Böcker i Technographies-serien

Dream Machines is a history of imaginary machines and the ways in which machines come to be imagined. It considers seven different kinds of speculative, projected or impossible machine: machines for teleportation, dream-production, sexual pleasure and medical treatment and cure, along with 'influencing machines', invisibility machines and perpetual motion machines. The process of imagining ideal or impossible forms of machinery tends backwards or inwards, allowing a way for imagination itelf to be conceived as a kind of machinery, or ingenious engineering. Machines suggest to us ways of imagining the machinery we take ourselves to be, the workings not only of immune systems and neural networks, but also of dreams, desires and aspirations. This reflexivity means that representations of machines are always suffused with intense feeling. The larger aim of Dream Machines is to isolate a strain of the visionary that may be involved in all thinking and writing about machines. An imaginary machine may also be a way of imagining other kinds of thing that a machine can do and be. This is the sense in which all machines may in fact be said to be forms of media; for we have always dreamed of and with machines, always therefore dreaming through the machines we have been dreaming about.

Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper is an interdisciplinary study of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media history in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.

To 'articulate' media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media's many articulations and associations?Diverse in topic and method, the collection's nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies - following previous volumes in the Technographies series - not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address. Scholars of literature, film, musicology, art, design theory, and media history evaluate new linguistic possibilities for thinking across disciplines and for considering the significance of location to media-critical writing. Collectively, the book traces the ways in which media vernaculars have shaped the vernaculars of media theory, and proposes a few ways in which we might reshape them. With essays by Bernhard Siegert, Melle Jan Kromhout, Bernard Geoghegan, Louise Shen, Caroline Bassett, Emma McCormick-Goodhart, Renee A. Farra, Rebecca Ross, and Jussi Parikka.