Action at a Distance
John Durham Peters, Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt
How are human actions shaped by the materiality of media?
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.
Tags
Film and Media, Film and Media, 2020 Humanities and Arts catalog, 2020 Social Sciences catalog, 2020 SHOT, SHOT Media, MLA 2021, MLA In Search of Media Series, MLA Media Studies, MLA Digital Culture, MLA Theory, SCMS 2021, SCMS In Search of Media series, SCMS digital culture, SCMS media theory, SCMS communications
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
About This Book
Related Publications

