Action at a Distance
John Durham Peters, Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt
Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial.
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Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial.
Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.
$18.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1009-9
104 pages, 13 b&w photos, 5 x 7, June 2020
John Durham Peters is Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University.
Florian Sprenger is Professor for Virtual Humanities at Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany.
Christina Vagt is Assistant Professor of European Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Contents
Series Foreword
Introduction
1. Temporalities of Instantaneity: Electric Wires and the Media of Immediacy
2. A Cornucopia of Meanwhiles
3. Physics and Esthetics: Simulation as Action at a Distance
Authors