Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine

Description

Wolfgang Ernst’s new work, Technológos in Being, in its explicit media-scientific approach, aligns with the politics of the thinking media series to publish innovative works that advance media studies towards the ‘new sciences.’ Ernst’s invites readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies: the conviction that an extended understanding of "medium" needs to include a concept of materiality that focuses on "non- human" agencies as well. The book grounds media analysis radically in the technological apparatuses, relays, transistors, hard- and software, to precisely locate the scenes, operations and frictions where reasoning logos and ‘informable’ matter interfere. Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures Preface: The Structure of Investigating Technológos Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction: Radical media archaeology Part One: Radical media archaeology as a method of media science, and as techno-logical practice Chapter 2: Towards a more radical understanding of media as technology and logotechnics Rethinking ‘technology’ beyond Heidegger Techno-mathematical implementations: Disembodied lógos Arché and lógos of electronic media Materialist media archaeology Radical technoanalysis: Theory and method Chapter 3: The hands of lógos: ‘Digitality’, literally Relieving the optical signal from human subjectivity: Case study photography Beyond anthropocentrism in the ‘hands on media’ approach: ‘Manipulation’, and technology Typewriting: The de-coupled relation of the hand to writing When lógos encounters the machine: The discretizing keyboard Digitality instead of the whole ‘hand’: Fingers and numbers Chapter 4: Human performance vs. technical operation: Mechanically informed music from the past Automatic invariance: Baroque music machines Audio-technical ‘archiving’ of musical presence Phono-graphical analysis vs. hermeneutic interpretation Techno-logical tradition of media music Chapter 5: (Re)enactments of technológos Analytic media diagrammatics Techno-scenic knowledge: Media theatre Re-enacting the technological past Manual experimentation of time with machines Symbolical re-enactment of machines: From Yugo back to Babbage Chapter 6: Technical logification of the optical image Escaping the control of lógos: Video as a material memory medium Digital logification of the video image Video compression Human and/or machine ‘vision’: Computer graphics Is there a lógos within technical images? Machine vision Chapter 7: Discretely addressing media artefacts ‘Post-digital’ nostalgia for materiality? Towards a redefinition of the ‘archaeological’ artefact Archaeologizing the present: The alógos of video noise, and digital sound compression Object and agency of media archaeology: The Restauration of early television recordings ‘E.T.’ as topic of computer (game) archaeology, and microprocessor ageing Really ‘forensic’ media archivology: Reading a ROM Part Two: Radical media archaeology in close alliance with operative logotechnics (computing) Chapter 8: Technológos from action: The matter of computation and the (with)inhuman symbolic machine Machine operations: Redefining the ‘human’ from within Mechanization of the calculating mind: Karsakov 1832 The calculating human as a computational machine ‘it’self Where algorithmic reasoning actually takes place: Techno-mathematical computing Algorithmic computation in media archaeological perspective How close can computing come to the material world? Chapter 9: Time-discrete computing as articulation of technológos Listening to computational time Challenging the ‘time’ axis: Computation Lógos in technical being: Actual computing Counting (and) time Time-discrete technical procedures: Cinematography, computing Chapter 10: A new kind of ‘love for lógos’: Material media philology as a more radical understanding of software Media philology as critical enquiry of digital humanities practice Operative encounters of lógos and matter: Algorithms as ‘software’ The unexpected behaviour of code ‘Text’ in the age of computer-based literacy: Software Second-order lógos? The literary code comment Digital anachronism Chapter 11: Experimental technológos: Humanities of the digital ‘Digital humanities’ avant la Lettre: Archaeology proper and techno-mathematical reason Counting by numbers instead of story-telling: The lógos of Markov chains in information aesthetics ‘Hermeneutics’ after Shannon: Algorithmic experimentation of text and speech Rooting digital humanities: Techno-mathematics New methods of content retrieval: Algorithmic data identification ‘Active archives’ The self-organizing archive Media archivology: Kittler’s case Chapter 12: Informatized matter: Computing for and as architecture Architectural matter and informational lógos The cybernetization of architecture Architecture in terms of information aesthetics Opening/closing ‘gates’: The flip-flop Towards an archaeology of digital architectures from within Algorithmicized architectures Architecturally embedded lógos vs. autonomous algorithmic thought Computational vs. computing ‘architectures’ Resubstantiation of code into matter: 3D printing Chapter 13: There is no ‘memory’ for technológos: Digital storage beyond the ‘memory’ metaphor, and its return in/as machine learning Only in quotation marks: Digital ‘memory’ from a technological view Not yet memory, or ‘memory’ no more? Intermediary storage, delay lines Neural ‘memory’, reformulated in technical terms The return of ‘memory’ in artificial intelligence A media archaeological prototype of machine learning: The ‘perceptron’ Human and/or nonhuman sorting of images by association: Pockets Full of Memories Chapter 14: Against metaphysics in artificial intelligence: A reminder of its technological ground The neocybernetic model and its electro-technical a priori ‘From’ machine analysis ‘to’ statistical AI? Neural nets and/or the algorithmic approach to intelligence How ‘deep’ is machine intelligence? ‘Emergent’ artificial knowledge and the metaphysical risk When the human voice is revealed as technológos: The anthropomorphic allure of machine ‘learning’ Chapter 15: Preliminary conclusions from the question concerning technológos Arché-lógos, technically revealed from matter itself Does technológos still matter? Discussing the limits of technological analysis Technológos within the Anthropocene For a techno-logically renewed media materialism References Index