2020.
Couling, Nancy. “Sensing Ocean Space.” In Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal
Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies. Edited by Nitin Bathla. Zurich, 151-169. Switzerland: Gta Verlag, 2024.
Fawcett, Leesa K., and Morgan Johnson. “Oceanic, Multispecies, Resilient Resistance: Whales, Noise Pollution, and Tiny House Warriors.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 9.3 (2022): 111–130.
Han, Lisa Yin. “Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation.” In Saturation: An Elemental Politics. Edited by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz, 223–242. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Horn, Eva. “Editor’s Introduction: ‘There Are No Media.’” Grey Room, no. 29 (Fall 2007): 7–
13. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Ritts, M., and M. Simpson. “Smart Oceans Governance: Reconfiguring Capitalist, Colonial, and Environmental Relations.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 48.2 (2023): 365–379.
Tollefson, H. “On Synchronicity: Green Shipping’s Logistical and Real-Time Media.” Journal of Environmental Media 5.1 (2024): 9–26.
Wang, Chi-Mao, and Ker-Hsuan Chien. “Mapping the Subaquatic Animals in the
Aquatocene: Offshore Wind Power, the Materialities of the Sea, and Animal Soundscapes.”
Political Geography 83 (2020): 102285.
2.3 A Natural History of Media Theory
Following Ursula Heise’s 2002 diagnosis of “The Metaphor of Environment in Media Theory,” scholars have questioned the historical and conceptual appeal of natural scientific language to describe media. Florian Sprenger terms this focus “epistemologies of surrounding.” Metahistorical examinations of environmental terms in media theory elucidate “ecosystem,” “climate,” “atmosphere,” “milieu,” “umwelt,” and more. Comparably, historical commentaries on media theoretical methods find origins in disciplines outside media studies. Yuriko Furuhata’s genealogy of “media ecology” begins with the urban sociology of human ecology, a formation indebted to data structured by racial hierarchies—which helps explain the version of universalism it presents. These examples, among others, demonstrate common interest in how media theories account for the technologically abetted environment that sustains human metabolism. Considering this reflexively, John Durham Peters analogizes the work of media historians to natural historians: “Environments, like media, are delicate systems of contingent conditions for the organisms that live in them. Environments select and reinforce traits that emerge from variation.” Because media function like environments—as technical surrounds— historical narration of media imports from ecology and biology. The natural selection of traits— media’s “species like role in the anthroposphere”—becomes a way to discern continuity (evolutionary success) from rupture (extinction). But what media theory accounts for this pattern of import?
Metahistorical commentary on why media theories draw descriptive terms and concepts from the natural sciences tends toward historical epistemology. Exemplary is Furuhata’s statement that “specific economic, political, and epistemic conditions contributed to this environmental understanding of media in the first place.” Underlying Furuhata’s critical approach are second-order mediations—capitalism, nationalism, the geopolitics of empire, social difference and violence—that synchronically bind media theory’s evaluation of technological surrounds to the uneven and heterogenous history of ecological ideas. Theorizations of media-as- environment have both histories and geographies.
My proposed presentation builds on Furuhata’s historicization of import by arguing for a general theory of exchange. I step back to identify points of convergence between environmental history and media theory that build inroads for the Marxian historiographical study of economic traffic between mediation and ecology. What happens to concepts of environment when they move from scientific disciplinary definitions to media theoretical abstractions and back? As case in point, I’ll focus on the concept of biodiversity, coined in 1980. A notable predecessor to this concept appeared in 1955 when Robert MacArthur used Claude Shannon’s index of entropy, or information, to estimate the number of interspecies relationships in an ecosystem, giving a method of measurement for community stability, and, avant la letter, setting off debates about how increased biodiversity made ecosystems more durable. From this lineage, biodiversity was first offered as economic, systemically enumerated for purpose of commodifying “genetic resources.” While media history’s focus on Gregory Bateson gives a clear narration of cybernetics in environmentalism, this emphasis has overshadowed how ecology learned from media theory. Viewing media theory from the history of ecology opens metahistorical questions about presentism, recursion, and the emergence of natural capitalism, which—like media theory—uses ecological concepts to describe environments as infrastructures of fixed capital.
Thomas Patrick Pringle is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle has held research fellowships with SSHRC, Leuphana University, and the SenseLab Montreal. His articles on environmental media appear in venues like Media-N, New Media and Society, and Environmental Communication, among others. Pringle serves on the editorial boards of Film History: An International Journal and Journal of Environmental Media.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, MIT University Press, 2011.
Jessica Dempsey. Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics, John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Yuriko Furuhata. Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control, Duke UP, 2022.
Yuriko Furuhata. “Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics,” Media Theory in Japan, Duke UP, 2017.
Bernard Geoghegan. “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): pp. 66–82.
Mark Hansen. “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, nos. 2–3, (2006): pp. 297-306. Donna
Haraway, “The High Cost of Information in Post-World War II Evolutionary Biology:
Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology of Communications Systems,” The Philosophical Forum XIII, nos. 2-3 (1981-2): 244-278.
Donna Haraway, “The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology,” Radical History Review 20 (1979): pp. 206-237.
Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Ursula Heise. “Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of Environment in Media Theory,”
Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): pp. 149-168.
Reinhold Martin. “On the Fence: Media, Ecology, Marx,” Critical Inquiry 49, No. 3 (2023): 359- 383.
Audra Mitchell. “Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5: pp. 23-42.
Gottfried Schnödl and Florian Sprenger. Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right- Wing Thought, Meson Press, 2022.
David Sepkoski, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene, University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Antonio Somaini. “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): pp. 6–41.
Florian Sprenger. “Experiments of Experimentation and Epistemologies of Surroundings,” Grey Room 75, (Spring 2019): pp. 6–35.
Florian Sprenger. “Surrounding and Surrounded: Toward a Conceptual History of Environment,” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 3 (2023): pp. 406-427.
John Durham Peters. “Infrastructuralism: Media as Traffic between Nature and Culture,” Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices, Brill, 2015.
E. O. Wilson. “The Current State of Biological Diversity,” Biodiversity, eds. E. O. Wilson and Frances M. Peter, National Academy Press, 1988.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “The Kultur of Cultural Techniques: Conceptual Inertia and the Parasitic Materialities of Ontologization,” Cultural Politics 10, no. 3 (2014): 376-388.
Derek Woods, “Accelerated Reading: Fossil Fuels, Infowhelm, and Archival Life,” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017.
2.4 Towards a media cosmology
Philosopher Alain Beaulieu (2016) observes that modern continental philosophy has largely drifted away from its engagement with cosmological thought— a tradition that is “as old as philosophy itself”. Film and media theorist Laura U. Marks (2024) cautions that “cosmology is a dated term, suggesting medieval notions of an orderly and bounded universe, often pictured as a series of concentric circles.” Nevertheless—or perhaps for that very reason—cosmology merits renewed contextualization within media theory. This proposed paper outlines three conceptual categories and associated theorizations of what media cosmology might entail. First, media cosmology investigates how various technologies shape our understanding of the universe. Second, it explores how our relationship with the universe is not only epistemological but also material—established, adjusted, and transformed through these technologies. Third, unlike many traditional cosmological frameworks, media cosmologies are inherently shaped by technological mediation, rendering them potentially partial, localized, and incomplete. These categories are developed in dialogue with A.N. Whitehead’s (1978) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology and are informed by my ongoing investigation into the development and utilization of the Solar System Internet.
Tero Karppi is Associate Professor of Critical Computation and Digital Media at ICCIT, University of Toronto. Karppi’s research has examined the questions of resistance against social media platforms, and he is currently working on a book on the Solar System Internet. Karppi is the author of Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (Minnesota 2018), one of the authors of Undoing Networks (Minnesota/Meson 2021), and one of the editors of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield 2021). His research has been published in journals such as Theory Culture & Society, New Media & Society, and Convergence.
Beaulieu, A. (2016). Introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s Cosmological Sensibility. Philosophy and Cosmology : The Journal of the International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology (ISPC), 16(16), 199–210.
Marks, L. U. (2024). The fold: From your body to the cosmos. Duke University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. (Corrected edition). The Free Press.
Panel 3: Corporealities
Friday, November 7, 3:00pm-4:30pm
Chair: Ashley Scarlett
| Daniel Arauz Nunez | Adolph Jonas and the Nervous System: Understanding of Early Media Studies Through the Hypersensitive Subject |
| Aleena Chia | Metabolic Speculation in Game Engine Culture |
| Nael Thomas | Inference and the stakes of sense |
| David Cecchetto and Katherine Behar | During Dopamine |
3.1 Adolph Jonas and the Nervous System: Understanding of Early Media Studies Through the Hypersensitive Subject
The foundational theorists of media studies have long been animated by questions of how media affects the body’s capacity to sense and feel (Malin, 2014). As part of a larger genealogy of numbness as a central concern in several academic and social research projects in the early to mid-twentieth century, this research paper aims to re-contextualize and critically analyze the ways that normative assumptions about the sensory capacities of the body. This paper is animated by an interest in rethinking numbness in early media studies, and re-examining Marshall McLuhan’s foundational concepts of the extension and prosthetic effects of media described in Understanding Media (2001). The idea is supported by the theory that the central nervous system self-amputates itself to protect itself from painful or harmful sensations received by organs within the body and that the nervous system’s extension via media technologies replicates this numbing, self-amputating process. Despite the popularity and canonical status of these ideas, the prosthesis theory has only recently been problematized and there is virtually no scholarship which engages with the primary source of this theory: the “theoretical medicine” of Adolphe (David) Jonas’ Irritation and Counterirritation: A Hypothesis about the Autoamputative Property of the Nervous System (1962). Jonas’ work aimed to provide a new, total theory of traumatic, infectious, and neoplastic disease, all centred around the supposed hierarchal relationship between the central nervous system and organs, which inform both speculative accounts of human evolution, the development of civilization, and diagnostics of various forms of neurodivergence. Despite Jonas’ work bearing a significant influence on McLuhan, there is a paucity of scholarly research on Jonas’ own life and works, including the several psychology texts that he published alongside his wife Doris Jonas, and, more vitally, the wider sociocultural context that has shaped their medical and psychological theories.
This paper first advocates for a critical re-visiting of Jonas’ significant yet poorly understood contribution to the field of media studies. This attention to Jonas’ work aims is inspired by disability media studies scholars such as Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne (2017), who identified the lack of scientific and physiological coherence to McLuhan’s prosthesis theory, and have highlighted the ableist, “narrative prosthesis” embedded in the Autoamputative hypothesis (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000). My critical reading of Jonas’ work is animated by Mills and Sterne’s call to re-think media theories held up by narrative prostheses, and to draw attention to the particular histories of neurodivergence that Jonas himself leans upon throughout the development of his thesis—that of the neurotic, “hypersensitive” person. This second interest in the paper focuses not in how the hypersensitive person is represented, but how the hypersensitive person through archival psychological case studies, experiments, interviews, and testimonies is used as the exemplary case of modernity’s technological transformation of the body’s sensory capacities. Indeed, this is one of the foundational modes of evidence that supports these early, albeit ableist and problematic, formulations of the nervous system’s interaction with technology and thus must be read as a crucial part of the history of media studies.
Daniel Arauz Nuñez is a PhD candidate at Western University’s Library and Information Science program. His interest focuses on the history of technologies of the built environment, and the ways that manufacturers, policy makers, and users make sense of how technologies shape our senses, particularly in healthcare contexts. Daniel, along with his supervisor Dr. Luke Stark and Benjamin Chin-Yee, is currently researching the ways that contemporary models for the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence may be informed by the principles of evidence-based medicine.
3.2 Metabolic Speculation in Game Engine Culture
Digital twins are data-integrated real-time simulations where game engine technology underpins the creation, operation, and coordination of physical assets, from buildings and vehicles to robots. Twinning operates within a dataist paradigm through “iconization of the calculated simulation results” (Hinterwaldner 2019), where a computational model provides a powerful organizing device (Gelernter 1993) for interpreting—and automating infrastructural and metabolic responses to—massive amounts of real-time data. The digital twin is not simply a proxy or the representational or logistical layer of data science—it is a different order of data visualization.
Even though twins are known as mirror worlds, they are logistical media not for correspondence, but commensuration. The digital twin concretizes contingencies within data science into an intuitive and responsive product that attempts to resolve different scales of analysis “from molecular and cellular to system and body,” which are made computationally tractable through “predictive physics-based models that can help with gaps in ‘big data’” (Willcox 2022). The twin marks a shift away from an algorithmic imagination that often “restricts the future to the past” by amplifying historical trends (Chun 2021). Instead, real-time physics cultivates a statistical consciousness that captures the past to pose all knowable and unknowable futures simultaneously—some more calculably probable or computationally costly than others—but all possible (May 2019). Real-time presupposes a multiverse of future scenarios, not to predict a definitive outcome, but to enable action despite unknowability. Twinning adapts Big Data’s “end of theory” to the “smartness mandate,” which views the world as too complex for fixed solutions, relying instead on provisional models and continuous experimentation (Halpern and Mitchell 2023). Rather than managing risk, statistical consciousness leverages uncertainty, which itself becomes a lucrative resource.
Real-time frames the future through a tension field between two forms of speculation: firmative speculation uses probabilistic and extrapolative systems to predict and control outcomes, while affirmative speculation embraces uncertainty and an open array of possibilities (Lachenicht 2020). Firmative and affirmative speculation model the probable or plausible in “a dynamic and dialectic relationship” with narrativizing the impossible and unimagined (2020: 32-3). This paper theorizes game engines as speculative technologies (Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022) that leverage uncertainty through a metabolic paradigm as their fulcrum. By treating energy as a universal or cosmic unit (Daggett 2019), twinning’s metabolic paradigm allows for the resolution of scales across chemical, computational, and environmental elements into measurable and manageable flows. Speculation is metabolized in this tension field at every scale of human and nonhuman operability, rerouting our mediated temporalities and energetics.
Aleena Chia is a lecturer in Game Studies and Media Studies based at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches videogame making cultures and digital wellness practices to understand how media technologies automate work and optimize life – shaping inequalities in cultural production. She is co-author of Technopharmacology (Meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and co-editor of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). She has also co-edited special issues on media in relation to posthumanism play in Convergence, time machines in MAST, and metaverse infrastructure in Games and Culture.
Amoore, L. (2011). Data derivatives: On the emergence of a security risk calculus for our times. Theory, culture & society, 28(6), 24-43.
Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating data: Correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition. MIT press.
Daggett, C. N. (2019). The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics and the politics of work. Duke University Press.
Ferrari, F. & McKelvey, F. (2023). Hyperproduction: A social theory of deep generative models. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 24(2), 338-360.
Gelernter, D. (1993). Mirror worlds: Or the day software puts the universe in a shoebox…
How it will happen and what it will mean. Oxford University Press. Halpern, O., & Mitchell, R. (2023). The smartness mandate. MIT Press.
Hinterwaldner, I. (2019). Systems Perspectivation as a General Basis for Computer Simulations. Leonardo, 52(1), 23-29.
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. (2022). Speculative communities: Living with uncertainty in a financialized world. University of Chicago Press.
Lachenicht, S. (2020). Cultures of Speculation—Histories of Speculation. In J. Cortiel, C. Hanke, J.S.
Hutta, & C. Milburn. Practices of speculation: Modeling, embodiment, figuration (pp. 31-48). transcript Verlag. May, J. (2019). Signal. image. architecture. Columbia University Press. Mulvin, D. (2021). Proxies: The cultural work of standing in. MIT Press.
Willcox, K. (2022). “Digital twins: A personalized future of computing for complex systems.” TEDxUTAustin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzfMLYw_-Ps
3.3 Inference and the stakes of sense
Resonating with recent work suggesting that media theory reframe itself in terms of the concreteness of computation (Alva 2023; Fazi and Hansen 2023), this paper takes up the shifting status of inference in mediated communication. It starts from the premise that technologies like recommendation engines and large language models represent a stark intensification of automated inference in public and private life. In this context, the paper advances an understanding of how formal strategies originally deployed for the purposes of information retrieval (IR) have expanded in scope to structure the communication of inference in a greater way, overall.
Maintaining a heuristic distinction between computational and pragmatic inference throughout the paper helps pose the following questions:
- How has IR traditionally conceived of inference for the purposes of computing relevance from documents?
- How did early social computing systems enroll pragmatic inference into these procedures through human-to-human communication, and what were some key consequences?
- What stands to be gained and lost in the present moment, as IR approaches to inference expand to structure pragmatic inference to a greater degree? Said differently, what happens when relevance goes from being conceptualized by analogy to semiosis to improve the retrieval of texts, to where signification and sense themselves come to be understood wholesale according to IR’s “post-documentary” strategies, especially via machine learning (Day 2019, 137–50)?
- Can we derive a media-theoretic perspective on communication that critically intervenes in this problematic, to think through the sociotechnical dynamics of inference in a new way?
Initially, the paper turns to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, because his philosophy represents a key historical moment for explaining inference as a “truth-producing” fallibilistic procedure for moving from premises to conclusions (Atkins 2023, 32). Acknowledging the baseline importance of his semiotics for communication theory (Bergman 2009), as early as the 1970s his philosophy was influential upon design thinking about data structures, remaining to this day an important intellectual backdrop for graph databases (Bergman 2018). Peirce’s work develops inference as a virtuous strategy for communities of inquirers to hold one another accountable socially, too; as Apel puts it, “[…] for Peirce the correct logical regulation of the process of inquiry is a priori morally relevant because it is metaphysically relevant” (Apel 1981, 87).
The paper lays out two paths for inferential functionality as it developed from Peircean thinking into our modern communications milieu: information retrieval’s approach to inferring relevance from term frequency and document similarity, and social computing’s approach to inferring relevance based on referential social roles. In the case of the former, Salton’s vector space model—pioneering for its construction of relevance as a measurable function for making inferences about documents (Salton and McGill 1983)—and Wilson’s notion of relevance as a logical but also context-specific “textual means to an end” (Wilson 2022) are discussed. In the case of the latter, early social computing thinking turned to speech act theory (Winograd and Flores 1987), communicative rationality (Hirschheim, Klein, and Lyytinen 1995), and conversational implicature (Tenenberg, Roth, and Socha 2016) as strategies for automating pragmatic inference, foregrounding contextual social license as a basis for inferring intent between speakers and hearers.
The paper concludes by suggesting what may be required by design to reconcile the two traditions in a different way, as a strategy for reclaiming the distributed power of inferential intelligence from its concentration in monopolistic platforms.
Neal Thomas teaches courses on media and technology in the Department of Communication
Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research and teaching bring a post-Continental perspective to bear on digital technology, particularly focused on the relationship between social computing and political subjectivity. Recent works include “Datafication and Deleuzean Sense” published in the journal Somatechnics in 2025, and “Digital Bildung as Semantic Emplacement” published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education in 2024. Neal lives in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada.
Alva, Alan Díaz. “Technics and Contingency: Ontological Productivity in Computation.” Media Theory 7, no. 2 (December 18, 2023): 37–76. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v7i2.587
Apel, Karl-Otto. Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.
Atkins, Richard Kenneth. Peirce on Inference: Validity, Strength, and the Community of Inquirers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Bergman, Mats. Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication: The Rhetorical Underpinnings of the Theory of Signs. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
Bergman, Michael K. A Knowledge Representation Practionary: Guidelines Based on Charles Sanders Peirce. Cham: Springer, 2018.
Day, Ronald E. Documentarity: Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Hirschheim, Rudy, Heinz K. Klein, and Kalle Lyytinen. Information Systems Development and Data Modeling: Conceptual and Philosophical Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Salton, Gerard, and Michael J. McGill. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Tenenberg, Josh, Wolff-Michael Roth, and David Socha. “From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 25, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 235–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-014-9215-0
3.4 During Dopamine
This paper examines disparate phenomena like Mark Carney’s unexpected political appeal and the exaggerated “Russian lip flip” trend among social media influencers to argue that contemporary politics and digital culture thrive on dopamine-driven attraction—fleeting, addictive sensations that bypass critical engagement. Just as dopaminic media appeals, so too does it foreclose the capacity to launch an appeal. As such, we contend that framing dopamine as the primary source of pleasure reinforces a (n)eurocentric discourse, obscuring the broader political and technological forces shaping the dynamics of dopaminic doldrums. By exposing the assumptions required to treat dopamine as a self-evident explanatory locus, we suggest that its dominance in technocultural discourse stems not only from its role as a cause but also as a symptom of deeper (and stranger) structures.
This paper is adapted from a chapter of our short book manuscript BAD Media, which we’ve written as a provocative exploration of the ways contemporary media technologies mediate—and are mediated by—our lived experiences, reshaping reality in unsettling and often unrecognizable ways. The essay and (and the book more broadly) is written as a guide to a register of contemporary techno-brutality that is hiding in plain sight: in the petty frustrations of 2fas and pop-ups, the seduction of wooden technocrats, and the relentlessly interruptive silence of smartphones. In short, as AI, algorithmic governance, and neuropolitics accelerate, we aim to provide a vocabulary for the creeping sense that nothing coheres—and that this incoherence is the system working as designed.
Katherine Behar is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is an interdisciplinary artist and media theorist whose work interrogates digital culture through feminism and materialism. Behar is the author and editor of several books, including Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press). Her solo exhibition catalogs include Data’s Entry | Veri Girişi (Pera Museum) and E-Waste (Tuska Center for Contemporary Art). Ack! Knowledge! Work!, an expanded catalog for her critically-acclaimed solo exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, is forthcoming from punctum books.
David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory at York University (Toronto). David is founding co-editor of the Proximities: Experiments in Nearness book series (University of Minnesota Press) and is past President (2020-2024) of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He is author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles, including Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke UP, 2022), Ludic Dreaming (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Humanesis (Minnesota, 2013). David performs and records as part of the musical group Bitstance. www.davidcecchetto.net
Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009). James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2023).
David Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).
Sander De Ridder, “The Datafication of Intimacy: Mobile Dating Apps, Dependency, and Everyday Life,” Television & New Media 23, no. 6 (September 1, 2022): 593–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764211052660.
Elena Esposito, Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence (The MIT Press, 2022).
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House, 2015).
Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (The MIT Press, 2016).
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, 2021).
Erin Manning, “Angular Perspective; Or, How Concern Shapes the Field.” Log, no. 49 (2020): 190, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27092852.
Carolyn Pedwell, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2021).
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (Polity, 2015).
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2020).
Panel 4: Decoloniality
Friday November 7, 4:45-6:15pm
Chair: Liam Cole Young
| Ian Reilly | Three Provocations for the Study and Praxis of Decolonial Media Theory |
| Oceane Nyela | Incommensurability as a techno-logic. |
| Ayesha Venturi | Speculative Infrastructure: Mediating and Materialising the Future |
| Christoph Brunner | On Opacity: An Activist Philosophy of Differential Media |
4.1 Three Provocations for the Study and Praxis of Decolonial Media Theory
In The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, Last Moyo (2020: 254) offers a preliminary framework for advancing a new foundation for media theory centred on decoloniality and the “creation of a trans-epistemic intercultural dialogue.” As Moyo argues, decolonial media theory must serve a vital role in re-humanizing the colonial subaltern, re-humanizing the colonizer/oppressor, advancing decolonial multiculturalism, and contributing to ongoing struggles for both social justice and cognitive justice. As Moyo and his contemporaries have shown, this decolonial turn in communication and media studies has foregrounded with great clarity and precision the kinds of reckoning and repair that are needed at the current moment, all the while articulating compelling visions of the decolonial future(s) to come. Consistent with this turn, persistent calls have been made to relinquish and return stolen Indigenous land (Tuck and Yang, 2012), to delink from Western Eurocentric epistemic ontologies (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Vázquez, 2020), to decolonize and not merely diversify the curriculum (Iyer, 2022; Risam, 2022), to re-envision the university as a site of pluriversal flourishing (Escobar, 2022), to sabotage imperialist-colonialist-capitalist institutions (paperson, 2017), to shed personal and institutional forms of epistemological arrogance (Machado de Oliveira, 2021), and to live in Indigenous sovereignty (Carlson-Manathara and Rowe, 2021). With so many vectors of decolonial theory and praxis currently in play and at stake, it can be difficult to ascertain how or in what ways these strands of activity play out within the realm of politics, culture, and/or education. In an attempt to foreground how decolonial media theory can participate in a transformative paradigm shift in media and communication studies, I offer three provocations meant to invite broader reflection and collaboration on how scholars might go about engaging more deeply in these deep-seated reorientations: the decolonial Rhodes Must Fall student movement (Kwoba et al., 2018), the Indigenous knowledge website, FourDirectionsTeachings.com (Wemigwans, 2018), and the anticolonial Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (Liboiron, 2021). Together these three distinct case studies will shed greater light on conceptual flashpoints in decolonial praxis that reveal the intricate and complex underpinnings of various sites of decolonial struggle. In counterbalancing perspectives from the Global South and the Global North, I also aim to juxtapose the kinds of imaginaries, relational ties, and responsibilities that are at once theorized and mobilized in the interests of furthering decolonial politics. In doing so, I hope to encourage greater dialogue and action among media and communication studies researchers in terms of how we might go about deepening our commitments to advancing decolonial media theory and praxis.
Ian Reilly (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki, the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
Carlson-Manathara, E., & Rowe, G.). (2021). Living in Indigenous Sovereignty. Fernwood Publishing.
Escobar, A. (2022). Global Higher Education in 2050. Critical Times, 5(1), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-9536551
Iyer, U. (2022). A Pedagogy of Reparations. Feminist Media Histories, 8(1), 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.181
Kwoba, B., Chantiluke, R., & Nkopo, A. (2018). Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press.
Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books.
Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press.
Moyo, L. (2020). The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4
paperson, la. (2017). A Third University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.
Risam, R. (2022). Indigenizing Decolonial Media Theory. Feminist Media Histories, 8(1), 134–164. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.134
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.
Vázquez, R. (2020). Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary. Mondriaan Fund.
Wemigwans, J. (2018). A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. University of Regina Press.
4.2 Incommensurability as a techno-logic
This paper engages with Hui’s thinking on technodiversity as it unfolds across his writing (Hui, 2016, 2017, 2020a, 2020b, 2024; Veilleux, 2021). Here, technodiversity is understood not only as a diversity of technics but a diversity of techno-logics (and therefor of cosmotechnics). For Hui, techno-logics emerge through a set of “cosmological conditions that are expressed in the relations between humans and their milieus” (Hui, 2016, p. 18). Furthermore, cosmotechnics and technodiversity are inextricably linked in his writing. He understands the role of technodiversity as attending to the “different histories of technologies”, the “relations between these technologies” as well as “the human and the cosmos” (2020, p. 29). His engagement with technodiversity begins with a recognition that the current planetary cosmotechnic of globalization has led us to the “apocalyptical end of technical singularity” where all facets of human life are understood and expressed through datafication. This is problematic since this planetary cosmotechnics has, in turn, transformed the Earth and the cosmos into a “gigantic technological system” (Hui, 2017). While this trajectory promises nothing but political and environmental disaster, Hui argues that embracing technodiversity is the way forward. This has also led to a moment which sees Western cosmotechnics—and to an extent Western metaphysics—collapsing in on itself.
I think through Hui’s critique of universalization which presents globalization as the denouement of a series of ontological absorptions where “the Western ontology of naturalism” has reduced every facet of life into a “techno-logic” (Hui, 2020b; Veilleux, 2021, p. 92). I argue that an alternative reading how Hui’s writing on technodiversity sees universality and incommensurability as providing the foundation for a rejection of the encroachment of the Western planetary techno-logic over all others and allows for the development of a viable alternative to the techno-logic of (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene, 2025). This paper begins with a discussion of technics and technicity throughout Hui’s work. This is followed by a discussion of technodiversity and the dangers of technical singularity. Finally, I develop the concept of incommensurability as a techno-logic. I argue that incommensurability reveals how “the West’s conception of media, as measures of the human, replicates a Western temporal logic that holds no universality for other genres of human” (Towns, 2022, p. 9).
Océane Nyela is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in Communication & Culture at York and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research interests include cognitive anthropology, phenomenology, continental philosophy and Black studies. Her doctoral research focuses on how sensoriality and the unconscious are implicated in the development of diasporic subjectivity by investigating the proliferation of braided hairstyles in several West African countries and their diasporas. She is a recipient of the of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS-D) Doctoral Scholarship.
de la Cadena, M. and Blaser, M. (2018) A world of many worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hui, Y. (2016) The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. MIT Press. Available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780995455009/the-question-concerning-technology-in-china/ (Accessed: 12 May 2022).
Hui, Y. (2017) ‘Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics’, e-flux [Preprint], (86). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics/ (Accessed: 22 May 2025).
Hui, Y. (2019) Recursivity and Contingency. 1st edition. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Hui, Y. (2020a) ‘For a planetary thinking’, E-flux Journal, 114. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/download/82505864/5._For_a_Planetary_Thinking.pdf (Accessed: 1 June 2025).
Hui, Y. (2020b) ‘Writing and Cosmotechnics’, Derrida Today, 13(1), pp. 17–32. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0217.
Hui, Y. (2024a) ‘Apropos Technophany’. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/HUIATH (Accessed: 3 April 2024).
Hui, Y. (ed.) (2024b) Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol. 1 Epistemological Reconstruction. Hanart Press. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/HUICFT (Accessed: 29 July 2024).
Kuhn, T.S. (2012) The structure of scientific revolutions. Fourth edition. Chicago ; The University of Chicago Press.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1971) L’homme et la matière: évolution et techniques. Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1973) Milieu et techniques. Paris: Albin Michel (Sciences d’aujourd’hui).
Oberheim, E. and Hoyningen-Huene, P. (2025) ‘The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories’, in
E.N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (eds) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2025. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/incommensurability/ (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Roberts, B. (2012) ‘Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler’s challenge to media theory’, New Formations, 77(77), pp. 8–20.
Simondon, G. (2016) On the mode of existence of technical objects. Translated by C. Malaspina and J. Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998a) Technics and time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998b) Technics and time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford University Press. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wGfHERkXO2UC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=Technics+and+time:+Disorientation+(Vol.+2)&ots=B6GL4sFWM7&sig=ooJG-79y9G0ypIJXp5Xp_Oh8qRQ (Accessed: 31 January 2024).
Stiegler, B. (2018) The Neganthropocene. Edited by D. Ross. Open Humanities Press. Available at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30171 (Accessed: 23 June 2025).
Stiegler, Bernard. (2019) The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Newark, UNITED KINGDOM: Polity Press. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york/detail.action?docID=5855524 (Accessed: 5 December 2024).
Towns, A.R. (2022) On Black Media Philosophy. University of California Press.
Veilleux, F. (2021) ‘Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency’, The Neutral: Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies [Preprint], (2). Available at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/theneutral/article/download/36475/27770 (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
4.3 Speculative Infrastructure: Mediating and Materialising the Future
This paper develops speculative infrastructure as a media-theoretical concept that challenges universalising tendencies in elemental media studies (Peters 2016, Starosielski 2019) by offering a situated, political, and ecological analysis of mediation. Rather than collapsing all environments into “media” or treating mediation as primarily symbolic or representational, I argue that mediation must be theorised as a constitutive technique—one that materialises through infrastructural form and actively shapes environmental futurity. Mediation, in this account, is not merely a matter of environments acting as interfaces or intermediaries between people and politics, but rather, an active part of a process of co-constituting social, ecological, and political relations.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, northeast India, where flood control, conservation, and extractive infrastructures converge, the paper examines how regimes of risk and speculation govern the future through technopolitical forms. In a region historically shaped by colonial hydrological engineering and now embedded in securitised discourses of climate and migration, infrastructure is not merely a support for environmental governance—it is a media form in its own right. Through state plans, environmental forecasts, legal rulings, satellite surveillance, and news coverage, Assam is rendered perpetually at risk. These forms of risk media (Ghosh and Sarkar 2020) do not simply represent threats; they prefigure futures, rendering them plausible, desirable, or dangerous.
Speculation and risk, I contend, function not only as epistemic frameworks but as mediating operations. They materialise in the form of embankments, sluice gates, border fences, conservation corridors, and surveillance systems. These infrastructures do not respond to uncertain futures—they enact them. Speculative infrastructure names this recursive temporality whereby anticipated futures are projected and then instantiated in the present. Such infrastructures are technomaterial and affective assemblages through which uncertainty becomes actionable. They mediate the redistribution of ecological risk and value, stratify social and environmental life, and reorganise relations across space and time.
Foregrounding mediation as a constitutive and historically embedded process, the paper positions speculative infrastructure as a conceptual bridge across environmental media studies, political ecology, and postcolonial infrastructure studies. It engages and departs from elemental media theory (Peters, Starosielski), proposing that media theory must attend more closely to geopolitical situatedness, colonial histories, and the material politics of infrastructure. Mediation here is not planetary in the abstract, but embedded in specific configurations of power, place, and history.
Infrastructures, I argue, do not merely carry media—they are media. They mediate not only flows of water, data, or bodies but the very terms of environmental futurity. By asking how infrastructures mediate the future through the language and logic of risk, this paper foregrounds mediation as a generative site of political struggle. It calls for a media theory attentive to how ecological futures are unevenly distributed, securitised, and materialised—one that recognises mediation as a contested, infrastructural practice with world-making consequences.
Ayesha Vemuri is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her work focuses on how experts calculate, mediate, and manage the risks of flooding and migration in Assam, India.
Dhaliwal, Ranjodh Singh, and Bernhard Siegert. 2024. “Knowing, Studying, Writing: A Conversation on History, Practice, and Other Doings with Technics.” In Technics, edited by Nicholas Baer and
Annie van den Oever, 125–50. Media in the Digital Age. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.13703101.10.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya, and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637501.
Peters, John Durham. 2016. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. 1 edition. University of Chicago Press.
Ruiz, Rafico. 2021. Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier. Duke University Press.
Starosielski, Nicole. 2019. “The Elements of Media Studies.” Media+Environment 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780.
4.4 On Opacity: An Activist Philosophy of Differential Media
This paper rethinks how media theory can engage decolonial and activist epistemologies through the conceptual lens of opacity. First, it engages the work of Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1997; 2020), focusing on his conception of opacity as a means to rethink media’s entanglement with visibility and legibility—especially in light of transparency discourses in media theory (McLuhan 1962; 1964; Bolter & Grusin 1999; Van den Eede 2011). Second, it develops the concept of di\erential media (Murphie 2019), drawing on Glissant’s opacity to stage a decolonial critique of dominant assumptions in media theories of transparency. Third, it proposes a di\erential account of media practices of resistance, elaborating a relational- philosophical perspective on media as conduits for critical activation (Brunner 2020).
Rather than opposing opacity and transparency in binary terms, the paper advances a di\erential and relational media theory—one that emerges from situated practices of sense-making in the Global South. This term is not used in a strictly geographical sense but designates non-hegemonic modalities of thought and action that challenge the normative logics of late liberalism and its techno-cultural dominance (Povinelli 2015). Drawing on feminist and Indigenous modes of resistance in several Brazilian contexts (Gutiérrez 2020; Zanolli & Prado 2022), the paper tests the activating potential of di\erential media as a philosophical and political proposition.
Foregrounding relationality over opposition, this approach positions opacity not as a limit, but as a generative force within media theory—capable of reframing how mediation operates across heterogeneous territories. In doing so, the paper critically responds to the persistence of theories of media domination that, while historically important, risk reproducing the very closures they seek to unmask. By contrast, a di\erential and activist media philosophy invites a reorientation toward the otherwise— toward emergent, resonant practices that complicate dominant epistemologies and open media theory to its decolonial potentials.
Christoph Brunner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research concerns the intersections between media, aesthetics, and activism.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press.
Brunner, C. (2020). “Making Sense”: Aesthetic Counterpowers in Activist Media Practices. Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation, 7(1), 1–16.
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press.
Glissant, É. (2020). Treatise on the Whole-World. Trans. Celia Britton. Liverpool University Press.
Gutiérrez, M. A. (2020). “Corpo-Território e as resistências indígenas no Brasil.” Revista Estudos Feministas, 28(3).
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.
Murphie, A. (2019). “Differential Media.” In The Go-To How-To Book of Anarchiving. SenseLab.
Povinelli, E. A. (2015). Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
Van den Eede, Y. (2011). Amor Technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Technology. PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp.
Zanolli, B., & Prado, D. (2022). “Feminist by Design and Designed by Diverse Feminists: Reflections on a Community Network Project in Brazil.” APRIA Journal, 4(4), 60–79.
Panel 5: Objects and spaces
Saturday November 8, 9:00am-10:30am
Chair: Rob Shields
| Carmen Warner | Material Representations: Relational Space in Media Theory |
| Anson Hunt | Pots, Pans and Knife Cuts on Hands: Restaurant Kitchens as Media |
| Jiaqi Wen | Cleanrooms: How Computers and Air are Made Parallel |
5.1 Material Representations: Relational Space in Media Theory
There is an assumed divide between messages and media in Communication and Media Studies. Messages are symbolic, linguistic, immaterial representations circulated by media, the material technologies and assemblages that make the very transmission of messages possible. This division is so ingrained it appears as empirical, obvious, unremarkable even. Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and their more contemporary—and often productively ambivalent—disciples, have all argued for the political and cultural effects of media themselves. This has created a critical field of inquiry that, though provincialized in the academy, has successfully argued for the ontological understanding of media as principally and materially altering experiences of time and space. Such ideas, Jody Berland (2009) writes, “challenge us to think through, beyond, and against the systems of symbolic meaning and expression that dominate our study of the realm of culture” (p. 9). While media theory traditionally ignored the politics of difference like gender, race, and ability, recent work on media have made a more concerted effort to think through the relationship between media and the politics of difference (Sharma & Singh, 2022; Towns, 2022).
My paper continues in this effort to elucidate the complex relationship between media, media theory, and power by arguing that messages—the complex representations so paramount to the politics of difference—are themselves material and that the media/message divide that often allows for difference to become a second order concern is predicated on a particular, normative understanding of space, imported into Communication from the longer tradition of temporal/spatial divide in social thought. In the whirlwind of Enlightenment writings from theorists such as Descartes and Kant, space was emptied of its philosophical impart, reduced to its Euclidean form, the transparent, banal distance between two points or the blank stage upon which time acts. As Lefebvre (1991) argues, this is the beginning of a noted temporal bias and the opening up of a mental-practical gap in Western social thought. Time became the site of philosophical fecundity and space became that which media simply moved over, rather than actively through as time did.
Bringing together thinkers from Lefebvre and Foucault to Coulthard and Watts, to Massey and Said, I present a relational conception of space in media theory that productively disrupts the media/message divide and deprovincializes media and linguistic-representation theories. I argue that, regardless of how topics are carved up by social theorists, empirically, media and messages are simultaneously temporal and spatial and effect all temporo-spatial logics and historico-geographical orderings. Rethinking the media/messages divide opens up new possibilities for thinking about the relationship between media, messages, and the politics of difference, particularly as it relates to neoliberal inclusion politics, which engage temporal framings of difference to draw attention away from spatial politics of difference.
Carmen Warner is a PhD candidate in Communication at Carleton University where she is teaching and finishing up her dissertation on communication, space, and the politics of difference in contemporary Nova Scotia.
Berland, J. (2009). North of empire: Essays on the cultural technologies of space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Carey, J. Space, time, and communications: A tribute to Harold Innis. In Communication as Culture: Essays on media and society (pp. 142-172). Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
Coulthard. G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. N. Smith, Trans.) Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974)
Massey, D. (1995) Spatial divisions of labour: Social structures and the geography of production (2nd ed.). London, UK: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. London, UK: SAGE Publications Inc.
Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Sharma, S., & Singh, R. (Eds.). (2022). Re-understanding media : feminist extensions of Marshall Mcluhan. Duke University Press.
Towns, A. R. (2022). On Black Media Philosophy (Vol. 2). University of California Press.
Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First
Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 20-34.
5.2 Eco-materially sensitizing concepts for dismantling the taken-for-grantedness of everyday material mediations
In this paper, I examine the creation of new eco-materially sensitizing concepts, such as the nodal point and deep surface, and their methodological-political implications for media studies (see Blumer 1969; Bal 2002; Ridell 2019 and 2021). I explore these concepts through the example of the laptop, which in this paper exemplifies an omnipresent and often taken-for-granted media-technological object that has, in part, contributed to the “black-boxing of media theory” (Rossiter 2017).
Over the past two decades, media studies has undergone a paradigm shift from the cultural to the material, which has simultaneously repositioned methodological orientation more firmly toward the ground and the Earth (see e.g., Gabrys 2011; Parikka 2015; Parks and Starosielski 2015; Cubitt 2017; Taffel 2019). The eco-materially sensitizing concepts I elaborate in this paper are especially fruitful when aiming to grasp not only material culture and material objects but also the ecological and material (eco-material) entanglements in and through which these objects and cultures are constituted. When the developed concepts sensitize us to the materiality of everyday life, they attune us to a way of approaching the world that enables us to articulate our historical, social, cultural, and material position in relation to the surrounding reality.
The laptop is one of the most common information technologies of our time, formed through the entanglement of organisms, inanimate entities, and technologies. When examined through the concept of the nodal point, the laptop allows us to unpack how not only its physical components and hardware, but also representational content and code are intricately intertwined (Taffel 2019). As a material nodal point, the laptop is also entangled in many complex ways with current ecological crises such as the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. Another way to approach the phenomena emerging from or associated with the laptop is through the concept of the deep surface and its various layers, such as the level of representation, cultural conventions and codes, the object-level, and broader techno-economic and material structures and processes like digital infrastructures.
In the paper, I argue that eco-materially sensitizing concepts, such as nodal point and deep surface, are necessary because they allow us to productively unpack the seemingly opaque everyday media technologies – like the laptop – within the context of anthropogenic ecological crises. These concepts enable an investigation, both temporally and spatially, into the multiscalar material constellations to which this seemingly self-evident technological device is connected (see e.g., Crawford & Joler 2018). At the same time, the analysis reveals the laptop’s multi-path connection to the fact that “the unravelling of geopolitical order has become part of everyday life.”
Eco-materially sensitizing concepts offer empirical media research a methodological framework through which it becomes possible to more precisely and diversely engage with discussions about what happens to materialities and what they cause as they flow, transform, and blend in the entanglements of organisms, inanimate entities, and technologies. This is especially significant because the concepts we use both produce and shape the world and the Earth we sense, experience and engage with.
Aino Kangaspuro Haaparanta is a doctoral researcher in Media Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research focuses on media ecologies, material media studies, media infrastructures, ecological entanglements, and ethnographic and material methods, particularly in relation to planetary boundaries. Her work aims to examine how media technologies materialize in everyday environments and engage with broader ecological and political processes.
Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Theory and Method. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press.
Crawford, Kate and Vladan Joler. 2018. Anatomy of an AI System. AI Now Institute and Share Lab. https://anatomyof.ai/
Cubitt, Seán. 2019. “Ecocritique.” Media + Environment 1(1): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10784
Gabrys, Jennifer. 2011. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Parks, Lisa and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Ridell, Seija. 2019. “Mediated Bodily Routines as Infrastructure in the Algorhythmic City”. Media Theory. [Online] 3(2): 27–62. doi:10.70064/mt.v3i2.978
Ridell, Seija. 2021. “From Hey, You There! to Got You: Re-materializing the Encoding/Decoding Model in the Computationally Mediated City”. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. [Online] 18(4): 413–420. doi:10.1080/14791420.2021.1995617
Rossiter, Ned. 2017. “Paranoia is Real: Algorithmic Governance and the Shadow of Control.” Media Theory. [Online] 1 (1), 88–102. doi:10.70064/mt.v1i1.564
Taffel, Sy. 2019. Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
5.3 Pots, Pans and Knife Cuts on Hands: Restaurant Kitchens as Media
Recently, there has been a renewed interest from some media studies scholars (Peters 2015, Young 2020, Kirschenbaum 2023) to broaden our understanding of media by adopting a definition of media that focuses on how they fulfill Kittler’s (1999) three functions of media; storage, processing, and transmission. This has pushed definitions of media beyond traditional “media devices” such as radio, television and computers, to include both natural elements like fire or the ocean (Peters 2015) and institutions like universities (Peters 2009), which are understood as media not because of their physical characteristics, but because they fulfill these functions. Media are theorized as “civilizational ordering devices” (Peters 2015) which set the parameters through which we experience reality (Larkin 2008). This has in turn informed an infrastructural turn in the field, with “media infrastructures” (Parks, 2015) emerging to consider the larger, material infrastructures that construct these ordering mediums.
Simultaneously, food studies in Canada has been characterized by a “food systems” approach (Koc et al. 2017), which studies food through a political economic lens, drawing attention to both interconnectedness and power structures. This is useful for understanding how issues of, in particular, sustainability can impact different areas of food production and consumption. However, scholars have neglected to fully consider the role of restaurants, often including them with other “catering” sectors like schools, hospitals and prisons (Lang and Heasman 2015), which ignore the unique labour conditions and relationships with food producers that characterizes the restaurant kitchen.
This paper addresses this gap by putting media infrastructures in dialogue with food studies. While studies of food itself as media and media representations of restaurants are not new, I move to theorize restaurant kitchen themselves as media. Building on the broader definition of media that focuses on how media function, I argue that restaurant kitchens themselves are media because they process, store and transmit data in the form of food, bodies, and cultural norms. Rather than focus on the food itself as a medium, I focus on the kitchen space that prepares it. Specifically, I am interested in using this framing to investigate the “media infrastructures” of these professional kitchens, the people, pans, knives, chemicals, ingredients and more that co-construct these spaces. This theoretical framework allows for a broader understanding of sustainability in food systems that focuses on an area that has traditionally been understudied. More broadly, it builds on existing work at the intersection of media studies and food studies (notable Pilcher 2016) and poses that adopting a radical definition of media enables media studies to be used as a theoretical framework through which to do interdisciplinary research.
Anson Hunt is a PhD candidate in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario Canada. His work on sustainable restaurants in Ottawa is deeply informed by his own experiences cooking in restaurants, which inform his commitment to a broad understanding of sustainability that includes sustainable labour and working conditions. He works in the intersection of media studies and food studies, and has written on topics such as the Michelin Guide, chef cultures, and the future possibilities of a critical food studies rooted in media studies perspectives. His dissertation focuses on exploring sustainable restaurants in Ottawa through a media infrastructure lens, with a particular emphasis on critical political economy and possibilities for a sustainable future.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Granular Worlds: Situating the Sand Table in Media History.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 50, no. 1, 2023, pp. 137–63, https://doi.org/10.1086/726299.
Koç, Mustafa, et al., editors. Critical Perspectives in Food Studies. Second edition., Oxford University Press, 2017.
Lang Tim. and Michael. Heaseman. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets 2nd ed, 2015
Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise : Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press, 2008.
Parks, Lisa. “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures.” Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 355-73, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9465.003.0031.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds : Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M. “Culinary Infrastructure: How Facilities and Technologies Create Value and Meaning Around Food.” Global Food History, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 105–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2016.1214896
Young, Liam Cole. “Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 6, 2020, pp. 135–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420915992.
5.4 Cleanrooms: How Computers and Air are Made Parallel
Computing deals with its inherent tension between thermal continuity and electric discretion
(Kittler, 1993b), which relies on the selective procedures of discarding the “waste” substances in and around the electronic parts (Starosielski, 2016). In these processes, air engineering seems to be the key. Everything is first exposed in boundless air, while air functions as either a protective screen or a barrier in the way of reliable conduction or communication. By the 1960s, contamination control emerged as a specialized field in the U.S. to study and apply the methods of monitoring and controlling dirt, mists, and chemical or thermal changes in the physical status of industrial materials, all integrated in the implementation of cleanrooms. (Holbrook, 2019)
This paper traces the history of the cleanroom and its sociocultural meanings. I argue that cleanroom has made computation contingent on the containment of electronic components and environmental entities. Such containment also distinguishes living and working conditions for human bodies, evoking similar technologies in biological reproduction, household refrigeration, spaceship quarantine, pandemic isolation, etc. (Sofia, 2000; Mulvin and McKinney, 2023; Duffy and Packer, 2020) Cleanrooms set the rules for a multi-level contactless-ness. By creating these contactless distinctions, containment helps to achieve the regulatory schemes for computation and the (material and symbolic) conditions for how we perceive, assume, and imagine those bodies and technologies in the first place.
One predecessor of cleanrooms emerged during the transatlantic cable projects. In the 1950s, Western Electric probed an early form of electronics manufacturing cleanrooms for their cable repeater production in New Jersey. Telecommunication infrastructures started to develop high-level precision of electric signals and the thermal regulation of undersea cables.
Accordingly, workers there had to adjust their mental and physical behaviour to the clean conditions. Experimental observations were conducted on the workers’ bodies, aiming at countering the rigidity of the work routines. In the 1960s, physicist Willis Whitfield proposed an optimized “ultra-clean room” with a new paradigm for manufacturing: inside the cubic, modular, and completely enclosed room, the ideally uniform, one-directional Laminar flows of air would continuously sweep any contaminants into the floor and filter them out. Such architecture dreamt of eliminating the human effort in cleaning all at once and replacing it with the autonomous cycles of pure air.
Finally, I will examine the sociocultural meanings of the cleanroom uniforms. I compare the Intel “bunny people” representations in the 1970s to a commercial campaign of Intel Pentium II workers in 1997. I argue that the commercial images of the bunny people and bunny figurine merchandise become a site of the humanly non-human – an objectified abjection that cancels the depth of affects and flattens human bodies (including obscuring gender and race). Fantasies about the cuteness of the bunny people transcend real bodies and decorate them with undifferentiable, positive associations of feelings (such as being productive, comfortable, and cheerful), echoing the latent politics of the cleanroom: a material infrastructure that radically forbids contact for the sake of cleanliness. In such a way, cleanroom culture has shaped an inhibition-oriented materialism in computation.
Jiaqi Wen is interested in the histories of computing, infrastructures of media, affects, queer thoughts, and media archeology. On her ongoing PhD journey in Communication, she thinks of computation as processes and experiences, as well as affective and imaginary constellations of bodies with differential vulnerabilities. Her dissertation, titled Thermal Engineering and the Comfort Zone of Computation, attends to intersectional histories of cleanrooms, thermal experiments, and computation. At the Digital Democracies Institute, she works on the research stream “Criminalizing Machinery” as a research assistant, exploring the historical entanglements of technology and carceral politics. Before her PhD, Jiaqi examined the historical epistemology of (pseudo-)randomness in early computer simulation and obtained her MA in Media Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Besides these research focuses, Jiaqi also pays attention to social and racial justice, digital cultures and subcultures, and the power of fantasy.
Abbate, Janet, and Stephanie Dick. Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society. JHU Press, 2022.
Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Jeremy Packer. “Wifesaver: Tupperware and the Unfortunate Spoils of Containment” In Sharma, Sarah, Singh, Rianka, and Banet, Sarah ed. Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke University Press, 2020: 98-118.
Holbrook, Daniel. “Controlling Contamination: The Origins of Clean Room Technology.”
History and Technology 25, no. 3 (September 2009): 173–91.
Horn, Eva. “Air as Medium.” Grey Room 73 (December 2018): 6–25.
Kittler, Friedrich. “Es gibt keine Software.” (There Is No Software) In Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften. Leibzig: Reclam Verlag Leibzig, 1993: 225-42.
Mulvin, Dylan, and Cait McKinney. “The Girl in the Bubble: An Essay on Containment.”
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9 (1) (2023): 1-25.
McNally, J. O., G. H. Metson, E. A. Veazie, and M. F. Holmes. “Electron Tubes for the Transatlantic Cable System.” Bell System Technical Journal 36, no. 1 (1957): 163–88.
Sofia, Zoë. “Container Technologies.” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 181-201.
Starosielski, Nicole. “Thermocultures of Geological Media.” Cultural Politics 12, no. 3 (November 1, 2016): 293–309.
Ullrich, Rebecca A. The Giants of the Nuclear Testing Era: A Series of Notebooks from the Pioneers – The Works of Willis Whitfield. SAND2018-8822R, Albuquerque, NM: Sandia National Laboratories, August 16, 2018.
Whitfield, Willis J. Ultra-clean Room. United States US3158457A, filed May 14, 1962, and issued November 24, 1964. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3158457A/en.
. A New Approach to Cleanroom Design. SC-4673(RR), New Mexico: Sandia Corporation, Contractor for U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, March 1962.
Wooley, M. “Components for Submarine Telephone Cable Repeaters.” IRE Transactions on Component Parts 6, no. 1 (March 1959): 34–41.
Panel 6: Radio, Sound
Saturday November 8, 10:30am-12:00pm
Chair: Aleena Chia
| Andrew Herman | Sonorities of the Dark Enlightenment |
| Sadie Couture | Thinking With the Electromagnetic Spectrum |
| David Jackson | ‘…and Guattari’s Drone: Schizoanalytic Media, Ethico-Aesthetic Frequencies, and the Refrain of Becoming Sonic |
| Andy Stahl | Do all media automate? |
6.1 Sonorities of the Dark Enlightenment
This paper explores what Jasen (2016) terms the “vibratory power” of transduction where sound media and other digitally mediated forms of reverberation conjure affective and corporeal bonds of resonance and solidarity. Using the theoretical perspective of materialist medium theory (and its attendant conceptualization of sound and aurality) this paper will explore the emplacements of internet radio in three senses: 1) understanding the territorialization of reach of radio in the transition from terrestrial broadcast to internet streaming; 2) understanding the topos of community that digital radio creates and conjures in the stream; and, finally, 3) understanding the place of internet radio in contemporary media theory.
Much of the power of broadcast radio inheres in its intimate ties of signal and reception to geographical territory that are constituted by the materialities of the broadcast radio assemblage. The boundaries of the sonically mediated socius of the community are very much drawn by the range of the signal. The consideration of the territorializations of internet radio when it is transmogrified from the geographically delimited reach of a broadcast signal of terrestrial radio into a “placeless” stream of data requires understanding how the topos of community is disarticulated from geolocation and conjured spatially and temporally through the internet. Accordingly, I will conceptualize what streaming as a mode of circulating radio programming and content socio-technically affords in terms of bonds of sociality that have historically made radio such a powerful and supple medium (Douglas, 2004). I will argue that such power always-already resides in the sonic place of aurality as it is entered into and engaged by the producer and the listener no matter where and no matter when in the flows of everyday life that this place is engaged.
One of the aporia of media theory concerning radio has been to push considerations of the character of internet radio as sound to the side in favour of the analysis of its structural elements in terms of code, network, and interactivity, and how these elements have reconfigured radio as part of a transition from a broadcast mode of cultural production to what can be termed a “social media mode of production (Herman, 2014; Bonino, 2018; Bonini, et.al., 2020) This tendency ignores the phenomenological temporality of “listening” which indubitably marks its ontological status as “radio” as a distinctive medium. With the exception of Bottomley’s (2020) history of radio-internet convergence, broad questions regarding how the radio-internet convergence have been displaced, on the one hand, by a focus on platforms and the datafication of musical production circulation and taste (Prey, 2020; Hesmondhalgh. et. al, 2020) and, on the other, a focus on the unique characteristic of podcasts and podcasts as a distinct set of production practices and sonic artifacts (Morris, 2021; Morris and Hoyt, 2021; Spinelli and Dann, 2019). This paper will return to more basic questions about the re-articulation of producer and listener in the socius of sound that has animated the work scholars such as Lacey (2013, 2018b), and Bonini (2018) while filling key gaps in their analysis.
Andrew Herman is associate professor of Communications at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Adrienne Massanari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Bonini, T., Monclús, B., & Scifo, S. (2020). Radio as a social media. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 18(1), 5–12.
Bonini, T. (2018). Introduction: The Listener as Producer: The Rise of the Networked Listener. In T. Bonini & B. Monclús (Eds.), Radio Audiences and Participation in the Age of Network Society (pp. 1–36). Routledge.
Boon, M. (2022). The politics of vibration : music as a cosmopolitical practice. Duke University Press.
Bottomley, A. J. (2020). Sound Streams: A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence. University of Michigan Press.
Bottomley, A. (2024). Sensational Voices: Discourses of Intimacy in Podcast Production Culture. In A. Bottomley and M. Hilmes, M. (Eds.) The Oxford handbook of radio and podcasting (pp 306-320). Oxford University Press.
Douglas, S. J. (2004). Listening In: Radio and The American Imagination. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Euritt, A. (2023). Podcasting as an intimate medium. Routledge.
Herman, A. (2014). Production, Consumption and Labor in the Social Media Mode of Production. In J. Hunsinger & T. Senft (Eds.), The Social Media Handbook (pp. 30–44). Routledge.
Hesmondhalgh, D. Jones, E., & Rauh, A. (2019). SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms. Social Media + Society, 5(4), 1-1
James, M. (2020). Sonic Intimacy. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jasen, P. (2016). Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies, and the Materiality of Sonic Experience. Bloomsbury
Khan, S. (2022). Assemblage Thinking in Lockdown: An Autoethnographic Approach. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 1-33
Lacey, K. (2013). Listening in the Digital Age. In J. Loviglio & M. Hilmes (Eds.), Radio’s New Wave (pp. 9–23). Routledge.
Lacey, K. (2018). Up in the air? The matter of radio studies. Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 16(2), 109–126.
Lefebvre, H. (2013). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Bloomsbury Academic.
Morris, J.W. (2021). Infrastructures of discovery: examining podcast ratings and rankings. Cultural Studies, 35(4-5), 728–749
Morris, J. W., & Hoyt, E. (Eds.). (2021). Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography. University of Michigan Press.
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (2nd ed., pp. xi–201). Routledge.
Pettman, D. (2017). Sonic intimacy : voice, species, technics (or, how to listen to the world). Stanford University Press.
Prey. (2020). Locating Power in Platformization: Music Streaming Playlists and Curatorial Power. Social Media + Society, 6(2), 1-11
Spinelli, & Dann, L. (2019). Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. Bloomsbury.
Vallee, M. (2016). The Rhythm of Echoes and Echoes of Violence. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(1), 97–114.
6.2 Thinking With the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Radio is born when an electric signal meets a metal rod and changes it forever. Touched, the 13 electrons of aluminum get excited, and sing a wave into existence. As it skitters through space, the wave bumps into things; buildings, mountains, other metal rods, the ionosphere. It follows the curvature of the earth and bounces off the sky until it gets tired and dissipates into the noise. The radio wave doesn’t care who it belongs to, or what country it lands in.
The ether, the “mother of all media” (Peters, 1999, p. 102) is famously ephemeral, and has troubled our understandings of both time and space for over a century. This paper takes lessons from the material and elemental turns in media studies to analyze how radio is not only a “container for content” but can be “defined as relationships between people and things, occurring in the context of the electro-magnetic spectrum” (Friz, 2014, n.p.). Considering the ways in which radio waves are both material and representational just as they are particularly unruly subjects within regimes of domination and exploitation, this paper traces the difficulty that historical and contemporary capitalism has had in defining the electromagnetic spectrum as both national territory, as a particular type of property fit for the extraction of profit (Douglas, 1989), and the ways in which these understandings are rearticulated and reinforced even by those who have wished to use the electromagnetic spectrum for other means (Craig, 2009).
Through analysis of historical radio policy documents, trade literature, and cultural production from the United States and Canada, this paper asks; How has the electromagnetic spectrum been conceptualized by radio practitioners and regulatory regimes throughout the past 150 years, what impact have these conceptualizations had on the form of radio, and what does an attentiveness to the materiality of the electromagnetic spectrum teach us about other frames from which to approach a critical radio studies agenda? This paper also pushes up against the idea of the ‘material’ in media studies. Radio is often considered one of the very most ephemeral of media and this paper asks, what constitutes a material radio studies?
In particular, this research sees thinking with the electromagnetic spectrum as an opportunity to think beyond and against both borders and property. More specifically, this research argues that ‘the nation’ has played an overdetermined role in radio history; while national regulatory regimes have profoundly affected the form and content of radio, in the densely populated borderlands of North America (and beyond), listeners regularly hear broadcasts from outside of their national context (Craig, 2009; Kuffert, 2016; Robles, 2019). Instead, this paper advocates for a regional approach to radio studies, one which acknowledges how radio is profoundly affected by the particulars of place and one which allies itself with Indigenous thinkers’ efforts to highlight how the United States and Canada have been violently and forcibly mapped on top of Indigenous territories. Beyond considering the electromagnetic spectrum as a national resource or as a medium for artistic experimentation, this research insists that an elemental view of radio can inform a politics all of its own, and contribute to the growing body of scholarship in material media theory.
Sadie Couture is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at McGill University. She works at the intersection of media history, sound studies, and science and technology studies, and has published on sound cultures, talk radio, and podcasting in AModern, MAST, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, and Social Media + Society. Her dissertation is entitled “Long Time, First Time: A History of Call-In Radio in the United States and Canada, 1945-1975.”
Anna Friz. (2014, November 6). Someplaces: Radio Art, Transmission Ecology and Chicago’s Radius. Sounding Out! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/11/06/someplaces-radio-art-transmission-ecology-and
Craig, S. (2009). Out of the dark: A history of radio and rural America. University of Alabama Press.
Douglas, S. J. (1989). Inventing American broadcasting, 1899-1922. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kuffert, L. (2016). Canada Before Television: Radio, Taste, and the Struggle for Cultural Democracy. McGill-Queen’s Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. University of Chicago Press.
Robles, S. (2019). Mexican waves: Radio broadcasting along Mexico’s northern border, 1930-1950. The University of Arizona Press.
Sterne, J. (2014). “What Do We Want?” “Materiality!” “When Do We Want It?” “Now!” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. The MIT Press.
6.3 ‘…and Guattari’s Drone: Schizoanalytic Media, Ethico-Aesthetic Frequencies, and the Refrain of Becoming Sonic
Contemporary media theory needs Guattari—not just Deleuze and then Guattari, but the overlooked radicality of Guattari’s solo work. There are reasons for Guattari’s secondary status: the difficulty and obscurity of his writing; the multitude of seemingly endless references, examples, and “lines of flight” connecting a vast array of imaginative ideas; and the multiplicity and intensity of his conceptual language – Guattari does not think in singularities, binaries, dialectics, or triads – but in a connective “both/and” way of assemblages, returns (refrains) and becomings. His writings teem with references to films, novels, paintings, music, hypertextual constructions, digital art, experimental aesthetic practice, computers, radio, networks, a-significations, machines, bodies, spaces, assemblages, hip-hop, and more. Guattari was involved in Italian Pirate Radio and saw it as a precursor to Internet communications. He was directly involved with the Minitel service “3615 ALTER,” which was initiated by a collective of critical IT specialists.
This expansive talk wants to bring Guattari noisily into the Media Theory conversation by considering his concept of “ethico-aesthetics” in relation to sonic media. Ethico-aesthetics rejects fixed analysis, reframing media as machines of subjectivation—not just representing a world but actively constructing it. Ethico-aesthetics emphasizes how creative practices—from film to algorithms—generate new modes of being, resisting and reinforcing capitalist homogenization in the production of media subjects. Guattari’s alternative to psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, invites we ask not just what media mean, but how they operationalize power—a shift from critique to intervention. Guattari’s ideas are not tools to “apply” but energies to think with. Media aren’t “objects” but chaosmotic processes. A band doesn’t express itself but is a machine that operationalizes and dismantles (or reinforces) norms of melody, gender, and politics through noise, DIY networks, or fluidity.
Using the example of Sunn O)))’s drone doom metal, this paper demonstrates how Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics reframes media as subjectivation-machines. Sunn O)))’s subsonic frequencies and musical structures do not just represent “chaos”—they enact a deterritorialization of listening, disrupting the rhythmic capture of Integrated World Capitalism. Sunn O)))’s live performance of monolithic volume, ritualistic staging, and fog machine oblivion do not just express doom metal—they physicallyreconfigure the audience’s sensorium, dissolving the subject into pure vibrational force (a becoming-sonic). Their staging is an affective experience where soundwaves act on a body, calling into question what a body can do and endure within the space of sound. Sunn O))) enacts a machinic assemblage (guitars, amps, strings, hands, soundwaves) producing an ecosophic subjectivity, where listeners experience themselves as part of a vibrational ecology. This reading utilizes Guattari’s solo writings The Machinic Unconscious, Three Ecologies, and Chaosmosis to move between ecology, psychoanalysis, and transformation found in the cosmic doom of ecological, mental, and social collapse.
Guattari’s legacy isn’t just a set of concepts but a mode of engagement. To theorize media today requires his rowdiness: his insistence that critique must construct, not just deconstruct. By centering ethico-aesthetics, we confront media’s role in capitalism rise while amplifying its latent possibilities—turning theory into a site of experiment rather than diagnosis.
David C. Jackson, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Research Professor in the school of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, experimental musician, and music organizer. He writes about sound and ecology and has published in Law Text Culture, Intermédialités, and Evental Aesthetics.
Berardi, Franco, Giuseppina Mecchia, and Charles J. Stivale. 2008. Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. 1. publ. Basingstoke [England] New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
De Landa, Manuel. 2022. Assemblage Theory. Speculative Realism SPRE. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474413640.
Genosko, Gary. 2009. Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Pluto Press.
Goffey, Andrew, and Éric Alliez, eds. 2011. The Guattari Effect. London New York: Continuum. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547613.
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin.
Guattari, Felix. 1992. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Guattari, Félix. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press.
———. 2012. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Impacts. New York: Continuum.
———. 2014. The Three Ecologies. Bloomsbury Revelations edition. Bloomsbury Revelations. London; Bloomsbury Academic.
———. 2016. Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities. Impacts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsburg Publishing Pl.
Guattari, Félix, and Sylvère Lotringer. 1996. Chaosophy: Soft Subversions. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. New York: Semiotext(e).
Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. 2009. Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Sullivan, Simon. 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
6.4 Do all media automate?
Following Harold Innis, media theory has often understood distance and time as the two quantities that media overcome (1951). This paper, drawing on a contextualist history of automation in broadcast radio, proposes that we consider another quantity—another axis along which media can be biased—in labor. Where transmission and inscription are the respective operations by which media collapse distance and time, automation is then the function that overcomes labor. “Labor” refers both to work as a necessity and to organized workers’ power (Williams, 1976); and automation aims to thwart it in both these senses. Today, a bias against labor plainly characterizes new media development, as executives credulously promise to redress the harms of automated distribution with better automated moderation—and to supplant producers with “AI.” Historians of computing and labor studies scholars have long shown that the social desire to subtract laboring bodies from communicative circuits has steered digital media since the postwar era (Irani, 2015; Nakamura, 2014). More recent labor-oriented media historiography reveals media like tape and film as automation facilitators in their own right (Ahern, 2018; Stine, 2022).
This latter tendency, paired with the recognition that “[t]he distinction between transmission and recording… is largely a convenience of organization” (Peters, 1999, p. 143), raises a question: do all media that transmit and inscribe also automate? This paper looks to the emergent years (1953 to 1970) of what would come to be called “radio automation,” as well as to the recent interchange among labor studies and media history, for an answer. Engineers at American radio stations in the 1950s understood the new technique of “automatic programming” as an all-but-intrinsic property of magnetic tape. These tools blossomed in an industry and medium still reeling from the AFM recording ban—an early-1940s labor action that preceded the coinage “automation” by a few years but understood sound recording (in tandem with radio transmission) as a form of labor displacement. Automation is both property and effect of technical media, and this detour into radio history maps out the uses for a media theory that understands automation’s inherent relationship to media life cycles under capitalism.
Andy Kelleher Stuhl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Arts at Seton Hall University. His book in progress traces industrial and artistic struggles over automation in American radio from the 1950s to the streaming era. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. His research has appeared in New Media & Society, the Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.
Ahern, M. (2018). Cinema’s Automatisms and Industrial Automation. Diacritics, 46(4), 6–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0001
Innis, H. A. (1951). The bias of communication. University of Toronto Press.
Irani, L. (2015). The cultural work of microwork. New Media & Society, 17(5), 720–739. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511926
Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture. American Quarterly, 66(4), 919–941.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. University of Chicago Press.
Stine, K. (2022). Film as the first universal data medium. In M. Burkhardt, D. van Geenen, C. Gerlitz, S. Hind, T. Kaerlein, D. Lämmerhirt, & A. Volmar (Eds.), Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data (pp. 39–59). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839455616
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press.
Panel 7: Image, Scale, Perception
Saturday November 8, 1:00pm-3:00pm
Chair: Tero Karppi
| Ashley Scarlett | Evidentiary Aesthetics after the Operational Image |
| Derek Woods | Flusser’s Particles, or What is Scale for Media Theory? |
| Emily M. Sobel | Recording, Revealing, Reinventing: Kracauer and Non-Human Perception |
| Erin Obodiac | Technicolors and Time: Lyotard’s Cinematography of Consciousness |
| Joshua Scannell | Alien Aesthesis |
7.1 Evidentiary Aesthetics after the Operational Image
Although contested from the outset, the asserted indexicality of photography has long positioned the medium as a critical means through which to capture, create, and disseminate evidence. Prominent theorists of photography have identified the critical role that evidentiary images have played in exposing the death-worlds of the ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe 2003), in crying emergency (Azoulay 2008), in spurring moral awakening (Sontag 2003) and in enabling emancipated spectators to begin establishing “different spatiotemporal systems, different communities or words and things, forms and meanings” (Mirzoeff 2008: 102).
Within the contemporary context, wherein the photographic image – now operational (Parikka 2023) – has become instrumental to the throes of computational capitalism (Stiegler 2019), it functions simultaneously as a critical site for the solicitation and collection of evidentiary data for use within platform optimization, machine learning, and AI applications (Hand & Scarlett 2023) while also becoming an increasingly devalued, discredited and unactionable form of representational evidence within legal contexts and the court of public opinion (Rettberg 2023; Uliasz 2022).
Nowhere have the evidentiary functions of the contemporary photograph been rendered more contradictorily than in responses to the deluge of atrocious images (Azoulay 2008) captured and uploaded from Gaza since October 7th, 2023. While often shared as an evidence-driven call to action or to witness (Azaiza 2023; Alyan 2023), the intended function of these images has largely been without appreciable effect, as they have instead been subsumed by the insatiable machinations of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016) and associated forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence (Crawford 2021) – in many cases this has actively contributed to the further censorship, dehumanization, and extinguishing of Palestinian life, precisely those things that the original images sought to counter (Scarlett 2025; Abraham 2024; El-Naggar 2024).
Responding to an expanded analysis of the contradictory treatment of photographic evidence outlined above, the following paper will identify an urgent need for images and imaging practices that can be leveraged as evidence while simultaneously resisting or reconfiguring use within the throes of computational capitalism, machine learning and AI – if only temporarily. In an effort to begin laying the groundwork for this undertaking, the paper will draw from the traditions of analytic and legal philosophy as well as media theory (see for example: Orr and Crawford 2024; Levy 2024; Ciero 2019; Lauer 2011; Achinstein 2010) to develop a working definition of evidence, identifying critical and largely under-examined overlaps between ‘evidence’ and the treatment of data within computational capitalism, machine learning and AI applications. What will become apparent through this discussion is that what is required is ultimately a fundamental rethinking and cultural renegotiation of evidentiary aesthetics and the standards of proof where contemporary imaging practices are concerned.
Ashley Scarlett is an Associate Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts. Her research, which investigates intersections between creative practice and computational culture, has appeared in Philosophy of Photography, photographies, Afterimage, Media Theory, Parallax, and Digital Culture and Society as well as in numerous edited volumes. A forthcoming manuscript (Bloomsbury) charts the role that artists-in-residence have played in spurring innovation and critique across the histories of computation.
Abraham, Yuval (2024), ‘“Lavender”: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza’, +972 Magazine, 3 April.
Alyan, Hala (2023), ‘Instagram post’, Instagram, 4 December.
Azaiza, Motaz (2023), ‘Please, don’t just watch.’, Instagram, 23 October.
Azoulay, Ariella (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Crawford, Kate (2021), The Atlas of A.I., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
El-Naggar, Mona, Collier, Neil, Boyer, Mark, Kylan, Hassan (2024), ‘Motaz Azaiza captures Gaza’s suffering. But “nothing changed”’, New York Times, 20 February
Hand, Martin and Scarlett, Ashley (2023), ‘Introduction: The politics and practices of computational seeing’, photographies, 16:2, pp. 155–71
Mbembe, Achille (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1, pp. 11–40
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2011), The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Parikka, Jussi (2023), Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rettberg, Jill Walker (2023), Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World, Cambridge: Polity.
Scarlett, Ashley (2025), ‘Learning from atrocity: When machines regard the pain of others’, Philosophy of Photography, 16:1, pp. 79–99.
Sontag, Susan (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador.
Srnicek, Nick (2016), Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity.
Stiegler, Bernard (2019), The Age of Disruption: Technology and Machines in Computational Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity.
Uliasz, Rebecca (2022), ‘On the Truth Claims of Deepfakes: Indexing Images and Semantic Forensics’, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, 3:1, pp. 63 – 84
7.2 Flusser’s Particles, or What is Scale for Media Theory?
Recent work in media theory takes an interest in problems of scale. For example, a scalar framing is at least implicit in the infrastructural turn exemplified by the work of Lisa Parks (2015), John Durham Peters (2015), and Nicole Starosielski (2015). As Parks queries the field, “how would one visualize contemporary phenomena such as packet switching or cloud computing, phenomena that occur at scales and speeds that neither the human eye nor the medium of film can readily bring into view?” This question captures the transition from film to media that is always ongoing on in our field, and its answer, from the perspective of the infrastructural turn, is to reconfigure macro and micro. On the one hand, to understand cloud computing is to go macro and trace the history of networks, as Tung Hui Hu does in A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015). On the other hand, to understand the high-speed nature of computing is to go micro and rethink the relation between subjectivity and mediation, as Shane Denson does in Discorrelated Images (2020). Other media scholars have begun to theorize scale explicitly. In very different books, Zach Horton (2021) and Mary Ann Doane (2021) look to the role of scale in visual representation, with a special focus on scaling’s conflict with human subjectivity. In reviewing this body of work, I want to determine what “scale” means in our anti-disciplinary field. Beyond the sense that our lives are increasingly determined by things much too big or small for our senses to represent to us, what is scale for media theory?
If Doane and Horton’s books are the first to address scale directly, this does not mean that foundational media theory has ignored the topic. Rather, it makes a peripheral appearance in books about other ideas (and not only in the form of global-village connectedness). In reading media theory in search of scale, my goal is to locate these relatively inactive moments in which the tradition has conceptualized magnitude and scaling in specifically mediatic ways. After reviewing the field’s current understanding of scale, I will focus on the work of Vilem Flusser, the important but still relatively unknown media theorist who has deeply influenced by both European phenomenology and Marshall McLuhan. In particular, Flusser’s theory of photography and the technical image hinges on a particular way of discussing scale. For example, as he writes in Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), “technical images arise in an attempt to consolidate particles around us … into images. This can be achieved neither with hands nor with fingers, for these elements are neither graspable, nor are they visible. For this reason, apparatuses must be developed to grasp the ungraspable, visualize the invisible.” What examples like Flusser’s particles help us to understand is the role that such scalar thinking has been playing since well before the infrastructural turn—the role of scale not as a particular trend in research but as a constitutive part of “media theory” in general. By rereading the tradition that goes by this name, my goal is to grasp what distinctions between micro and macro—distinctions among qualitatively different scales—have meant for the media concept’s mercurial trajectory.
Derek Woods is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University. Woods works to create dialogue between the sciences and humanities for the sake of anti-capitalist climate politics. He studies media in a time of accelerating ecological crisis, including how environmental damage and restoration intersect with the production of inequality and efforts to redistribute wealth. With Joshua Schuster, he is the author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). He has published articles about scale in relation to climate, film, and ecology in journals like New Formations and New Literary History. With Karen Pinkus, he co-edited a special issue of diacritics on terraforming. Woods is completing a book manuscript about the ecosystem and earth system concepts entitled Trophic Time: A Media Theory of the Ecosystem.
Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Doane, Mary Ann. Bigger than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Flusser, Vilém. 1985. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Horton, Zach. The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Parks, Lisa. “Stuff You Can Kick: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures,” Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrick Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2015.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
7.3 Recording, Revealing, Reinventing: Kracauer and Non-Human Perception
Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer is hardly an overlooked figure in media scholarship and curricula; however, a renewed interest in his theory of cinematic realism has emerged over the last decade in recent work on environmental and atmospheric media and material aesthetics. Cassandra Guan and Adam O’Brien interrogate cinema’s natural aesthetics through early and classical film theory to consider the connection between film form and experience in ecomedia projects. In doing so, they reveal how difficult it remains to discern and describe shared characteristics across a diverse sample of ecologically driven films. A few years prior, Karl Schoonover cites Kracauer’s Theory of Film in the first lines of “Documentaries without documents?: Ecocinema and the toxic” to reestablish the medium’s unique capability to produce “images that defamiliarize the familiar or expose what is hidden right in front of our eyes” (483). This turn to Kracauer’s work reimagines the relationship between the material reality of the world and the experiences and affects images of that world make possible. These scholars think with and beyond Kracauer’s classical theory of cinematic realism—“to record and reveal reality”—to foreground how the relation between the human and non-human is not only depicted on the screen but reinvented by it.
This paper explores the unique ways in which formal and aesthetic abstraction in EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) resonates with Kracauer’s theoretical commitments to materiality and film experience. EO offers dense and distorted depictions of nature that foreground diverse environments and resist their relegation to narrative background. However, the careful attention paid to environments is constantly disrupted by the film’s self-reflexivity and perspectival shifts so that spectatorship and mediation must be acknowledged. Such formal strategies disrupt passive viewing and invite curiosity and attentiveness, offering affective alternatives to the dominant modes of fear and catastrophe in ecological representation. If, as Miriam Hansen writes about the work of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, “film could animate and reassemble the inert, mortified fragments of photographic nature to suggest the possibility of a different history,” what possibilities arise for imagining a different future? (37). In this paper, I aim to further question cinema’s distinct ecological capabilities for producing alternate eco-conscious forms of being and knowing. By thinking with Kracauer, I explore the ways in which ecofilms encourage contemplative viewing practices that center around experiences and sensations of the minute particulars of non-human life.
Emily M. Sobel is a PhD student in English literature at Stony Brook University, where she studies ecofeminist film and theories of affect and embodiment. She earned her MA in screen studies at Brooklyn College, Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. Her master’s thesis, Silk Screens, explores the use of the spider as a striking symbol for new conceptions of nature and the feminine in contemporary ecofeminist media.
Fay, Jennifer. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Goodwin, Hannah. Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. University of California Press, 2012.
Ivakhiv, Adrian J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Kracauer, Siegfried, and Paul Oskar Kristeller. History, the Last Things before the Last. Oxford University Press, 1969.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1960.
Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, 2000.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Pollmann, Inga. Cinematic Vitalism. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
7.4 Technicolors and Time: Lyotard’s Cinematography of Consciousness
In Technics and Time III: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler argues that time is a technics constituted by the “cinematography of consciousness.” He revisits the question of the transcendental deduction in Kant’s schematism and sees “this transcendental moment as cinematic consciousness constituting an arche-cinema” (6). The synthesis that constitutes time is likened to the workings of a cinematic apparatus because the movement of cinema’s animation-effect can be understood as a machinic analogue of the Kantian synthesis of time as succession, and more strongly, that “the cinematic techno-logically exhumes the ‘mechanism’ of [its] ‘hidden art’” (9). Stiegler frames his argument by turning to Husserl’s analysis of the temporal object as an account of the intentional structure of consciousness. By re-introducing the technics of recording foreclosed by Husserl’s analysis of the temporal object, Stiegler hypothesizes “an essentially cinemato-graphic structure for consciousness in general” (13). And yet, this hypothesis had already been explored by Jean-François Lyotard in several works such as Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and “L’idée d’un film souverain” (1995)—which revisits some of the questions from his 1973 essay “Acinema”—where he compares the synthetic act of comprehension, which constitutes temporality and movement, with cinematography. He writes, “The camera works here in the manner of the Kantian Zusammennehmung [a gathering or holding together]” (217). Kant tells us that the imagination can compose (Zusammensetzung) syntheses ad infinitum. Yet the imagination is overwhelmed when it is asked to “‘comprehend’ [Zussamenfassung] in a glance what it ‘composes’ ‘successively’.” The imagination’s failure to comprehend simultaneously the entire sequence is the negative moment in the feeling of the sublime as a mathematical synthesis. When the cinematic apparatus, like a Kantian Zusammennehmung, “assembles at once all past events . . . without placing in succession, but by co- presenting them in a virtual simultaneity,” what we have here is a kind of machinic inanimation or still life, an interruption of the synthesis of the before/after series and, hence, in cinema, of images in motion. If, as we shall see, the acinema concerns immobilization and excess mobilization—in effect, “a-temporalité” (atemporality) or “la stase atemporelle” (atemporal stasis)—which interrupt and suspend the synthetic act of comprehension, then the acinema operates in the manner of a cinematic sublime. Attempting to explore temporal sequence apart from any schema related to form, shape, figure, or inscription, Lyotard observes, in “On the Constitution of Time through Color in the Recent Works of Albert Ayme,” how the spatial simultaneity of painting can produce a sense of temporality through “a logic of the passage from one colour to another,” likening this process to both cinematography and Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness. Mobilizing sculptor Richard Serra’s minimalist film Color Aid (1970-71), which presents in a 36-minute random sequence a stack of colored cardboard cards, this paper will attempt to rethink Stiegler’s arche-cinema, his “cinematography of consciousness,” via the apprehension and comprehension of color.
Erin Obodiac received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at UC Irvine, the University of Leeds, Cornell University, SUNY Cortland, and SUNY Albany. Her writings assemble residual questions from the deconstructive “legacy” with emergent discourses on technics and animality, media ecology, and machinic subjectivity. She is currently completing a book called The Transhuman Interface, which repositions critical theory and deconstruction within the history of cybernetics and machinic life. The Transhuman Interface is a result of the research project “Robots at Risk: Transgenic Art and Corporate Personhood,” which Obodiac began as a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. The project and accompanying book manuscript examine the conceptual antecedents of machinic subjectivity and automation as well as the nascent technosphere that ushered in our geologic era, the anthropocene.
Durafour, Jean-Miche. Jean-François Lyotard: Questions Au Cinema. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009.
Grammel, Soren. Richard Serra: Films and Videotapes. Manual No. 7, Kunstmuseum Basel, 2017.
Husserl, Edmund. (1964) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917). New York: Springer, 1992.
Jones, Graham and Ashley Woodward eds. Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Kant, Emmanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Acinema,” in The Lyotard Reader. Trans. Paisley N. Livingston.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
–. “L’idée d’un film souverain,” in Misère de la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 2000.
–. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
–. “On the Constitution of Time through Color in the Recent Works of Albert Ayme,” in Textes dispersés II: artistes contemporains/ Miscellaneous Texts II: Contemporary Artists. Ed. Herman Parret. Trans. Vlad Ionescu, Erica Harris, and Peter W. Milne.
Brussels: Leuvan University Press, 2012.
Obodiac, Erin. “Autoaffection and Lyotard’s Cinematic Sublime,” in Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard. Eds. Julie Gaillard, Claire Nouvet and Mark Stoholski. Londaon Nad New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Serra, Richard, dir. Color Aid. U.S.A.: 1970/71.
–. Hand Catching Lead. U.S.A.: 1968.
–. Hand Lead Fulcrum. U.S.A.: 1968.
–. Hands Scraping. U.S.A.: 1968.
–. Hands Tied. U.S.A.: 1968.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
–.. Technics and Time III: Cinematic Time and Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
–. “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema.” Screening the Past 38. http://www.screen- ingthepast.com/2013/06/the-organology-of-dreams-and-arche-cinema/, 2013.
7.5 Alien Aesthesis
At the beginning of Post-cinematic Embodiment, Shane Denson walks the reader through Ian Cheng’s Emissary Sunsets the Self, a media art installation in which “a real AI plays a diegetic AI, and the videogame plays itself, usurping the role of the human player now left feeling sidelined and strangely disembodied.” As Denson points out, this is a useful description of the contemporary condition of the sensuous body. Denson’s discorrelation trilogy (my term for the books, not his) is an excellent example of a growing tendency in critical media studies to frame the relation between the human and the digital by centering how computational media inhabits the body. In his work, computational media works the threshold between embodiment and environment in surprising and disconcerting ways. The algorithmic microtemporalities of computer clock time and the statistical fields of object emergence that govern the digital surround are so removed from human perceptual frameworks that “embodiment,” such as it is, inhabits an aesthetic remainder of a fed forward world. That’s not nothing, of course. It’s all humans have, and it’s the “untoward land” on which we build our collective projects. The global conditions of our terrifying politics suggests that it might not be fertile ground.
The rise of AI generated “content” has broken the unnerving and unheimlich qualities of this situation into mainstream discourse. Machine-made media (especially videos, chats, and songs) has turned the Turing Test into a paranoid and compulsory parlor game. Users are repeatedly enjoined to guess what is made by “real” people and what is “artificial,” and we can’t reliably do it. This has tendentially deadly consequences that are exacerbated by the idea that the problem is new. AI media has shown us that, when it comes to computation, humans can’t trust our senses. But, as Clough argues, when it comes to cognitive work, we’ve been congenitally misrecognizing digital media since its inception because we imagine that humans and computers are grounded in the same world.
In this paper, I take the ontoepistemological status implied by “feeling sidelined and strangely disembodied” and radicalize it. Rather than think the “post-cinematic” body as entangled with the computational, I propose a chasmic alienation. Drawing especially on Beatrice Fazi’s work, I argue that computational media proceeds via an alien aesthesis to which human sensoria and cognition are foreclosed. But, contra Eugenie Brinkema, I want to suggest that this foreclosure does not excise the body from thinking the computational. Instead, by grounding my critique in Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick’s, and Denise da Silva’s black feminist and poethical traditions, I argue that media theory now must account for how the body is enacted and enfleshed by the alienness of computation. This move demands an ontological reorientation that posits “the human” as arriving afterdatafication, as something like the fleshly haunting of data clouds.
R. Joshua Scannell is assistant professor of Media Studies at The New School. He is the author of The Carceral Surround (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press) and Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World.
Amaro, Ramon. The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021.
Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Software Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015.
Brinkema, Eugenie. Life-Destroying Diagrams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
———. The Forms of the Affects. Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2014.
Clarke, Bruce. “Heinz von Foerster’s Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory.” In Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, 34–61. Science and Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
———. The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. 1 edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images, 2020.
———. Post-Cinematic Bodies. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Meson Press Eg, 2023.
———. Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. Transcript-Verlag, 2014.
Fazi, M. Beatrice. “Can a Machine Think (Anything New)? Automation beyond Simulation.” AI & SOCIETY 34, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 813–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0821-0.
———. Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018.
———. “Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418770243.
———. “Incomputable Aesthetics: Open Axioms of Contingency.” Computational Culture, no. 5 (January 15, 2016). http://computationalculture.net/incomputable-aesthetics-open-axioms-of-contingency/.
Franklin, Seb. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Galloway, Alexander. Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2021.
Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Posthumanities 31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Galloway, Alexander R., Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Trios. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Hansen, Mark B. N. “Our Predictive Condition, or, Prediction in the Wild.” In The Non-Human Turn, edited by Mark Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.
Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Harney, Stefano, Fred Moten, Zun Lee, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. All Incomplete. Colchester New York Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2021.
Hodges, Andrew, and Douglas Hofstadter. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game – Updated Edition. Revised edition. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. NYU Press, 2020.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Spec Acts: Reading Form in Recurrent Neural Networks.” ELH 88, no. 2 (2021): 361–86.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories, 2021.
———, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Parisi, Luciana. Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space. Technologies of Lived Abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts l London, England: The MIT Press, 2013.
———. “Critical Computation: Digital Automata and General Artificial Thinking.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 2 (March 2019): 89–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418818889.
———. “Xeno-Patterning.” Angelaki 24, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1568735.
Parisi, Luciana, and Ezekiel Dixon-Román. “Data Capitalism, Sociogenic Prediction, and Recursive Indeterminacies.” In Data Publics. Routledge, 2020.
Shaviro, Steven. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
———. Post Cinematic Affect, 2010.
———. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Posthumanities 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Silva, Denise Ferreira da. Toward a Global Idea of Race. First Edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Silva, Denise Ferreira Da. Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.
Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. 1st edition. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Towns, Armond R. On Black Media Philosophy. Oakland California: University of California Press, 2022.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Panel 8: Anxiety and Adaptation
Saturday November 8, 3:30pm-5:00pm
Chair: Joshua Synenko
| Marcel O’Gorman | Technofailure: On Innovation and Maladaptation |
| Hannah Dick | Is Media Theory Religious Theory? |
| Dalia Barghouty | Desire, Will, and Media Theory |
| Karl Manis | Reading Unreadable Media: Fictional Interfaces with the Database |
8.1 Technofailure: On Innovation and Maladaptation
If we follow the story as told by Bernard Stiegler, the human was invented as a result of failure: Epimetheus, who was entrusted with giving gifts of self-preservation to all creatures on earth, ran out of stock before he got to the humans, leaving us “naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed.” Of course, Prometheus stepped in to save the day, but the “fault of Epimetheus,” as Stiegler puts it, forever haunts the invention of the human. Our Promethean techno-heroism can be a destructive force that threatens our very species.
There is another way of telling this story. If we turn to Stiegler’s daughter Barbara (who does not associate with her father’s techno-philosophical legacy) innovation is a battle against species maladaptation. By tracing how evolutionary theory shaped the political-economic debates of Dewey and Lippman, Stiegler shows that the innovation ecology is an unstoppable political and economic force that must engage in social programming to overcome the problem of “human lag.”
In this discussion, I will bridge the gap between the two Stieglers by focusing on the concept of technofailure. Drawing in part on my recent interview with Barbara Stiegler, I will argue that media theory must work to render transparent the black-boxed neoliberal social programs that constantly “nudge” humans to adapt technologies that they neither desire nor require for self-preservation.
Perhaps predictably, I will draw on Generative AI as a case study in technofailure, focusing on policies put forth by governments and institutions for the sake of “accelerating AI adoption.” Following a discussion of human failure (technological maladaptation), I will turn to critical failure (the problem of media theorists critiquing the systems that foster them); engineering failure (the problem of colonial-Promethean worldbuilding); mission failure (the problem of ethics-washing); and natural failure (existential risk in a more-than-human context). The result will be a broad introduction to technofailure as a framework for understanding, critiquing, and resisting the extractive social Darwinism at the heart of neoliberal techno capitalism.
Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses, leads collaborative projects, and directs workshops that combine research/creation and critical media studies. O’Gorman has published widely about the impacts of technology, including his books E-Crit and Necromedia 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. This experience guides the creative hands-on methods espoused by the Critical Media Lab and outlined in detail in his most recent book Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology. O’Gorman’s most recent research looks at how critical and inclusive design methods might help tackle some of the ethical and environmental issues faced by contemporary technoculture.
Stiegler, Barbara. Il faut s’adapter. Sur un nouvel impératif politique. Paris: Gallimard, 2019.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.
8.2 Is Media Theory Religious Theory?
Twenty years ago, Jeremy Stolow advanced a provocative and foundational premise in Theory, Culture & Society when he conceived of “Religion and/as Media” (2005). As his title suggests, Stolow advocated moving beyond thinking in terms of ‘religion and media’ (or, ‘religion and the media’) and towards understanding mediation as an inherent feature of religious meaning-making and expression. This entails beginning from the premise that religion is media. Stolow writes,
religion always encompasses techniques and technologies that we think of as ‘media’, just as, by the same token, every medium necessarily participates in the realm of the transcendent, if nothing else than by its inability to be fully subject to the instrumental intentions of its users. (2005, 125)
This latter premise – that mediation is religious, insofar as the ethereal, metaphysical, and existential properties of media escape empirical observation and technical description – is what I take up in this paper, asking to what extent theorization about media is always to some extent a form of religious theorization.
This current runs through the subfield of religion and media and has been taken up more recently in elemental and existential media studies, which, in the words of John Durham Peters, looks at “media in terms of being” (2015, 10; see also Lagerkvist 2022). However, the religious capacities of mediation have not been fully or explicitly taken up across media studies, in part owing to the field’s reliance on a ‘secular’ form of cultural studies and Marxist critical theory.
Further, an emphasis on empirical media studies, as well as what James Carey called the transmission model of communication, has obfuscated some of the religious meanings that inhere to media. For Carey, “the historic religious undercurrent has never been eliminated from our thought. From the telegraph to the computer the same sense of profound possibility for moral improvement is present whenever these machines are invoked” (2008 [1989], 14-15). Further to this, novel media forms are accompanied with a profusion of religious metaphors and meanings, from 19th century anxieties around the disembodying effects of remote and asynchronous communication via telegraphy, photography, and recorded sound, through to contemporary hopes and fears surrounding so-called generative Artificial Intelligence and its potential to enhance or displace human life. The ethereality and opacity of mediation has resulted in a proliferation of discourse around the existential, ethical, and metaphysical implications of media forms.
In this paper I consider informal media theory which emphasizes these metaphysical dimensions alongside the formal media theory of the Frankfurt School. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, I consider the tacit forms of religious theorizing embedded in critical theory. I ask which specific religious inheritances are invoked in this current of thought, and what implications this might have for our contemporary understanding of media. By identifying and naming this religious current as such I aim to contribute to work which contextualizes ‘foundational’ texts in media studies and situates them within their cultural frames of reference.
Hannah Dick (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on how religion is mediated in and through political, legal, and cultural discourses. She has published in journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Feminist Legal Studies,and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She co-edited a 2021 special issue of Media Theory, “Into the Air” (Vol. 5 No. 2), reflecting on the 20th anniversary of John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air (1999). She has also spent many years teaching introductory media theory courses at both New York University and at Carleton.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969 [1935]. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 1–26. New York: Schocken Books.
Carey, James W. 2008 [1989]. Communication As Culture, Revised Edition: Essays on Media and Society. Oxford, UK: Taylor & Francis Group.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. “Notes on Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly 25 (4): 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2008.01017.x.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger. 2006. Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Ignatius Press.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 1972 [1944]. Dialectic Of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum.
Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2022. Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peters, John. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stolow, Jeremy. 2005. “Religion and/as Media.” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (4): 119–45.
Stolow, Jeremy. 2012. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press.
Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna. 2021. When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture. New York: NYU Press.
8.3 Desire, Will, and Media Theory
The concept of desire as a term used within discursive trajectories of cultural and social theory (and its associated metaphors and inscriptions) has served as a demarcator of distributions of power differentiated throughout social and media technological systems. Theorists of technological mediation have long been concerned with these inscriptions of desire as a means to tell the story of technogenesis. Given the way these metaphors of desire are employed, interpreted, and circulated through academic and theoretical discourses, the conceptualization of desire as chains or strata that inform subjectivity ultimately do little in addressing the emotional tumult of the “posthuman” self – a self who, historically theorized as “multiplicitous” and “assemblaged,” at once materially and semiotically constituted by one’s many entangled relations, is imbricated again and again in these circuits of desire and continuously finds themselves diagnosed with an array of maladies: “schizophrenia” (Deleuze & Guattari), “symbolic misery” (Stiegler), “depressive hedonia” (Fisher), “anxiety” and the resulting state of “being screwed” (Hodge), for example (although this list is certainly not exhaustive), with cures – often vaguely or speculatively – gesturing towards an outside, a potential social system beyond capitalist constraints. These theorizations become stringent and leave the malaised self without reprieve, ultimately “suffocated” (Stiegler) within desire’s knotty systemizations.
Revisiting Mark B.N. Hansen’s criticism of media technology’s discursive reductions throughout critical theory as well as his appraisal of Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of libidinal economy, I suggest that while media theory as a field has since addressed a conflation between the discursive and machinic, it has not directly confronted its continual reliance on frameworks of desire that undergird this conflation. Neither has it explicitly accounted for the limits of desire as an employed concept that underscores contemporary subjects’ encapsulation in machinic feeling – a psychic condition wrought by continuous identification with one’s externalized desires and facilitated vis-à-vis media technological formations under capitalism – which continues to influence and shape contemporary subjectivity and selfhood.
I propose that the will, often conflated with desire, suggests a simultaneous relinquishing and acceptance of one’s environs and surroundings, emerging as something conceptually distinct from desire’s circuits towards a different orientation of the self. As a starting point, I turn to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualizations of will. Attention towards both is not meant to enforce notions of Western philosophical canon, but is in part meant to revise what I see as the tendency for Nietzsche’s work in particular to be co-opted in the contemporary cultural imaginary. (This co-optation not excluding tech accelerationists and oligarchs who frequently employ self-help rhetoric advocating for the conflation of “will” as “will-power,” a misconceptualization that becomes instrumentalized for subjugating ends in determining one’s subjectivity.) In that vein, this project opens space to reclaim will as a transformative concept in self-expression rather than as a vehicle of domination and absolutism. An emerging focus on the will also complements and advances media theory’s broader continuing trends towards theorizing media as milieu, beyond networked and object/subject relations, and engaging cosmotechnics and politics that extend beyond Western philosophical ontologies and epistemologies of mediation.
Bibliography
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
Hansen, M B N. (2000) Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing. University of Michigan Press.
Hansen, M B N. (2017) ‘Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?’ Boundary 2. 44(1), pp. 167-190, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3725929
Hodge, J J. (2021) ‘Screwed: Anxiety and the Digital Ends of Anticipation’ in A. Volmar & K. Stine (eds.) Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities. Amsterdam University Press, pp. 205-220: doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048550753-013
Hui, Y. & P. Lemmens (eds.) (2021) Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge.
Kittler, F. (2012). ‘In the Wake of the Odyssey,’ trans. C. Neaveill & L. Powell. Cultural Politics 8(3), pp. 413–27.
Nietzsche, F. (1982) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann. In The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Penguin.
Schopenhauer, A. (2021) ‘On Will in Nature’ in D. Cartwright, E. Erdmann, C. Janaway(eds. and trans.) On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.
Stiegler, B. (2011) “Suffocated Desire, Or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption,” trans. J. Rossouw. Parrhesia, 13, pp.52-61.
Stiegler, B. (2014) Symbolic Misery. Volume 1. The Hyper-industrial Epoch, trans. B. Norman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.
Biography:
Dalia Barghouty is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Davis. Much of her research focuses on interpreting beauty and wellness cultures and aesthetics across social media platforms.
8.4 Reading Unreadable Media: Fictional Interfaces with the Database
What forms of encounter are possible with today’s mass quantities of data? What kind of “meeting,” as Sean Cubitt (2020) asks, can there possibly be “with agglutinations of materials far too vast for anyone to experience all of them?” In this paper, I investigate the cultural configuration of this impossible encounter by considering “database” and “interface” as cultural forms that evoke the opacity of contemporary media environments. Today, it’s abundantly clear that databases are more than just structured collections of data for the computer age that eschew the narrative dominant of previous media like print and cinema (Manovich 2001). Prevalent emblems of control like opaque algorithms, blackboxed product design, predictive modeling, and big data at scale imbue data structures with a sense of unreadable totality (Cubitt; Chun 2021). At the same time, interfaces—instances of user contact with media—often only afford a myopic view that is profoundly determined by corporate power structures (Munster 2006; Chun 2011; Galloway 2021). Whether through sheer vastness or occlusive design, networked digital media are often necessarily provincializing insofar as they consign users to a limited view of their scope and operations. On a cultural level, this often manifests as an anxiety of unreadability: a pervasive sense of the opacity and illegibility of contemporary media. Yet if we shift the focus from the system to the subject, the hegemonic modes of unreadability are accompanied by what Michel de Certeau (1984) would call “tactical” ones: to be unreadable is to take flight from a database’s mandates of “total participation” and “universal capture” (Galloway 2021).
By examining a range of what I’ll call “database fictions,” I trace these poles of control and liberation that accompany unreadable media. In their attempts to fictionalize contemporary media use, these texts dramatize encounters with databases and interfaces. Whether through game mechanics premised on simple search engine queries (Barlow 2015), anxieties about corporate big data initiatives (McCarthy 2015), or clashes between planetary ecology and technocapitalist logics of visual representation (Harvey 2023), these database fictions confront players/readers with the ends of readability—the provincialization of human comprehension in the face of totalizing systems of mediation. Nevertheless, these humbling encounters also probe the critical potential of unreadability. By depicting the idiosyncratic data-gathering of their characters, and by enticing similar behaviors from their readers, these narratives brush databases against indeterminate instances of interface. They precipitate what Anna Munster (2006) has called the “[g]aps and remainders” that mitigate against seamless connection and standardization. Their ambiguity and humility pry open moments of “strategic illegibility” or “glitch” (Russell 2018; Denson 2020), instances where mediation falters, procedures break down, and other modes of reading become available. In other words, these fictional encounters with databases undercut systemic unreadability with a more modest kind: the unreadability of user movements, sensations, and whims that don’t quite fit pre-existing logics of mediation. Ultimately, I suggest, a theory of fictional media might eschew resemblance and representation, and instead look for unpredictable encounters where imagination intervenes, where prescriptive forms of mediation evoking totality are unsettled by interfacial uncertainty and surprise.
Karl Manis is assistant professor of Media Studies (limited term) at Trent University Durham, where he teaches cinema, media history, and digital culture. His research examines the overlaps and tensions between aesthetic experience and technology, particularly how contemporary fiction imagines phenomenologies of media use. His writing on comics, postmodernism, literary sounds, and styles of reading has appeared or is forthcoming in Critique, Novel, Sound Studies, and the collection Music In/As Literature.
Barlow, Sam (2015). Her Story. Steam.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2011). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Cubitt, Sean (2020). Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Denson, Shane (2020). Discorrelated Images. Durham: Duke University Press.
Galloway, Alexander R. (2021). Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. London: Verso.
Harvey, Samantha (2023). Orbital. New York: Grove Press.
Horton, Zachary (2021). The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
McCarthy, Tom (2015). Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape.
Munster, Anna (2006). Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Lebanon, NH: Darthmouth College Press.
Russel, Legacy (2018). Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.
Closing Remarks
Rob Shields, University of Alberta
