Overzicht Media Time and Space, hoorcollege + werkcollege + films
Nature and/as Media, week 1
What is time and space?
2 basic approaches to understanding:
1. Quantitate measurable quantities
2. Qualitative interrogating into subjective models of how time and space are
experienced, memories of the past, perceptions of the present, a sense of place, of how
you orient your body in space, how you think about your relationship to the rest of the
planet. Conscious …. To the present
In dialogue with one another.
Innovations in the quantitative side have powerful effects on the qualitative side of space.
There is no way to divide the subjective and the objective.
Claim: Rather time and space are constituted by the mediation between these levels, between
facts and experience. Time and space are the mediation between these things.
1. How are media and space seen as questions of mediation?
2. How do we trace changes in this mediation?
Time and space are difficult to describe in themselves, because they are so familiar, very
familiar infrastructures.
Time and space are what we take for granted for the background of experience of such.
McLuhan: David Foster Wallace ‘This is Water’ (analogy)
A thought experiment in the time and space of media – Peterson
Media profoundly shape or constitute our perception of time and space we must entertain a
great expansion of media
‘‘The question of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same question’’
(Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p. 51) Elemental media
Greatly expanding or broadening what we understand by media
Central claim: Media are more…. Our natural history (Peters, p. 52)
Most important claim of the class as a whole.
Ecological: About our experience of the environment
Existential: Questions about life and death and so on
Existential definition of media: media are simply the means, the means by which any form of
life can exist.
DNA is also media, historical, how it inscribes previous diseases etc.
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,We are not only surrounded by the history-rich artifacts of applied intelligence: we also
are such artifacts… (Belangrijk)
The concept of Media
The method the development of the word, the notion of media already contains this entire
argument.
- Medium has always meant an element, environment or vehicle in the middle of things
- Media is 20 century media, we have to look before that, before that it was already a
large concept. Media is imbedded in every aspect of our environment
Classical roots (peters, p. 46)
- Aristotle’s concept of (to periekhon) named a ‘surrounding’ or environment which
expressed ‘‘sympathy and harmony between the universe and man.’’
- Aristotle’s concept of (to metaxu), the in-between, was used to posit a transparent
substance that enabled the eyes to connect with objects.
- The concept of medium and milieu are intimately linked, both deriving from the latin
word medius, middle.
Medieval and modern transformation
Quotes: p. 46-47
Smuggles in the term medium… of seeing…
Ever since, media…. Contact at a distance
Media is the thing that allows our eyes to make contact with the world.
19th century
- Medium slowly comes to refer to the conveyance of specifically human signals
Key moments: media became to describe a person who could communicate with the dead: a
spirit medium. How can you communicate with the spiritual world, the invisible world?
Photography and sound recordings are tightly intertwined with the spiritual world.
Sound recording: the idea was to record the voices of your ancestors, to preserve your voice
for later generations. Not to record music. To make contact with the dead.
20th century
- Comes to mean mass media of radio, television, film, newspapers and magazines
- But also recovers an environmental meaning as an all-pervasive ‘‘ecology’’
- Money, power and love can also be media
(Peters, p. 51- The crossroads of humans…. Them in the face)
We are conditioned by conditions we condition. feedback group, it is hard to understand
how we are created by the things we create.
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,‘‘Artificiality is natural to human beings.’’ Walter Ong
A shift from an oral culture to a literate culture
Andre Leroi-Gourhan: cortical picture of voluntary motor function
Once humans started walking on two feet, it freed up their mouths and hands and they could
develop new techniques.
Those techniques have to do with communication. It happened trough posture.
What has become common sense? What has fallen into the background? How do you make
the familiar strange, something that you can once again pay attention to?
1990’s: the attention society/economy the most important commodity is the time and
attention of users. Monetization of your attention. All of the different entities are fighting for
your attention. If it is free, then you are the product.
Lo and behold – Werner Herzog
The aim of the film: the history and the ramification of the internet for normal modern life.
The internet as the infrastructures of all infrastructures.
Seminar week 1
Heidegger: philosopher, German: ‘‘The essence of technology is nothing technological.’’
The essence has to do with how we are in the world. How it structures social life, being in the
world. What does it mean to already be thrown in the world?
Cloud: temporal and spatial, material and not material, more of a phenomenon than an object.
analogy: how do you capture the essence of the internet?
Movie – Lo and behold:
- Artificiality to the aesthetic
- AI, artificial intelligence, the internet extending into objects in the world
- Ethical aspects are missing in the movie: the football robots are really killing machines
funded by the military
60s/ 70s: The internet origin
Counter cultural revolution – distribution of knowledge: the hippie era
What’s funding it is the Cold War preserve command and control in the case of a nuclear
strike top down control
Radiation disease part:
If you were suffering from a vague disease before the internet you would go to the doctor.
Now the internet creates these conditions because it gives it a name. You can find people
online with the same conditions. Radiation disease leads to radical estrangement.
McLuhan and Peterson: Whenever you add an extension you also create a new vulnerability.
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, Ambivalent: the internet has a social aspect and an anti-social aspect. To connect people and
to isolate people.
Identity on the internet: Complete anonymity and also extreme personal identification through
metadata.
AI: the ethics around AI: human to human but also human to machine. (caretakes, cars etc.) A
Google car killed a person in America.
Pain is extremely useful for learning. Ethical question: do you want to introduce AI’s who
feel pain to learn? But also, why would you introduce pain which didn’t exist before?
The concept of media
Peters history, medium, milieu, medius
Society 20th century definition
It went from physics to human signals.
In our society: a decrease of space, faster travelling. It makes time experienced as the now, the
horizon is the instant.
Bol.com/ Amazon It all should be instant, no time to wait.
Media and/as Infrastructures - Week 2
‘‘To be modern means to live within and by means of infrastructures.’’ (Paul Edwards)
infrastructures become essential for the meaning of modernity
‘‘Media have a world-leveraging power’’ Peters
‘‘Mind and matter are married, and mind is exterior to brain’’ Peters
Radical claim: Mind and matter are inseparable, they are bound up with one another.
There is a distinction mind is immaterial, to have existence in the world they need to
depend on matter.
My mind is depended on the pen, (analogy from class) when you lose it, it feels like an
amputation
Cognition thought mind is always an extension in the world, it is always out there in the
world.
What is an infrastructure: that which stands under, the structure which enables us to do
whatever we are doing. It tends to go without notice. Task is to bring them into visibility, to
bring them into our attention.
Electricity what enables the simple interface is a complex expensive, layered system.
Commodities that you consume depend on an infrastructure (coffee is part of the financial
infrastructure)
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