Variations on Media Thinking
Expanding on Siegfried Zielinski’s groundbreaking inquiry into “deep time” of the media, these essays foster the eminent media theorist’s unique method of expanded hermeneutics, which means for him interpreting technical artifacts as essential parts of our cultural lives. Including many previously untranslated and scarce essays, these “written time machines” further diversify Zielinski’s insight into the hidden layers of media development.
Historians of technology know that any tool is also an instrument of exploration, experiment, and simulation. Siegfried Zielinski reminds us that any technology is also a generator of wonder. In fact, Zielinski does not write media history, he writes world history through the generative lens of media as machines of speculation and imagination. This is a material history of dissent, heretical hermeneutics, and electrified alchemic curiosity.
Matteo Pasquinelli, Karlsruhe University of Art and Design
Expanding on Siegfried Zielinski’s groundbreaking inquiry into “deep time” of the media, the essays in Variations on Media Thinking further the eminent media theorist’s unique method of expanded hermeneutics, which means for him interpreting technical artifacts as essential parts of our cultural lives. Covering such topics as the televisualized “Holocaust,” the ubiquity of media today, the Internet, the genealogy of sound art, and history’s first hacker movement, these essays further diversify Zielinski’s insight into the hidden layers of media development, which he first articulated in his pioneering work Deep Time of the Media.
Including many previously untranslated and scarce essays, these “written time machines” open new lines of investigation for cultural scholars. From the automata of the Arabic-Islamic Renaissance (800–1200) to the largest and loudest techno-event ever, known as The Symphony of Sirens—which transformed Baku in 1922 into an immense music box of modern noise—Variations on Media Thinking covers Zielinski’s inquiries since 1975. Richly illustrated and full of provocation, brilliant insight, and fascinating research, this volume is perfect for students of media archaeology, philosophy, and technology, as well as any adventurous, rigorous thinkers engaged with culture and media.
Historians of technology know that any tool is also an instrument of exploration, experiment, and simulation. Siegfried Zielinski reminds us that any technology is also a generator of wonder. In fact, Zielinski does not write media history, he writes world history through the generative lens of media as machines of speculation and imagination. This is a material history of dissent, heretical hermeneutics, and electrified alchemic curiosity.
Matteo Pasquinelli, Karlsruhe University of Art and Design
Zielinski’s work represents a qualitative tradition that focuses on the long-term and more immediate impacts of media technologies and programming on human inquiry and cultural progress. The essays provide insights about the capabilities of media as a tool for personal use and a channel of communication.
CHOICE
Variations on Media Thinking provides a historically capacious introduction to the work of one of today's most important theorists of media and media archaeology.
Symploke
A much needed selection of Zielinski’s texts for non-German speakers, made of eighteen translated essays, produced over several decades.
Neural
Not merely a collection of interesting discoveries in an alternative archive of art, science and media, but an inquiry into an-archaeologies.
Machinology
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Generators of Surprise: Diverse Media Thinking
I. Provocations
1. History as Entertainment and Provocation: The TV Series Holocaust in West Germany
2. Media Archaeology: Searching for Different Orders of Envisioning
3. Seven Items on the Net
4. Toward a Dramaturgy of Differences
5. From Territories to Intervals: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Economy of Time/the Time
6. On the Difficulty to Think Twofold in One
with Nils Röller
7. The Art of Design: (Manifesto) On the State of Affairs and Their Agility
8. “Too Many Images!—We Have to React”: Theses toward an Apparatical Prosthesis for Seeing—in the Context of Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma
II. Particular Archaeologies
9. The Audiovisual Time Machine: Concluding Theses on the Cultural Technique of the Video Recorder
10. War and Media: Marginalia of a Genealogy, in Legends and Images
11. Theologi electrici: A Few Passages
12. Historic Modes of the Audiovisual Apparatus
13. “TO ALL!” The Struggle of the German Workers Radio Movement 1918–1933
14. Urban Music Box, Urban Hearing: Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens in Baku and Moscow 1922/23—A Media-Archaeological Miniature
15. How One Sees
16. Lüology, Techno-Souls, Artificial Paradises: Fragments of an An-Archaeology of Sound Arts
17. Designing and Revealing: Some Aspects of a Genealogy of Projection
18. Allah’s Automata: Where Ancient Oriental Learning Intersects with Early Modern Europe; A Media-Archaeological Miniature by Way of Introduction
Publication History
Index
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