en-us http://www.mediatrans.ca Conference en-us Media Theory in North America and German-Speaking Europe http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Opening_Remarks.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Norm Friesen and Richard Cavell Opening Remarks http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Katherine_Hayles.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Katherine Hayles Katherine Hayles is Professor of English in the English Department at the University of California Los Angeles in the US. Her many books include Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Writing Machines (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002). http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Tristan_Thielmann.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Tristan Thielmann Since we have been interacting with a gigantic, global, disorganized but incessantly expanding mass of “born-digital” data and cultural content in the last decade, German media theory has lost its international supremacy. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Michael_Darroch.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Michael Darroch In the context of examining the continuing influence of Toronto School thinkers on contemporary theories of media and the materialities of communication in German-speaking Europe, it is vital to recognise transatlantic influences on the development of the Toronto School in the first place. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Sybille_Kramer.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 SYBILLE KRÄMER Dr. Krämer is professor of theoretical philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. She is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin, and member of the panel of the European Research Council. She has been a guest professor at the University of Zurich, the Technical University of Vienna and the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. Her areas of interest include the philosophy of language, media and mediality, theorizing the computer as tool and medium, and the study of symbolic machines and other cultural technologies of formalization. Dr. Kramer introduced the question of “mediality” as an issue for explicit investigation in philosophy. Her work has also focused significantly on the development of a philosophy of media, and on the phenomenon of Schrift –as script, writing, and type. She is the author of the recently-published Performativity and Mediality (2004), and of Medium, Messenger, Translation: A small Metaphysics of Mediality (2008). http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Christine_Mitchell.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Christine Mitchell The study of media, culture and communication has undergone a theoretical and methodological turn towards ‘materiality.’ While language would seem to have been well accounted for in such materialist frameworks, it nevertheless sits uneasily within such discourses. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Till_Heilmann.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Till Heilmann Harold Innis and Friedrich Kittler are exemplary thinkers, if not founders, of two quite distinct fields in communication and media studies: The Toronto School of communication theory and German discourse analysis of media (Diskursanalyse technischer Medien). Though their work is separated by time, space, and intellectual heritage, for Innis as well as for Kittler the Greek alphabet holds a unique place in history and in their respective theoretical understanding of media. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Twyla_Gibson.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Twyla Gibson The theory of media associated with a group of scholars known as the Toronto School of Communication—Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong—relied on the arguments of Milman Parry and Albert Lord concerning the oral-derivation of Homer’s formulaic poetry. Innis built on the Parry-Lord method of comparative history and warned that predominating technologies produce a distorting bias. Havelock argued that Plato’s dialogues mark the division between orality and literacy in ancient Greek culture. The advent of the phonetic alphabet promoted changes in vocabulary, syntax, and basic categories of human thought that entailed centuries of development time and a long period of tension and interaction. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Geoffrey_Winthrop_Young.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is associate professor of German at the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include posthumanism, theories of media, materialities of communication and/or memory, systems theory and theories of cultural evolution, and biological models in cultural evolution. He is author of Friedrich Kittler zur Einfühurung (Hamburg: Junius), and the forthcoming Kittler and the Media (Cambridge: Polity). http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Michael_Macdonald.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Michael MacDonald Although the work of Marshall McLuhan is enjoying a “renaissance for a wired world,” as Gary Genosko aptly puts it, scholars still tend to dismiss McLuhan as a “guru,” “oracle,” or “metaphysician” who mistook the global information ecology for a “media Eden” (Virilio). Paul Virilio, for example, contends that McLuhan was “drooling” over the spiritual properties of cyberspace, while Friedrich Kittler rejects McLuhan’s ideal of “understanding” media as a mirage produced by the “silent theology” that governs his media theory as a whole: the dominant media of our time, argues Kittler, “control all understanding” (not to mention our very “schematism of perceptibility”), and for this reason understanding media remains an “impossibility.” http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Markus_Krajewski.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Markus Krajewski With nearly inflationary use, around 1900 the prefix “world” is placed before such diverse projects as Sandford Fleming’s “unified world time,” the implementation of a “world auxiliary language” (like Esperanto, Ido, or Volapük), the spread and circulation of a “world currency,” and not least the standardization of various national units of measurement into a “world format.” This unusual clustering of such heterogenous plans, all of which add the prefix “world” to their programmatic titles, constitutes a number of undertakings at the turn of the 20th century with maximum scope. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Daniel_Gilfillan.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Daniel Gilfillan Two live broadcasts produced by the orf Kunstradio programme form the focus of this paper. Each engages conceptually with issues of globalization in the context of the growing European Union. Given Austria’s geopolitical location and Vienna’s imperial history as center of the Austro-Hungarian empire, these broadcasts provide a medial and artistic layer to understanding Austria’s role in contemporary discussions about issues of migration within post-1989 Europe. State of Transition (1994) explores various geographical points and economic sites where human movement occurs (airport transit halls, market squares, border crossings) to diagnose larger questions of asylum, while Horizontal Radio (1995) combines the technical possibilities of radio transmission and the theoretical imagination of its designers to create a networked performance environment where artists from any of the 26 cities involved in the broadcast could collaborate. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Kim_Sawchuk.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 KIM SAWCHUK Kim Sawchuk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, the current editor of the Canadian Journal of Communications (www.cjc-online.ca) and Wi: Journal of the Mobile Commons Network (www.wi-not.ca). Her research involves the close study of the relationship between embodiment, social practice and discourses on technology. Kim writes on the politics and culture of health and biomedicine, new media art, and wireless technologies from a feminist, anti-racist perspective. Her most recent publication is The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media, co-edited with Barbara Crow and Michael Longford. Patient Embodiment, an earlier collection of feminist writing on the body was co-edited with Christina Lammer and Catherine Pilcher from Vienna. In addition to her academic interests, Kim has been a new media activist, having co-founded StudioXX, a feminist research and media arts centre in Montréal, in 1996. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Anthony_Enns.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Anthony Enns In the nineteenth century, physiologists frequently compared the eye to a photographic camera. Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, famously described the eye as a black box with a lens that perceives points of light just as individual grains are recorded on photographic plates. British physician Robert Hanham Collyer similarly argued that optical information is transmitted from the retina to the brain via the optic nerve in the same way it is recorded by a photographic apparatus, yet he also emphasized that its mode of transmission was vibratory. The notion of the eye as a camera thus led to speculation that the method of recording photographic images might also parallel the transmission of electrical impulses through the nervous system. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Darryl_Cressman.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Darryl Cressman One of the recurring examples used by Max Weber to explain the rational character of Western society is music. Rationalization, for Weber, is both a material process and a mode of thought, and in this way musical culture is instructive for understanding the object of Weber’s sociological analysis. Asking, “why harmonic music developed from the almost universal polyphony of folk music only in Europe and only in a particular time period, while everywhere else the rationalization of music took a different path? http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Rainer_Leschke.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Rainer Leschke One of the recurring examples used by Max Weber to explain the rational character of Western society is music. Rationalization, for Weber, is both a material process and a mode of thought, and in this way musical culture is instructive for understanding the object of Weber’s sociological analysis. Asking, “why harmonic music developed from the almost universal polyphony of folk music only in Europe and only in a particular time period, while everywhere else the rationalization of music took a different path? http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Roberto_Simanowski.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Roberto Simanowski In his 1990 essay “Is There Love in the Telematic Em- brace?”, British artist and self proclaimed “visionary theorist” Roy Ascott updates his concept of “Behaviorist Art”, proposed more than 20 years before, stating: the traditional artwork, which “requires, for its completion, the viewer as, at best, a skilled decoder or interpreter of the artist’s ‘meaning’ [...] gives rise to the industry of criticism and exegesis, in which those who ‘understand’ this or that work of art explain it to those who are too stupid or uneducated to receive its meaning unaided.” As the quote reveals, what is at stake in behaviourist, interactive art is not only the work of the artist but also that of the critic. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Dieter_MerschMed.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 DIETER MERSCH Dieter Mersch studied math and philosophy in Cologne und Bochum. His doctoral thesis was on Semiotics, and Rationality and its Critique in Umberto Eco; Dr. Mersch wrote his Habilitation in philosophy on Materiality, Presence and Event. He has been Chair of Media Studies at the University of Potsdam since 2004. His research interests include the philosophy of media, philosophy of language, aesthetics, semiotics and hermeneutics. He has published areas such as aesthetics and hermeneutics, and is the author of a recent Introduction to Media Theory (2009) and most recently a book on Posthermeneutics (2010). http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Jaeho_Kang.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Jaeho Kang Within the tradition of German and North American media studies, there have been claims that key elements of Walter Benjamin’s original account of the impact of the media on human perception have especially marked similarities with Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the technological extensions of human body. However, those arguments on affinities between Benjamin and McLuhan put forward by authors such as Arnold Houser, Jean Baudrillard, Norbert Bolz, and James Carey, to name a few, fail to address a core tenet of their theories, that is, tactility of media-space. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Jan_Mueggenburg.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Jan Mueggenburg In his 1967 book The Medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan expressively reinforces his famous dictum of technological media as “extensions of the human nervous system.” As McLuhan argues, “by altering the environment media evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions” and since “any one sense alters the way we think and act” media structure the way we perceive the world. While McLuhan’s concept of media as sensual prosthetics indisputably has been one of the most influential concepts in the history of media theory in the 20th century, much less attention has been paid to his general understanding of the workings of the human senses. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Nina_Samuel.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Nina Samuel Chaos and the Materiality of Thought The emergence of a theory of complex dynamics in the 1970s would not have been possible without both analogue and digital computer technology as instruments of experimental visualization. Nevertheless, the pencil did not function merely as a supplementary tool of investigation but played a pivotal role in the formation of theories in this field. It was not in spite of but rather because of the emergence of computer-generated images that the pencil became an indispensable tool in the process of extracting a theoretical idea from the bulk of visualized data. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Hartmut_Winkler.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 HARTMUT WINKLER Hartmut Winkler has been professor of Media Theory and Media Culture the University of Paderborn since 1999. He is well known for his mediatic philosophy of the computer, in which he describes the networked computer as transcending all individual media and creating a universe of computer-readable Gesamt-documentation. Dr. Winkler has developed such ideas, for example, in his book Docuverse: towards a media theory of the computer which appeared in 1997. His more recent book Discourse Economy, on the inner economy of media echoes the emphasis on political economy in Canadian communication studies. It combines Marx’s conception of exchange and exchange value with contemporary notions of communication as information exchange. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Bob_HankeMed.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Bob Hanke In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the “classroom without walls” had arrived. A half century later, we are working in the university without walls and the ict “revolution” is over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” published in Critical Inquiry in 2004, Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of European university based media history to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete media system.” http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Sean_Franzel.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Sean B. Franzel From early modern scholarly oratory to the streaming of university lectures online, the lecture has been both a central mode of knowledge transmission and a telling lens through which to track the intermediality of academic communication. The perception and practice of extended speech directed at a group of listeners/readers/viewers have been central to theories of pedagogy, media, and interpersonal interaction up to the present day. Indeed, the scholarly lecture has historically been thought (alternatively or concomitantly) to spread canonical doctrine; manifest the physical presence of original thought; make manuscripts available to audiences unable to purchase them; allow new kinds of virtual publics to emerge distinct from campus life; call ideal political communities into being, and more. In this context, I argue that rich and divergent accounts of the lecture’s status across orality, print, radio, and the internet reveal how societies imagine the social and cultural functions of the scholar/scientist, a figure who paradigmatically organizes information across a variety of media. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Catherine_Adams_Patti_Pente.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Catherine Adams & Patti Pente Andy Clark (2003) opens his Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence recounting the recent loss of his laptop, an experience he likens to “a sudden and vicious type of (hopefully transient) brain damage . . . the cyborg equivalent of a mild stroke” (4, 10). At a faculty development workshop on applying brain research to enhance instruction, a brief technical glitch prompts the presenter to humorously remark, “If PowerPoint crashes, my iq will drop 20 points!” Such anecdotes, jokingly hyperbolic in their account, nonetheless allude to the tight intimacies, the primordial interminglings, and, at times, the acute dependencies we find ourselves living with technology today. http://www.mediatrans.ca/podcast/Norm_Friesen_Theo_Hug.flv.mp3 June 3 2010 Norm Friesen & Theo Hug Next to media themselves, pedagogy or education onfigured specifically as a “training the senses” (McLuhan & Leonard 1967, 25) or “sensuous education” (McLuhan 1964, 107)—is one of the most prominent themes in McLuhan’s corpus. It is the focus of numerous articles published throughout his career and of two significant albeit relatively obscure monographs that effectively book-end his work on electronic media (the 1960 Project in Understanding New Media and the 1977 textbook, City as Classroom). As Janine Marchessault says, McLuhan articulates “a specifically argued pedagogical enterprise” that is central to his “aesthetically-based, highly performative and historically grounded contribution to the study of media” (2004 xi, 10, 34).