Action at a Distance

2020
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Authors:

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.

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.

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