T H E K E Y D E B A T E S 10 N ich o la s B a e r a n d A n n ie va n d e n O e ve r (e d s.) T E C H N IC S T H E K E Y D E B A T E S M u tation s an d A ppropriation s in E u ro p e a n Film S tu d ie s Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever (eds.) 10 Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies The Key Debates is a film series from Amsterdam University Press. The series’ ambition is to uncover the processes of appropriation and diffusion of key concepts that have shaped Film Studies. The series editors are: Anna Backman Rogers, Nicholas Baer, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, Sarah Leperchey, José Moure, and Annie van den Oever. Contributions by: Neta Alexander, André Brock, Francesco Casetti, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Astrid Deuber- Mankowsky, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Amanda Egbe, Andreas Fickers, Yuriko Furuhata, Doron Galili, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Catherine Grant, Tom Gunning, Malte Hagener, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Gertrud Koch, Katharina Loew, Laura Mulvey, Kartik Nair, Jean-Christophe Plantin, Ariel Rogers, Bernhard Siegert, Jonathan Sterne, Wanda Strauven, Yijun Sun, and Benoît Turquety ISBN 978-90-4856-455-2 Featuring 28 leading international media scholars, Technics rethinks technology for the contemporary digital era, with cutting- edge theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions. The volume’s contributors explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and Sylvia Wynter in conjunction with urgent questions concerning algorithmic media, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. An expansive collection of writings on media technologies in the digital age, Technics is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media studies, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of technology. Technics is a multi-modal, transdisciplinary, and free- ranging challenge to “come to terms” with how we talk about digital media’s micro and macro materials, practices, and cultural force fields. The contributors expand, transform, and/or leave terms behind with a contemporary eye on “everything, everywhere, all at once.” In its entirety, this is a serious, delirious, and oddly comforting must-read that not only records but also models our present moment. — Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture This scholarly collection comes just in time for an urgent updating and differentiation of media-archaeological key terms and categories like techne, (cultural) techniques, technics, and technologies. The methodologically rich chorus of various textual forms and approaches to technical phenomenology and nonlinear media times is not limited to the human perspective but grants a voice to the apparatus itself. — Wolfgang Ernst, author of Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology & the Computational Machine 9 789048 564552 > Amsterdam Universit y Press AUP.nl THE KEY DEBATES TECHNICS Technics The Key Debates Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies Series Editors Anna Backman Rogers, Nicholas Baer, Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Sarah Leperchey, José Moure, Annie van den Oever Volumes published Vol. 1: Ostrannenie 2010 Vol. 2: Subjectivity 2011 Vol. 3: Audiences 2012 Vol. 4: Technē/Technology 2014 Vol. 5: Feminisms 2015 Vol. 6: Screens 2016 Vol. 7: Stories 2018 Vol. 8: Post-Cinema 2020 Vol. 9: Spaces 2024 Technics Media in the Digital Age Edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever Amsterdam University Press The publication of this book has been made possible by grants from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Groningen; and the Mulerius Foundation. Cover design: Sabine Mannel Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 4856 455 2 e-isbn 978 90 4856 456 9 doi 10.5117/9789048564552 nur 670 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2024 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 Table of Contents Editorial 7 Acknowledgments 9 PART I Questions Concerning Technics 1. Technics: An Introduction 13 Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever 2. Ten Statements on Technics 25 André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christophe Plantin PART II Philosophies of Technology 3. Machine Aesthetics : Animation through Technology, Animation of Technology 61 Gertrud Koch 4. “New Stars Were Rising in the Sky” : On Benjamin’s Concept of Cosmic Experience and Technology around 1930 79 Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 5. Instructions for Use : Thinking Body, Machine, and Technicity with Simondon 103 Benoît Turquety 6. Knowing, Studying, Writing : A Conversation on History, Practice, and Other Doings with Technics 125 Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Bernhard Siegert PART III Theories of Media 7. Protective Media 153 Francesco Casetti 8. Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media 169 Yijun Sun and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan 9. Beyond Access: Transforming Ableist Techno-Worlds 187 Neta Alexander and Jonathan Sterne PART IV Archaeologies of Media 10. Coming to Terms with the “Smart” Phone 201 Wanda Strauven 11. The Afterlife of an Optical Device, or Making the Lantern Kosher 221 Doron Galili PART V Filmic Techniques 12. Theories of the Frame and Framing in Cinema: A Genealogy 241 Ariel Rogers 13. Split Screens : A Discussion with Catherine Grant, Malte Hagener, and Katharina Loew 263 Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever 14. Specks of Time : Digital Editing and Verse Jumping in Everything Everywhere All at Once 277 Kartik Nair PART VI Digital Humanities 15. Streams, Portals, and Data Flows: Digital Infrastructures of Film Studies 295 Malte Hagener 16. Six Memos for the New Millennium : A Dialogue with Andreas Fickers on Epistemic Virtues in the Digital Humanities 313 Annie van den Oever Editorial The Key Debates series was launched in 2010 with the aim of revisiting “the central issues that continue to animate thinking about f ilm and audiovisual media,” which we have now done across ten volumes. All of these have followed a pattern of reexamining foundational texts and issues, while also investigating new lines of transmission and interpretation. Our book series’ dual interest in foundations and novel lines of inquiry is demonstrated by the prior two collections, Post-Cinema (2020) and Spaces (2024). In the editorial of Post-Cinema, we foresaw that the shutdown of com- munal cultural activity during the pandemic was likely to change the status of film and cinema in the contemporary mediascape – which it undoubtedly has done – accelerating the shift to an increasingly post-cinematic environment. As the volume indicated, however, post-cinema is less a radical caesura than a new set of relations between cinema’s varied pasts and emerging futures. Spaces engaged with enduring texts and issues in media representation and reception while also further exploring the post-cinematic ecology, including chapters on lockdown as a mental space of communication and on new technologies such as drones and immersive virtual reality. Questions of technology assume a central position in our tenth volume, Technics, as they did in our fourth volume from 2014, Technē/Technology. Addressing issues that have gained urgency over the intervening decade – from algorithms and artif icial intelligence to digital infrastructures and geoengineering – the present volume features global perspectives from a variety of f ields, including f ilm and media studies, philosophy of technology, media theory, science and technology studies, media archaeology, and the digital humanities. This capacious approach is deliberate on our part: although European f ilm studies remains core to our book series, crises such as the pandemic and climate change transcend European boundaries, and the post-cinematic ecology compels us to broaden our purview beyond film. With the support of our institutions in f ive countries (France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US), and of our valued publisher, Amsterdam University Press, we provide a platform to revisit key debates, while also insisting that global f ilm and media studies must be accorded a critical position in contemporary intellectual and cultural life. Groningen / Amsterdam / Gothenburg / Berkeley / London / Paris Annie van den Oever, Anna Backman Rogers, Nicholas Baer, Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Sarah Leperchey, José Moure Acknowledgments Technics is the tenth collection to appear in our Key Debates book series. Like its predecessors, volume 10 is devoted to a topic that has reverberated across the history of f ilm and media – in this case, so much so that we already addressed the topic in our fourth volume, Technē/Technology (2014). Given the dizzying transformations of the past decade, we decided to return to the topic under a new title, and with a fresh set of perspectives. Technics gathers cutting-edge media scholars and creative practitioners to rethink technology for our global present. One of the great joys of this project has been to work with an international group of thinkers coming from a variety of f ields, intellectual traditions, and cultural-linguistic contexts – yet all invested in a common set of questions. It has been exciting seeing the different perspectives come together, often challenging each other in productive ways. We are grateful to all twenty-eight contributors for their brilliant work: Neta Alexander, André Brock, Francesco Casetti, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Amanda Egbe, Andreas Fickers, Yuriko Furuhata, Doron Galili, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Catherine Grant, Tom Gunning, Malte Hagener, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Gertrud Koch, Katharina Loew, Laura Mulvey, Kartik Nair, Jean-Christophe Plantin, Ariel Rogers, Bernhard Siegert, Jonathan Sterne, Wanda Strauven, Yijun Sun, and Benoît Turquety. In addition to our contributors, we owe a debt of gratitude to Eleonora Antonakaki Giannisi, Ambika Athreya, and Bernardo Bárzana for thoughtful and eloquent translations; Sanna McGregor for crucial research assistance; and esteemed colleagues for generous and incisive feedback: Giuseppe Fidotta, Doron Galili, Julian Hanich, Tim van der Heijden, Jordan Schonig, Robert Sinnerbrink, Sara Strandvad, and Benoît Turquety. Volume 10 marks the start of a third phase of international cooperation for the Key Debates, which now includes series editors based in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US. We thank our series co-editors Anna Backman Rogers, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, Sarah Leperchey, and José Moure for expert guidance and suggestions. Four more volumes in our series are already lined up, all of which will appear in open-access format. Our Advisory Board members have offered their enthusiastic, unwavering support and rich intellectual contributions to the Key Debates over the years. We once again thank Francesco Casetti, Laurent Creton, Jane Gaines, Frank Kessler, András Bálint Kovács, Eric de Kuyper, Laura Mulvey, Emile Poppe, 10 Vivian Sobchack, and Janet Staiger. We also honor the memory of our late Advisory Board members Miriam Hansen and Roger Odin. As always, we are deeply grateful to Amsterdam University Press and its Senior Commissioning Editor for Film, Media and Communication Studies, Maryse Elliott, for supporting our book series. Thanks are also due to AUP Managing Director Jan-Peter Wissink, Publishing Director Irene van Rossum, Head of Desk Editing and Production Chantal Nicolaes, Marketing Manager Anna Thornton, and Graphic Designer Sabine Mannel. The Key Debates depended in its early phase on generous funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientif ic Research (NWO), and the series benefits from ongoing support from the University of Groningen as well as Research School ACTE/CNRS, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris I. We are further grateful to the University of California, Berkeley, and the Mulerius Foundation for open-access funding for volume 10. Particular thanks go to License Manager Monique Dikboom and Open Access Specialist Giulia Trentacosti. Last but not least, we wish to express our immense gratitude to our copyeditors: Elizabeth Rankin, who helped assemble Technics so eff iciently and meticulously, and Viola ten Hoorn, who has been extremely supportive of the book series since its inception. Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever Berkeley / Amsterdam, December 2023 PART I Questions Concerning Technics 1. Technics: An Introduction Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever Abstract This introduction argues that contemporary developments in the digital age (e.g., algorithmic media, generative artificial intelligence) are fundamentally reconfiguring the relations between key terms in the study of technology: technē, technique, technology, and technics. Returning to Martin Heidegger and other thinkers who have formatively shaped our conceptual under- standings of technology, editors Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever offer a renewed exploration of the semantic f ield and preview the essays, statements, dialogues, and roundtable discussions featured in the volume. Keywords: technē, technique, technology, f ilm and digital media, phi- losophy of technology, Martin Heidegger When Martin Heidegger pondered whether “modern technology is something incomparably different from all earlier technologies,” he had in mind a technological landscape that may itself seem incomparably different from our own (Heidegger [1954] 1977, 14). Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”) juxtaposed machine-powered technology with traditional handicraft: the radar station versus the weather vane, mechanized agriculture versus conventional grain-sowing methods, the hydroelectric plant on the River Rhine versus the sawmill in a remote Black Forest valley. These juxtapositions are now seventy years old and we are thus compelled to raise a similar question as Heidegger: What is the mode of revealing of technology in today’s digital world? And, if digital technology is incomparably different from all earlier technologies, the follow-up one inevitably is: Has Heidegger’s essay, alongside other foundational writings on technology, reached its expiry date? We are not the f irst to pose such questions or to feel tempted to believe that Heidegger maintained an allegiance to the older technologies rather Baer, N. and A. van den Oever (eds.), Technics: Media in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789048564552_ch01 14 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever than the newer ones. Yet this assumption comes at a high price, as we will show – namely, a misassessment of his essay’s ongoing relevance and a mis- interpretation of its central term, technics (Technik). In Technē/Technology (2014), volume 4 of our Key Debates series, Robert Sinnerbrink argued that, although Heidegger’s penchant for huts and Holzwege may have suggested a stance of nostalgia or even neo-Luddism, it would be wrong to assume that the philosopher simply dismissed new technologies: “Heidegger is at pains to insist that there is nothing to be gained by rejecting technology (as though that were possible) or denouncing it ‘as the work of the devil.’ The point is to understand our current relationship of enslavement and misunderstanding in order to better prepare for the possibility of a free relationship to technology” (Sinnerbrink 2014, 70). For Heidegger, a free relationship involves opening our existence to technology’s essence. “The Question Concerning Technology” shows the untenability of common definitions of technology as an instrumental means or human activity, and instead identif ies the fundamental characteristic of technology as revealing. For Heidegger, modern technology’s mode of revealing is a setting-upon or challenging based on the extraction and storage of energies, reducing nature to a mere standing-reserve. His essay ultimately arrives at enframing (Ge-stell) as the mode of revealing in which the essence of modern technology lies: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve” (Heidegger [1954] 1977, 20). In Heidegger’s view, enframing conceals not only a prior mode of revealing, poiēsis or bringing-forth, but also its own fundamental characteristic of revealing – and, with it, the appearance of truth. Animated by both ontological and ethical concerns, Heidegger’s es- say offers numerous examples of the prevailing ordering of the real as a standing-reserve of potential resources – among them natural elements (e.g., coal, ore, uranium), human beings (“human resources”), and socio- technological creations, such as the airplane on the runway that ensures the possibility of transportation: “it must be in its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff” (Heidegger [1954] 1977, 17). Updating Heidegger’s examples for our own time, we would also need to consider the digital media technologies that place us permanently “on call” and def ine us as algorithmic ensembles of information, quantif iable desires, and instrumental actions; artif icial intelligence (AI) as a new form of predictive coding and data mining; and, not least, the ongoing climate catastrophe driven by the literal extraction and exploitation of natural resources, rendering the planet increasingly TechNics: aN iNTroduc TioN 15 uninhabitable. In light of these examples, it is easy to see why Heidegger’s essay is still relevant today. At once pervasive and invasive, technological developments such as algorithmic media and generative AI are transforming our very mode of existence, raising a whole host of pressing issues explored by the twenty- eight contributors to this volume: ableism, access, agency, automation, geoengineering, infrastructure, knowledge production, racial and gender bias and discrimination, surveillance, and warfare, among countless others. Far from marginal or obsolete, the Heideggerian question concerning technology – and especially the potential for a liberatory rather than oppressive relationship to technology – has gained great urgency. The argu- ment of this volume is that the contemporary digital age is fundamentally reconf iguring the relations between technē, technique, technology, and technics. It is thus a crucial moment to reexamine the ideas of Heidegger and further thinkers who have shaped, challenged, and extended our conceptual understandings of technology, including Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Sylvia Wynter. Media in the Digital Age: A Semantic Void Returning to key terms in the study of media – technē, technique, technology, and technics – this volume offers a renewed exploration of the semantic field, clearing what Gregory Bateson called the “conceptual fog” created by hazily defined explanatory notions (Bateson 1972, xx). Already in Technē/Technology (2014), Benoît Turquety cautioned against the unreflective use of terms that had distinct meanings in the mechanical era, which is epistemologically different from the digital one. Where technology was once considered within a conceptual realm that often centered on the mechanical art of cinema, the digital age has shifted the general understanding of technology in the cultural sphere: “digital techniques – machineries and processes, apparatuses and workflows – are perceived as belonging to a slightly different conceptual structure than mechanics” (Turquety 2014, 63-64). Etymologically derived from the Greek root technē (art, craft, skill, know- how) and the suff ix -ology (branch of knowledge), the term “technology” entered the English language in the seventeenth century but did not gain broad currency until after the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1870–1914). Leo Marx attributes the term’s popularization to the prevailing ideology of progress and to changes in the organizational and material matrix 16 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever (large-scale, complex sociotechnological systems), which together created “a semantic void, that is, a set of social circumstances for which no adequate concept was yet available” (Marx 1997, 967). The widespread adoption of the abstract, even indefinable concept of technology thus had a symptomatic value: it marked the inaptness of prior terms (e.g., machine, invention, improvement, the mechanic arts) in relation to the ambiguous developments in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century society and culture. With its vague and often contradictory meanings in both popular and academic discourse, the concept of technology comes with many hazards. Integrating a critique of capitalism lacking from Heidegger’s analysis, Marx warns that technology has become a reif ied term, “used as if it referred to a tangible, determinate entity – a kind of thing” (1997, 981). Ascribed an objective, autonomous agency, technology is seen as an external threat to the humans who created it, leading to mystif ication and a sense of fatalistic pas- sivity. Moreover, inasmuch as the concept is commonly projected backward to encapsulate the full history of tools, it elides the social conditions for which technology once served as a historical marker. Where Marx ultimately doubts whether the concept allows for cogent, analytical thinking, we might also consider whether technology is still the best referent for the novel formations that characterize the reconfigured landscape of our own digital age. In interrogating the concept of technology amid the semantic void in our own time, questions of cultural-linguistic context and intellectual genealogy become salient. For, if the term “technology” is shrouded in ambiguity and reif ied understandings today, this is also due to the peculiarities of its English usage. Where many European languages distinguish between technique (the object of study; the mechanic arts) and technology (the f ield of study; the logos or science of techniques), the English word “technology” has generally referred to the former since the turn of the twentieth century (with the notable exception of schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, established in 1861). Crucial distinctions are thereby lost in translation, particularly as cognates of both technique (die Technik in Ger- man, la technique in French) and technology (die Technologie, la technologie) can be rendered in English as “technology” (Schatzberg 2018, 8-13; see also Altman 1984). In the f irst decades of the twentieth century, American social scientists such as Thorstein Veblen transposed German discussions of Technik into English deliberations on “technology.” Lewis Mumford, by contrast, rendered Technik as “technics” in his Technics and Civilization (1934), dividing the development of machine civilization into “eotechnic,” “paleotechnic,” and TechNics: aN iNTroduc TioN 17 “neotechnic” phases, yet his terminological efforts ran against the dominant trend. It was Don Ihde who would later re-embrace and popularize the word “technics” for its dual connotations of action and artifact. In his introduction to Existential Technics, Ihde wrote: “Technics stands in between the too abstract ‘technique’ which can refer to any set action with or without a material object, and the sometimes too narrow sense of technology as a collection of tools or machinery. Central to my understanding and use of technics is the sense of human action engaged with, through, among concrete artifacts or material entities” (1983, 1). While, as Ihde noted, North American thinkers had rarely focused on the role of technology in human life, European intellectuals had a more extensive tradition of the philosophy of technology, including Marxist, phenomenological, and existential schools. Ihde nonetheless wrote at a moment of heightened Anglophone interest in Continental philosophy – interest that has continued to be piqued by the publication of texts such as Michel Foucault’s Technologies of the Self (1988), Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, [1877] 2018), Bernhard Siegert’s essay collection Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (2015), Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, [1958] 2016), and Bernard Stiegler’s three-volume series Technics and Time (La technique et le temps, [1994, 1996, 2001] 1998, 2009, 2011). In the process, the English term “technics” has gained greater currency alongside the familiar “technique” and “technology.” Translations of the past years have also underscored the often-ambiguous range of meanings of terms such as Technik. In an overview of German media theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan notes that Kulturtechniken – which might be translated as “cultural techniques,” “cultural technologies,” “cultural technics,” or “culturing techniques” – was in fact a nineteenth-century term for agricultural engineering (2013, 67). Given this semantic history, it is no coincidence that Heidegger juxtaposed modern and traditional technics in the form of the mechanized food industry and older grain-sowing meth- ods. Where Heidegger’s “Die Frage nach der Technik” has commonly been translated as “The Question Concerning Technology,” this title obscures the essay’s major themes and stakes, as Geoghegan contends: far from rejecting technology out of hand, Heidegger seeks to reunify technique, technology, and culture under the ancient Greek technē (2013, 74). Advocating for a more differentiated set of terms, our volume not only heralds a shift from technology to technics, or from “The Question Concern- ing Technology” to “The Question Concerning Technics.” We also emphasize 18 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever the plurality of questions concerning technics today. Such questions, we insist, demand diverse theoretical, historiographical, and methodological approaches, as well as a global, intermedial, and multidisciplinary scope – including f ilm and media studies, media theory, media archaeology, media infrastructures, science and technology studies, digital humanities, critical race theory, postcolonialism, feminism, critical disability studies, and the environmental humanities. In pursuing multiple lines of inquiry, our volume embraces a mix of textual forms, from essays and statements to dialogues and roundtable discussions. Exploratory in nature, the chapters in our volume map out the conceptual relations that, as we argue, are being fundamentally reconfigured by the digital era. About the Book We open the volume with a survey of the current f ield of thinking about media and technology through ten statements by scholars and artists: André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christophe Plantin. This multidisciplinary and multigenerational group reflects on their past work, while also sharing their latest thoughts on issues such as algorithmic media, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. Additional topics of discussion include key thinkers, concepts, and approaches and the (geo)political stakes of contemporary inquiries into media devices and practices. These lines of inquiry are further pursued in subsequent chapters of the volume. Part II focuses on philosophies of technology in the modern era. Allaying present-day anxieties regarding human displacement via automation and AI, Gertrud Koch argues for a more dialectical understanding of human- machine interrelation, which she elaborates via an intellectual trajectory extending from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, through Max Weber and Ernst Cassirer, up to Friedrich Kittler and Jean-Louis Comolli. Amid ongoing concerns over technological warfare, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky draws a sustained comparison with Kantian philosophy in examining Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of the crisis of perception (Anschauung) and experience wrought by the First World War. Much as Koch posits the aesthetic sphere as one of playful experimentation with technology, Deuber-Mankowsky contends that Benjamin’s “To the Planetarium” sought to help construct a “room-for-play” (Spielraum) – one in which technology recalibrates the TechNics: aN iNTroduc TioN 19 relationship between humanity and nature, rather than serving as an instrument of domination and destruction. The following two chapters spotlight thinkers who have gained promi- nence in the Anglophone world thanks to recent translations. Engaging with Gilbert Simondon, Benoît Turquety locates the instructional manual at the interface between human and machine, viewing the user’s guide as a manifestation of the technicity of media devices such as Bolex cameras. Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal stages a conversation with Bernhard Siegert, who has elaborated the aforementioned concept of cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). Delineating the terms technē, technique, and technology, Dhaliwal and Siegert discuss issues of etymology and semantic change, of historicism and anachronism, and further address the relations between mediation and techniques, and between cultural techniques and institutions. Part III features novel interventions in the f ield of media theory. Where Francesco Casetti conceives of media as forms of protection against external dangers, allowing humans to reconnect with the world on more secure terms, Yijun Sun and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan draw from Ursula Le Guin to advance a carrier bag theory of media, which they exemplify through the vacuum tube. Interweaving their scholarly trajectories and embodied experiences, Neta Alexander and Jonathan Sterne reflect on technology through a disability-informed lens and emphasize the persistence of ableism in media studies. All three chapters challenge Marshall McLuhan’s famous understanding of media as “extensions of man” – whether for overlooking the sheltering function of media, perpetuating masculinist and phallocentric ideologies, or assuming able-bodiedness and treating prosthesis solely as a metaphor. Media archaeology moves to the fore in Part IV. With her hands-on, mate- rial, and playfully experimental approach to media archaeology (recalling Benjamin’s “room-for-play”), Wanda Strauven explores the emergence of the smartphone and its varied terminology across European languages, with anecdotes from her family life and excursuses into the history of candies, plastics, emojis, and games. Similarly focused on children’s media, Doron Galili studies the contemporary case of the “Makrentz’ik,” a toy magic lantern marketed to the Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community. Inasmuch as the magic lantern is often regarded as obsolete, the Makrentz’ik’s coexistence with digital devices complicates established narratives about old versus new media technologies. Strauven’s and Galili’s chapters illustrate the nonlinear temporalities of media archaeology – known for its deep time, palimpsestic layers, cyclically recurring topoi, and Foucauldian ruptures 20 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever and discontinuities – while also extending the f ield to a more personal domain and to underexamined contexts of media practice. Revisiting f ilm against the backdrop of today’s rapidly changing media environment, Part V investigates the specif ic techniques of framing, split screen, and montage. Ariel Rogers contributes to debates about “immersive” media such as 3D cinema and virtual reality, tracing a genealogy of theories of the frame and framing in cinema – from classical f ilm theory up to recent work on race as technology. Likewise transhistorical in their scope, Catherine Grant, Malte Hagener, and Katharina Loew discuss the varied uses of split screen in f ilm and media history, including examples from the nineteenth century (e.g., picture postcards, lantern slides) and the present-day mediascape (e.g., video essays, multichannel art installations). Kartik Nair considers the affordances of digital editing software programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro, arguing that the verse jumping in Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022) lends allegorical expression to the shifting terrain of editorial labor. As the volume’s chapters indicate, digital technologies have inaugurated a paradigm shift in f ilm and media culture. In Part VI, Malte Hagener focuses on the ramifications of digitization for f ilm studies, engaging with recent scholarship on infrastructures and reflecting on questions of access, metadata, and method. With a similar attention to the political economy of digital knowledge infrastructures and institutions, Annie van den Oever leads a conversation with Andreas Fickers on epistemic virtues in the digital humanities. Structured around Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Mil- lennium (1988), their conversation covers the latest topics of debate in the digital humanities, including the geopolitics of knowledge and the problems of epistemic inequality and injustice. Much as Hagener lays out individual, collective, and political spheres of action, Fickers ultimately calls for a new “style of reasoning” characterized by epistemic, political, and ethical virtues. Taken together, the chapters in this volume thus pursue crucial questions concerning technics, providing cutting-edge ref lections on media and technology for the contemporary digital age. References and Further Reading Altman, Rick. 1984. “Toward a Theory of the History of Representational Technolo- gies.” Iris 2, no. 2: 111-125. Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. 2012. “Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon.” In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, edited by Arne De TechNics: aN iNTroduc TioN 21 Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, 203-231. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc- ibility: Second Version.” Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19-55. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. (1930) 2012. “Form and Technology.” Translated by Wilson McClelland Dunlavey and John Michael Krois. In Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology: Contemporary Readings, edited by Aud Sissel Hoel and Ingvild Folkvord, 15-53. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chateau, Dominique. 2014. “The Philosophy of Technology in the Frame of Film Theory: Walter Benjamin’s Contribution.” Translated by Maxime Shelledy. In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever, 29-49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas W. Keenan, eds. 2016. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Comolli, Jean-Louis. (1996) 1998. “Mechanical Bodies, Ever More Heavenly.” Translated by Annette Michelson. October 83 (Winter): 19-24. Crogan, Patrick. 2014. “Stiegler’s Post-Phenomenological Account of Mediated Experience.” In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technolo- gies – Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever, 81-92. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. De Boever, Arne, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, eds. 2012. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Denson, Shane. 2023. Post-Cinematic Bodies. Lüneburg: meson press. Dhaliwal, Ranjodh Singh. 2023. “What Do We Critique When We Critique Technol- ogy?” American Literature 95, no. 2: 305-319. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2021. Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. 2013. “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6: 66-82. 22 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever Gillespie, Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, eds. 2014. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Tech- nogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1954) 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3-35. New York and London: Garland. Hidalgo, Santiago, ed. 2018. Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ihde, Don. 1983. Existential Technics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kapp, Ernst. (1877) 2018. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolution- ary History of Culture. Edited by Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby. Translated by Lauren K. Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1986) 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geof- frey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. 2003. “Heidegger und die Medien- und Technikgeschichte. Oder: Heidegger vor uns.” In Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben ‒ Werk ‒ Wirkung, edited by Dieter Thomä, 500-504. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Le Guin, Ursula K. (1986) 1989. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 165-170. New York: Groves Press. Marx, Karl. (1857-1858) 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. Marx, Leo. 1984. “On Heidegger’s Conception of ‘Technology’ and Its Historical Validity.” The Massachusetts Review 25, no. 4 (Winter): 638-652. —. 1997. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall): 965-988. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1878) 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oever, Annie van den, ed. 2014. Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32718. Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schatzberg, Eric. 2018. Technology: Critical History of a Concept. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32718 TechNics: aN iNTroduc TioN 23 Sharma, Sarah, and Rianka Singh. 2022. Re-understanding Media: Feminist Exten- sions of Marshall McLuhan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Siegert, Bernhard. 2015. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articula- tions of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. (1958) 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2014. “Technē and Poiēsis: On Heidegger and Film Theory.” In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever, 65-80. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. “‘Susie Scribbles’: On Technology, Technē, and Writing Incarnate.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 109-134. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stiegler, Bernard. (1994) 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. (1996) 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. (2001) 2011. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2012. “The Theatre of Individuation: Phase-Shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger.” Translated by Kristina Lebedeva. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, 185-202. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Towns, Armond R. 2022. On Black Media Philosophy. Oakland: University of California Press. Turquety, Benoît. 2014. “Toward an Archaeology of the Cinema/Technology Relation: From Mechanization to ‘Digital Cinema.’” In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever, 50-64. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. —. 2019. Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Weber, Max. (1921-1922) 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociol- ogy, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Based on the work of numerous translators. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williams, Raymond. 2014. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. 2011. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity. 24 Nicholas Baer aNd aNNie vaN deN oever —. 2015. “Material World: An Interview with Bernhard Siegert.” Artforum 53, no. 10 (Summer): 324-333. https://www.artforum.com/features/material-world-an- interview-with-bernhard-siegert-224303/. Wynter, Sylvia. 1984. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” boundary 2 12, no. 3; 13, no. 1: 19-70. About the Authors Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, with aff iliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (2024) and co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (2016) and Unwatchable (2019). Annie van den Oever is a Professor of Film at the University of Groningen; an Extraordinary Professor of Film at the University of the Free State (until January 2024); and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg (since March 2024). Recent books: Doing Experimental Media Archaeology. Theory (De Gruyter, 2022, with Andreas Fickers); and Digital Distortions and the Grotesque as a Dominant Format Today (AUP, 2024). https://www.artforum.com/features/material-world-an-interview-with-bernhard-siegert-224303/ https://www.artforum.com/features/material-world-an-interview-with-bernhard-siegert-224303/ 2. Ten Statements on Technics André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christophe Plantin Abstract To understand how preeminent scholars and creative practitioners ap- proach the topic of technology today, Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever invited them to reflect on a series of questions: What drew them to technology as a matter of inquiry, and how have developments of the past decade extended, shifted, or even challenged their thinking? What is a recent media-technological development that bears on their work, and how does the contemporary mediascape realign the relations between technē, technique, and technology? Which theoretical, historiographical, and methodological approaches are especially generative, and which texts warrant further attention? Finally, how does their work think through (geo)political issues such as power, access, and accountability; participation, engagement, and activism; and racial, social, and environmental justice? Keywords: f ilm and media studies, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), media infrastructures, environmental media, artif icial intelligence (AI) André Brock: When I started studying the internet in the early 2000s, the accepted wisdom was that the default internet user was white, male, middle class, Protestant, and straight. The trouble with accepted wisdoms, however, is that few people attempt to interrogate them. Moreover, the newness of internet use meant that we (I’m including myself in this) treated it as if it were a new form of human-machine sociality, where we could identify humanity as a (insert platform/app here) “user.” That left little room for interrogating how those Baer, N. and A. van den Oever (eds.), Technics: Media in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789048564552_ch02 26 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN users were always already embedded in sociocultural contexts before ever touching a keyboard or mouse. The phenomenon I’ve invested my career in is this: Black people have always used information technologies/the internet. Thanks to accepted wisdom and digital divide scholarship, I was often asked “how do you even know they’re Black?” So it was only when Black digital practice became hypervisible thanks to Twitter affordances – specif ically, the hashtag – that people began to understand that race could be a salient indicator of digital practice and even expertise. These affordances have lost much of their glamour as the furores over George Floyd and COVID have receded to become an infrastructural hum of disquiet. But if I had told you in 2003 that the humble octothorp would become a vital organizing tool for digital information and for social justice … would you have believed me? The hashtag helped to cement the recognition that race is inherently an aspect of technoculture. Dominique Chateau: Technique and technology are the topic of numerous debates that presup- pose or make explicit a hypothetical mythology of the original – and this comes with philosophical implications, among them the existence of a pre-philosophical time that philosophy would aspire to rediscover; and f ilm-theoretical implications, among them a f ilm ideal for which pre- technical reality provides the model. While it is pertinent to rediscover archaic aspects in the invention of cinema, as Edgar Morin ([1956] 2005) does, these philosophical and theoretical perspectives come with a huge disadvantage for the f ield of f ilm and media studies. Because they are associated with the denial of representation (as a case of presence, of being, etc.), they do not allow us to understand how and under what conditions a technological device can function as a medium of representation of reality. In other words, these perspectives overlook the crucial function of the technological devices under scrutiny (for instance, in film and media studies) as media which mediate reality in specif ic ways. As for f ilm: the primary and most important medium-specific element of its technological mediation is motion or movement, which, when rendered on screen, produces an effect of presence. (Christian Metz [1991] is right, not Gilles Deleuze [1986, 1989], when it comes to the effect of presence created by the movies.) In other words, presence as an effect created by the movies is not unique, mysterious, or ontological; it is constitutive of f ilmic technology. Presence is the raison d’être of a medium which, even before any narrative situation is represented, constitutes as present what it represents. TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 27 While presence is the f irst and most important factor brought about by f ilm’s medium-specif ic technological mediation, the second factor is the modalities of perception brought about by f ilm or digital technology – see Walter Benjamin’s excellent formula: “sense perception altered by technol- ogy” (Benjamin 2002, 122). The transformational power of the medium has notable ontological implications. Following Benjamin, we could argue that human ontology is transformed by technology. This second factor has been at the heart of a f ierce debate by critics, among them Benjamin himself, who were ambivalent about the effect on perception brought about by technology, and hesitant to frame it along the lines of two familiar themes: either the loss of aura or the gain of cinema as a popular art. Regardless of the outcome of such debates, we may conclude on the basis of the reflections on the two factors examined so far (there are others, of course) that the effect of presence and the shock of the image, montage, and visual effects conspired to def ine the new medium as an ontological and psychological transformation of the world. It is from the perspective of such a theoretical approach to the media- tion of reality provided by f ilm techniques that we can grasp the practical effectiveness of f ilm. As Gaston Bachelard ([1940] 1968, 119) suggests, this involves accessing a concept of f ilm that represents it as a superobject (in French, surobjet). For the philosopher, the concept of the superobject implies (entails) the history of concept formation, exemplif ied by the concept of the atom in theoretical physics. In light of a technological history as in the sciences, the analysis of f ilm understood as a superobject (an object beyond the semantic atoms manipulated in ordinary discussion) opens up a complex parametric interplay: as the phenomenon itself is def ined, the basic atom cracks, disseminates, and explodes: 1) f irst, within the triad of device/medium/apparatus, used to specify the social dimensions of f ilm, and to stress that the medium is the pivot; and that mediation moves from one screen device to another, from IMAX to the smartphone, and from one dispositif to another, from the cinema hall to the living room; and 2) second, within a whole host of terms and concepts – parameters, if you wish – whose consideration directs our attention toward a further decomposition of the superobject in terms of its traits, such as fixed/nomadic, dedicated hall/domestic setting, projection/backlighting, integral medium/ hybridization, optical distance/haptic possibility, and so on. In short, the technological superobject called f ilm is the product of critical reflections, not in the negative sense of denial or denigration, but in the positive sense of that human faculty Bachelard calls “polemical reason” ([1938] 2002, 22). 28 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN The latter, when it leads to a multiparametric vision, enables us to understand the full richness of technique and technology (particularly in the manner of Gilbert Simondon [2017]). The antinomy of technique and ontology (known as realism) presupposes a pure state of the world or of knowledge, as origin or ideal, obviously without technique. But humanity started off as a social species in which, from the outset, technology was an integral part (see agriculture). Technology is humanity! It is an integral part of human history. There is no dichotomy between humanity and the specif ic knowledge (techno-logos) that constitutes it: because technique and technology, with their specif icity, have never ceased to be decisive for humanity. Beth Coleman: My genealogy of technē would be Greeks>Heidegger>Stiegler>Glissant. The term and critical praxis around it have been a point of obsession for me from the beginning of thinking and doing with technology. If one sticks with the awkward translation of “know-how,” then the situation of actor-material is foregrounded. The phenomenal aspect of technē is central to the worlds it produces. Yes, already “worlds,” as I cannot resist the possibility of liberation technologies. This is clear in my writings, from “Race as Technology” (2009) to “Technology of the Surround” (2021). Within this context, I make the jump from technē to technology as the thing that does a thing. I am not sure I have a conviction or commitment to technique other than as a pale specter between the two beloved, vexing terms. Feel free to make fun, but ChatGPT is the technological phenomenon that has my attention. And, if we attend to the AI engineering literature, attention is everything. It (ChatGPT) is not an account of technē, as the current AI chatbots do not demonstrate “know-how.” In fact, the ways they don’t know or hallucinate or genuflect are amazing theater but not the ability of technē. I am interested – perhaps we all are interested – as it is the f irst public demonstration of turning on an AI “lightbulb” or watching the AI gilded Digesting Duck. Equal parts new technology and legerdemain. Perhaps I was dropped on my head as a baby, but technical apparatuses have always been interesting to me. I am interested in the architecture of how a thing works in relation to the social world of how it works. Obviously, that is the sociotechnological. But the thing that floors me is that thinking those things together continues to be entirely alien on account of disciplinary silos. Machine-learning people duck when the word “social” shows up, and media studies often struggles to move beyond systems of signs (not sure if we have the Frankfurt School to blame for that). I began my graduate TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 29 studies in philosophy of technology (a.k.a. comparative literature) while running an art studio, SoundLab, where we made new technologies for the internet age. In my early work on avatars, I was interested in the social world of virtual agency. So, for me, inquiry has continuously been tethered to that obscure object of desire, technology. As discussed above, I primarily move between technē and technology in my work. I see technique as a secondary aspect. And yet, the contemporary mediascape realigns the semantic forcefield, as one has been surrounded by technology that fails to acknowledge technique. The frequent violence that is the state of social media might have been better acknowledged, if not better managed, if there were industry accountability for technique. It seems the necessity of precise conceptual distinctions of media technologies is even more pressing now. If we think of the advanced automation turn as a “general purpose technology,” like electricity or the internet, then the importance of distinguishing military from civic from public is pronounced. And yet, we are distinctly in a state of catch-all panic that only supports a particular narrative of techno-determinism. Film can inhabit the amphibian state of technique and technology without being culturally disruptive, as it is known in temporal, narrative, and dimensional form. The contemporary phase shift of advanced automation is environmental immersive technologies that surround although often invisible. These are a different beast. I think it is a great time for many more of us to attend to Sylvia Wynter’s work, on “After Humanism” (1984). Whether we think of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (2005) or Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s sorting of things (1999), it is crucial to remember where we are on sorting systems, sorting humans, sorting things and the world. In terms of recent changes in technology-shaping research methods, I see a clear shift toward working collaboratively with machine-learning researchers, as well as working hands-on with generative tools. It means my publications are looking like multi-authored papers at ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) conferences as opposed to traditional humanities/STS. It won’t stay like that forever, but I am interested to see how critical frameworks and computer science/engineering technē can better cross-pollinate. My creative practice mirrors the scholarly one in the sense that I often take on new tools and work with them in a way that is against the cultural grain. For example, in the project and book Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (2023), I train a generative adversarial network (GAN) AI, away from the photo real and human likeness. On a good day, my work thinks through geopolitical issues in a relational way: power can’t be thought without shades of access and accountability. 30 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN At this point, participation ends up being a bit of a creepy word for me, as the last two decades of social media have been directed at “participation” in a way that forecloses on consent. In the face of the institutional legacy of hegemony, engagement and activism are mission critical. If we do not speak out against the forecasting of the past as the future, we won’t have a future. I think racial/social/environmental justice is part of that, although justice, like participation, has had a tough go of it in this millennium. Methodologically, STS and Black studies are powerful engines for me, and I apply them to technology infrastructure, data studies, and media archaeology. I am working on cities and data and AI & Society. So more recently I have been doing work that sounds like policy studies – trusted data sharing, responsible AI, and so on. But I’m pretty sure it’s the same methods of the sociotechnological that I’ve developed through the works of Lucy Suchman (2007), Michelle Murphy (2017), Rosi Braidotti (2011), Wendy Chun (2008, 2011) … it’s a long list. It’s nice to have such good company in troubled times. Shane Denson: The phenomenon that I have been most interested in lately concerns a broad transformation in the media environment – one that has a lot to do with the media-technological developments that others have pointed out here. Whether it is generative AI, or the aggregative and algorithmic systems of social media, or the more literally environmental technics of geoengineering efforts, what we are witnessing is a shift from past-based or “mnemotechnical” (using Bernard Stiegler’s term) to more decisively future-oriented or protentional forms of mediation that effectively lay the groundwork, predictively and in advance, for emergent agencies. This is something that I have described, in my book Discorrelated Images (2020), as a shift from “cinematic” media (based in the recording and replay of past events) to “post-cinematic” media (which operate in a generative mode, oftentimes producing new images and other sensory contents in real time). What’s at stake here more broadly, however, is hardly confined to audiovisual media. Rather, it concerns the technical operationalization of microtemporalities, allowing contemporary media technologies to bypass subjective consciousness and operate on its very ground – including the presubjective and microtemporal processes of embodied and environmental metabolism (something that I have elaborated on in my more recent book, Post-Cinematic Bodies [2023]). Of course, these material and environmental dimensions of media and mediation are not entirely new; we might think of photochemical processes, or environmental reactions, such as oxidation TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 31 and decay, along these lines as well. What is new, however, is the precision and control that are enabled by algorithmic media. Operating faster than thought or perception, these media tap into our temporal becoming, trac- ing out grooves within which phenomenal experience can unfold. Thus, while media have always been environmental (both literally and in the metaphorical sense of “media ecologies”), they would seem to form the total environment today for subjectivities and collectivities that – while not absolutely predetermined – have in an important sense been anticipated and, we might say, “parameterized.” If there was a single object that drew me toward thinking about and theorizing technology as a primary area of concern in my work, it was Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein, f irst published in 1818 – in the wake of the still recent split between “art” and “technology” in European languages. A long line of feminist thinking has traced the ways that Shelley was attuned to the transformations of gendered embodiment and sociality in relation to the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, work in philosophy of technology and in science and technology studies, read alongside (and often in tension with) post-structuralist thinkers, helped me to see how technology’s impact could not be reduced to the domain of discourse alone; rather, technology – as I came to see it – had material and environmental impacts that, by way of the body’s prepersonal sensitivities, could trans- form subjective and collective relations to the world. Rather than mere applications of science, industrial-era technologies like the steam engine led scientif ic theorization; thermodynamics developed out of an attempt to theorize these new technologies, which had already reshaped life, labor, and experiences of time and space. Two of my f irst publications turned to Frankenstein in order to think about these dimensions of technology; one of them (“Frankenstein, Bioethics, and Technological Irreversibility” [2007a]) developed a theory of “technological irreversibility” that extrapolated from Shelley’s novel in order to think about the transformations of agency at stake in biotechnical interventions, while the other article (“Incorpora- tions: Melodrama and Monstrosity in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein” [2007b]) looked at the role of Frankenstein in mediating the media-technical shift from silent to sound f ilm. Together, these twin interests in what can loosely be called technology’s ontological dimensions and its cultural-phenomenological ones (as reflected in the estimated 200 f ilmic adaptations of Frankenstein, each responding to new media-technical developments, contexts, and constellations) laid the basis for my f irst book, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). 32 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN Since then, I have continued to focus on ways to combine the ontological and the cultural, while recent work has refined and refocused these interests in terms of specifically environmental and aesthetic transductions of agency in relation to technics. In recent thinking, I see some of my earliest attempts to theorize the Frankensteinian dimensions of biotechnology (and the fundamental challenges that biotechnics poses to bioethical questions that rely on pre-existing subjects capable of deliberation) resonating with the rapid developments we are witnessing with respect to generative AI. Because the latter operate predictively and outside the purview of subjec- tive awareness, they are capable of subtly reconf iguring the parameters of subjectivity itself. My argument is not that AI will “outsmart” humans (or similar science-f ictional scenarios, based in the idea of technical and artif icial “intelligence”), but rather that machine-learning algorithms (e.g., in diffusion models that produce the real-time spectacles of AI art by the likes of Refik Anadol or Ian Cheng) can undercut consciousness, impinging directly on our embodied, metabolic processing of the visual, thus shifting the ground beneath the seeing subject. As a result, I contend, there can be no AI ethics without a prior assessment of AI aesthetics. And I think, ultimately, that this applies to any consequential technological development, which is f irst a transformation of the broadly aesthetic (i.e., sensory) environment for consciousness. It is certainly the case for contemporary, algorithmic, and future-oriented technologies. In all of this work, I often f ind myself thinking about the relations among terms like technē, technique, and technology, and especially what these terms say about historically shifting relations and interfaces between human and technical agencies. As is well known, the term technology f irst enters into European languages around the time of the Industrial Revolution – coinciding roughly with both the steam engine and the advent of philo- sophical aesthetics. That, to me, is itself worthy of theoretical and historical consideration. The art/technology split drives a wedge right into the heart of a previously more-or-less undifferentiated f ield of making, as framed by both the Latin ars and the Greek technē before it. Afterwards, art, craft, industrial technology, and other forms of making become at least somewhat more clearly delineated, with signif icant consequences for various concep- tions of individual (authorial, artisanal, and/or industrial) and collective (market-oriented or class-based) agency, among other things. Interestingly, technology originally referred to the quasi-scientif ic or analytical study of what we later came to name with that term (while many European languages, like German, retain Technik as the more common term alongside the less everyday Technologie). Originally, technology suggests, in a sense, a greater TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 33 distance from the direct action of technique, which suggests a tool-like or instrumental relation according to which agency resides in the subject (and in this early analytical distance, we perhaps f ind the seeds of the alienated distance of industrial and postindustrial technology). All of this is of course well known. The reason I recount it here is, f irst, simply to foreground the contingency of this f ield of meaning, along with the self-conceptions that it conditions for human agents; second, and related to this basic contingency, I believe we are witnessing another major shift in these relations, or in what Beth Coleman refers to above as the “semantic forcefield” around them. As I have said before, AI and other algorithmic technologies fundamentally redistribute agency; in the form of AI art and related generative, computa- tional forms, they also challenge the split between art and tech, portending a reconvergence or at least reconfiguration of relations. And at the heart of this reconfiguration we f ind precisely a question of media and mediation, which has always been the tacit common ground between the estranged realms of art and technology – for only in the wake of this estrangement do concepts of communicative, expressive, and artistic media and mediums flourish. Today, with the emergence of futural, generative, and predictive media technologies, we must ask again what a medium is, and what it is a medium for. This is the background for the work I am doing now on serialized media, typification, and generativity, drawing on the still understudied late work of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason Fredric Jameson once referred to as providing “the only genuine philosophy of the media” (Sartre 2004, xxviii). Sartre’s fusion of existentialism and Marxism in this late work could be very signif icant, I think, for theorizing what has vari- ously been termed “cognitive capitalism,” the “attention economy,” and the like. The resources of phenomenology have not been exhausted, and they are very much needed today, even though the contemporary capture of attention and awareness often operates, as I have said, by way of bypassing consciousness, or eluding the window of phenomenality itself. Sartre’s turn away from the solipsistic method that arguably inheres in his early work (and, according to some interpretations, in phenomenology generally) and toward collectivity and the material environment as a repository and constraint on human agency is invaluable today. Clearly, we need to update some of his concepts, such as the “practico-inert” – Sartre’s term for the built environment, commodities, and “worked matter” generally, which stores and retains the agency of human praxis and labor while condensing it into inert, objective form. As Sartre shows, such objects exert an important enabling and constraining force in shaping individual and collective existences, 34 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN and this alone is worth returning to. But in an age of smart technologies and predictive algorithms, the landscape of worked matter is hardly inert anymore. It is active, predictive, anticipatory, and exhausting. It drains us of our energies, while channeling our conscious and preconscious agencies and identities into pre-def ined and pre-formatted categories. This is no longer the practico-inert but rather the practico-alert. What I have been describing here as a shift toward futural modes of mediation, or the shift from Sartre’s “practico-inert” to a new, protentional technics of the practico-alert, is in fact all about the consolidation and exercise of power, expressing itself most directly in predictive forms of typif ication – forms of categorization, whether racializing or gendering, for example, that operate on our bodies and minds in advance of our ability to perceive or act in the world. Sartre’s concept of “seriality” – which for him describes the mutually alienated form of social collectivity that emerges around the industrially standardized lifeworld, its built environments, and commodity objects – offers a useful starting point for thinking about this political dimension. Feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young (1994) famously argued for a reconception of gender as a Sartrean seriality – which is to say, as a negatively and materially imposed category, not biologically determined nor voluntarily chosen either. Together with resources drawn from Black studies and Black feminism in particular, including Hortense Spillers’s (2003) distinction between body and f lesh, and Sylvia Wynters’s (2001; Wynter and McKittrick 2015) thinking about the “sociogenic principle” and various “genres of the human,” I think there are ample resources for thinking race and racialization under the category of serialization as well. And this line of thinking acquires its full force, I believe, when we take note of the shifting parameters of serialization, which is to say: the shift of media-technical operations and agencies from the memorial to the futural, which allows for the inscription of serial- ized categories directly into the f lesh and the algorithmically computed environment itself. Amanda Egbe: Artif icial intelligence continues to occupy a central place in my contempla- tion of the realm of moving images and media in general. The ramifications of AI’s impact on creativity resonate with me deeply, especially from my standpoint as a practitioner. A signif icant critique that has emerged within the f ield of AI and com- puter science around racial bias, articulated by figures like Timnit Gebru, has sought to identify frameworks and strategies from the arts and humanities TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 35 that could serve to mitigate concerns related to representation (Jo and Timnit 2020). This line of thinking has guided me to reflect on the nature of datasets employed in AI and how this aligns with concepts like Lev Manovich’s “database cinema” (1999). Additionally, it draws parallels to moments in art history, such as Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas ([1924-1929] 2009), prompting me to contemplate how categorization and meaning-making occur. Specif ically, I’m interested in exploring how images positioned next to each other influence representation and the dynamics of moving images. I delve into the relationship between images by reconsidering the context of pre-cinematic technologies like the stereograph, the f lipbook, and magic lantern slides, all the while considering the intricacies of bias and representation. This inquiry provides an avenue to examine creativity intertwined with technology, transcending simplistic dichotomies and uncritical media histories. When examining the historical utilization of moving-image technology by Black f ilmmakers or representations of race, these strategies of managing image relationships offer a pathway to explore the creative capacities of artif icial intelligence. Moreover, they open novel avenues for reevaluating the fundamental nature of moving images. This prompts contemplation regarding the permissible and achievable interven- tions with media technologies, questioning where and in what manner they can be applied. I initially embarked on my exploration with various image technolo- gies, encompassing photography, video, f ilm, and computing, drawn to smaller formats due to their accessibility. The internet became a location for collectors and enthusiasts to trade media technologies, and this in the digital realm significantly enriched my passion for technology and provided access to items that would have otherwise remained out of reach, alongside enthusiasts’ know-how. The interconnected nature of these technologies has been pivotal in sustaining my inquiry. The realm of small technologies and open source has allowed me to prototype ideas and reflect on practices quickly; this goes from depth cameras to 360 cameras, and brings the sense of the media lab to an environment outside of institutions. The ongoing technological and cultural shifts brought about by digi- tization continue to influence my perspective deeply. They highlight the essential role of technology in shaping the subjects of research. Additionally, I contemplate utilizing and repurposing diverse materials and mediums as foundational elements for artistic expression. This approach has meant that every novel technology has yielded distinct insights. For instance, the creative aspect of interactivity within computing has facilitated connections between different technologies and materials. 36 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN I’m not sure whether precise conceptual distinctions are important for me but, in looking at the overlap of paper and moving-image technologies in my previous research, I am aware that thinking through the concepts of cultural techniques helped me to look differently at how technologies shape and are shaped by subjects, so Bernhard Siegert (2015) (as with Yuriko Furuhata below) in the European context has been helpful, as has Lisa Gitelman’s (2014) approach to media history in the North American context. My friend Claudy Op den Kamp’s (2018) work on copyright/intellectual property and reuse has also been very signif icant to me for consider- ing how reuse plays such an important part in creativity, and how legal aspects can shape distinctions. These distinctions, when I consider f ilm as single screen/cinema, and so on, seem problematic, they seem to be opposable when you consider collective/cooperative approaches. For example, the studio f ilm club associated with Peter Doig reminds me of spaces of communal watching in places like Sierra Leone, or the radical cinema or f ilm groups such as Exploding Cinema in the UK; they utilize all types of technologies of the moving and still image under the umbrella of f ilm. Siegfried Zielinksi’s variantology (2006) holds some sway for me when I consider the various approaches of media archaeology, but when I also ref lect on approaches of intersectionality, critical race theory, and transnationalism, then there are other aspects of media, related to Blackness and representation, which add another dimension to what we consider a distinct medium. This summer in the UK, there have been two amazing large exhibitions of the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Isaac Julien, artists from the US and UK. From still to moving image and moving image to still, both artists consider the history of f ilm, photography, video, pre-cinematic moving and still image technologies in the context of the Black experience, the gay experience, the gendered experience. Their installation work brings the viewer into a physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual engagement with the content, and the questions of technē, technology, and technique. And so, the works of Fred Moten (2017) and Ramon Amaro (2022) at present are resonating with my own research, the not f ixing of the Black experience, and how that impacts our reading of media technologies and their use. For me, media archives and their shifting use; techniques and technolo- gies; reuse; and artif icial intelligence are of current importance because they bring into focus the ethics of the image, the embedding of technologies and techniques, and how race can put instability into relief. TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 37 Yuriko Furuhata: Lately, I have been interested in geoengineering, including technologies of cloud seeding and solar radiation management. In my book Climatic Media (2022), I examine the early transpacific history of geoengineering in the 1950s by connecting how the desire to manipulate and engineer indoor and outdoor atmospheres led to various weather modification experiments by scientists, architects, and environmental artists in Japan and the United States. These attempts to control and engineer atmospheric phenomena – including everything from the small scale of laboratory experiments to the large scale of the weaponization of hurricanes during the Vietnam War – were also intimately tied to the development of digital computers on both sides of the Pacif ic. So current debates on anthropogenic climate change and its devastating planetary effects in the form of extreme weather such as heatwaves, along with the concurrent technophilic propositions such as solar geoengineering, present another moment to reflect on this history. This includes of course its geopolitical backgrounds, which I approach from the critical perspective of media studies and science and technology studies. In my earlier work on Japanese avant-garde cinema and its intermedial experiments with television and photography, I turned to the question of technology by first thinking about the issue of medium specificity of cinema, which was having its moment in f ilm and media studies. I was curious to f ind out how this issue of medium specif icity was articulated by Japanese filmmakers in the 1960s, as they responded to the “threat” of television as the newest medium that could respond much faster to contemporary events and convey sensations of actuality and liveness. I found it particularly evocative that the timing of the Japanese translation of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in 1965 coincided with the rise of eizō (technologically mediated image) as a buzzword within Japanese f ilm and art criticism of the time. Later, I became interested more in the overlap between histories of sci- ence, architecture, and digital computing, which led me to think about more mundane technologies, such as mechanical air-conditioning. In dialogue with other scholars in the fast-growing subfield of environmental media studies, I tried to expand the definition of “media” by turning to the material- ity of media infrastructures, such as the energy-intensive data centers that support our daily use of digital media via cloud computing. In particular, I focused on the importance of mechanical air-conditioning as a material support of data centers wherein digital computers are constantly chilled and “pampered” in order to operate in the optimal manner. So, the question 38 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN of technology for me became intertwined with questions of the materiality of media infrastructure, architecture, and engineering of indoor climates. In Climatic Media and various articles, I’ve borrowed German media theorist Bernhard Siegert’s take on “cultural techniques” (2015) to talk about architectural techniques such as the engineering of the air, for instance, in the case of so-called “dragon holes” that ventilate high-rise buildings in the tropical island of Hong Kong. There, buildings often feature large holes or gaps in the middle of the building. This architectural feature not only brings about the material effect of ventilation, but it also has the symbolic function of responding to local feng shui lore – the need to circulate auspicious energy, which is usually represented by dragons. This is why they’re called dragon holes or dragon gates. So, in spite of the post-structuralist bent to Siegert’s theory, I thought it nicely captured the material and symbolic dimension of non-mechanical devices and architectural interfaces that operate as media, such as gates and doors. Similarly, while I remain critical of the Eurocentrism and the conserva- tive political stance of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, I found his argument that modernity is def ined by what he calls the “explication of the atmosphere” helpful (2009, 56). His point is that modern technological developments, such as the invention of poison gas and nuclear weapons, revealed and made explicit the hitherto implicit lethal potential of the air to be weaponized, which generated a kind of existential insecurity among modern subjects. I ended up complicating Sloterdijk’s argument about the singularity of this modernity centered on Europe, by turning instead to the imperial geopolitics of the Japanese empire and its own technological investment in the modification of atmosphere. But his take on technological modernity was quite useful for me to historicize how the modif ication of the atmosphere became such a central concern among various groups of engineers, architects, scientists, and artists in Japan. I’ve already mentioned the example of feng shui-influenced architectural features of “dragon holes” in Hong Kong, but this example is also linked to my comparative thinking about what John Durham Peters has called “a philosophy of elemental media” (2015). I wanted to think about certain Eurocentric and modern assumptions we may bring to concepts such as “elements” or “environment” in media studies by comparing something like the philosophical tradition of feng shui and its f ive elemental phases to Greek philosophy’s four classical elements of f ire, water, earth, and air. But my point was not about advocating for an “Eastern” philosophy of elements, since there is no such thing as a unif ied or continuous mode of thinking. That said, it was a way for me to articulate the genealogy of concepts and TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 39 metaphors that we mobilize within media studies. In my work, I also traced parallel discourses of “media ecology” in Japan and North America, and how the concept of ecology borrowed from science has entered humanities and social sciences. In this regard I’m very Foucauldian. I like to historicize the paths that certain concepts such as “ecology,” “elements,” and “environment” took before they became naturalized in the present, and incorporated in our discussions about media. Because I work primarily with Japanese archival materials, I try to show the convergence and divergence of these paths as part of media histories. The question of geopolitics is central to my own research, as I often reflect on the colonial legacies and reality of Japan as a former non-Western empire and as an ongoing settler colonial state. I consider my current work to be part of environmental media studies and environmental humanities in general and, in my recent work on the transpacif ic media history of geosciences and the anthropogenic markers of the Anthropocene, I build on the work of scholars engaging in critical race theory, feminist STS, Indigenous and Pacif ic Island Studies, as well as transpacif ic and archipelagic studies. I’m interested in rethinking the problematic f igure of “anthropos” at the center of the Anthropocene in relation to the development of scientif ic modes of seeing and visualizing the “deep time” of Earth’s geologic history, and how they intersect with the territorial expansions of Japan and the United States as archipelagic empires in the Pacif ic during the twentieth century. Ultimately, in my view, questions of media and technology are inseparable from geopolitical conflicts, colonial histories, and climatic conditions. Tom Gunning: I have trouble with the term – and the concept – “new” media. It always smacks of an advertising campaign or a dean’s fundraising letter. (My friend Noël Carroll once pointed out to me the oxymoron of an advertise- ment for a “new improved” version of an established cleanser: “Brand New Old Dutch Cleanser.”) However, the issue of novelty, innovation – and, indeed, invention (which is I think the proper term here), if more than rhetorical – is crucial to understanding the history of media and technol- ogy. My point of reference would be a quote from André Bazin from his 1946 essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” “In short, cinema has not yet been invented!” (1967, 21). I interpret this not as a call for cinema’s (or broadly speaking, the technology of the moving image’s) aspiration to total realism, but as indicating cinema’s inherently open technical nature. Here I follow Gilbert Simondon: “Invention is the taking charge of the system of actuality through the system of virtualities” (2017, 61). Technic must 40 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN be understood as keeping open and actualizing possibilities. Technics of media are in a constant process of renewal, not through progressive stages of perfection of a specif ic goal, but a process of virtualities becoming concrete. The goal of media history and theory must be to discover the novelty inherent in media history and within each device, whether the camera obscura, magic lantern, 3D projection, digital video, or sound cinema. My thinking is provoked by Martin Heidegger’s 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977b). Heidegger asserts an essential relation between technē and poiēsis, understanding technē not simply as a means to an end, but as a process of revealing (poiēsis). However, Heidegger sees “modern technology” as betraying this understanding, becoming instead a “setting upon,” a challenging of nature to fulf ill operational demands, embodied especially in the concept of Ge-stell, “enframing.” I see cinema and motion pictures as the technological art par excellence, and framing Fig. 2.1: “Brand New old dutch cleanser.” TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 41 would seem to be at its center. Although Heidegger’s comments on f ilm are sparse, his 1959 essay “Dialogue on Language” contains a curious discussion of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) posed by his Japanese interlocutor, Tezuka Tomio: Regardless of what the aesthetic quality of a Japanese f ilm may turn out to be, the mere fact that our world is set forth in the frame of a f ilm forces that world into the sphere of what you call objectness. The photographic objectif ication is already a consequence of the ever wider outreach of Europeanization. (Heidegger 1971, 17) This description would seem to condemn cinema as a tool of modern technology, as enframing, and therefore cutting off f ilm from the possibili- ties of poiēsis. However, “The Question Concerning Technology” avoids a reductive view of technology. The enframing that aspires to ordering everything as available to human use does pose a danger; but Heidegger quotes the poet Hölderlin, “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” (quoted in Heidegger 1977b, 28). Modern technology, Heidegger claims, brings not only the danger of setting upon the whole world as devised for human use, but also the possibility of technē as revealing – as poiēsis – something beyond mere human instrumental use. I believe the technological moving image becomes one place where this struggle takes place. Can the moving and projected image offer an encounter between technology and aesthetics? Wanting to avoid both a mechanical course of progress in media and a reactionary conservatism, I will violate chronology by evoking a relation between technē and magic. In his classic anthropological essay, “Magic, Science and Religion,” Bronisław Malinowski demonstrated that traditional societies depended on a complex weave between systems of specialist knowledge – tools and techniques (i.e., technology) – and practices of magic. Thus, the rather complex process of constructing outrigger canoes among the Trobriand Islanders employs complex technology, but interweaves it with magical procedures: But even with all their systematic knowledge, methodically applied, they are still at the mercy of powerful and incalculable tides, sudden gales during the monsoon season and unknown reefs. And here comes in their magic, performed over the canoe during its construction, carried out at the beginning and in the course of expeditions and resorted to in moments of real danger. (Malinowski 1948, 30) 42 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN Both systematic techniques and magic may be seen as means of control over nature; magic recognizes limits to technic and supplements it by other means. This traditional society acknowledges powers beyond rational prediction, and plunges into a logic of images, metaphors, and analogies. It is here I would claim that Heidegger’s understanding of technē as poiēsis appears. It acknowledges the vagaries of the world rather than simply asserting dominance over them, and participates in these unpredictable energies and events through an invocation of analogies through spell and rituals. Gilbert Simondon’s understanding of the technical, expounded in his 1958 book, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017), posits a magical world view preceding a fundamental split in thinking, which parallels (expresses) the split between the object and the subject which are united in magic. While I have doubts about this schema as an actual historical periodization, the contrast in ideal types seems to me illuminating. The technical, understood not simply as a series of operational devices for the domination of nature, but as the interrelation of what Simondon calls “technical ensembles,” while radically different from the f ixed system of magic, nonetheless approaches the world as a system of networks. Technic in Simondon’s view is not a matter of isolated technical objects, but rather their interrelation within a milieu. The key to the technical, beyond seeing it as a tool in the domination of nature and humanity, lies, then, in its embrace of the virtual, a view of a potential totality. I believe the key to what is commonly called “new media” lies in its fundamental relation to the virtual; in cinema this indicates the possibility of mutability in the image. This corresponds to the concept of information as Simondon takes it from cybernetics: renewal through the unpredictable. Here lies the aff inity between the technical and the avant-garde, which explores media’s ability (as Simondon puts it) not to copy the world but to extend it. Jeffrey West Kirkwood: In the wake of recent consumer-facing evolutions in machine learning and transformer architecture, there’s been a perilous sense that humanistic inquiry has been ejected from its most sovereign domain: questions of mean- ing. The ability of generative AI to probabilistically invent texts that seem to replicate human conventions of writing using large language models (LLMs) based on immense training sets has led to an ostensible victory parade for the most obnoxious forms of positivism. “Not only can the fragile reserve of human language be quantif ied, it can be technically reproduced!” Hurray. But what techno-triumphalism and humanist dejection alike often seem to ignore is that intelligence (human or otherwise) was always artif icial. The TeN sTaTeMeNTs oN TechNics 43 question of both mind and meaning are questions of technics. In what we might refer to as “the revenge of humanism,” however, I would argue that technics must be seen foremost as a question of meaning. This is perhaps a puzzling suggestion from someone who, like me, works in a tradition of German theory, equally misinterpreted, celebrated, and reviled for its “anti-hermeneutic” positions and insistence on a “technologi- cal a priori.” A brief detour to some older territory of a prioris might help to begin to clarify. In his 1786 text, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Immanuel Kant offered an incendiary assessment of which areas of study could ever hope to be considered sciences (watch out, biology and chemistry, Kant says you’re not sciences!). One of the unlucky disciplines to be excluded from the hallowed category was psychology. Kant claimed that the object (the mind) and the subject (also a mind) of observation cannot be adequately differentiated, and additionally, “mathematics is not applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws” (2004, 7). A proper science, which could make a priori claims, would need to have an independent, physical object that it could mathematize. As Kant framed it, a scientif ic psychology would need “to take the law of continuity in the f lux of inner changes into account” in a way analogous to how mathematics explains the relationship of the “straight line” to “the whole of geometry” (2004, 7). In other words, a scientif ic explanation of the psyche had to be externally measurable, and thus discretized, but also able to account for and reproduce the continuities of inner life that were broken down in that same process of measure. This, I would contend, offers a groundwork for understanding the place of technics at the very heart of human meaning-making. For better or worse, Kant’s dismissals were not heeded. The greater part of the nineteenth century, following Johann Friedrich Herbart’s landmark 1824 text, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, was a riot of attempts to empirically measure the functions of the mind, and philosophy departments even found themselves under siege by experimental psychologists who were beginning to occupy their chair positions in an early prelude to the STEM f ields takeover. This was a feat accomplished through the development of machines and, specif ically, proto-cinematic instruments like the fall tachistoscope and chronoscope, which delivered and measured the responses to rapid stimuli, dismantling the complexities of inner life into quantif i- able intervals between input and output. In my book, Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 (2022a), I detail the way that psychology became a science at the point that the mind became a technical object – discretized, operationalized, and sequenced. This was an instance of what Tom Gunning describes in Gilbert Simondon’s On 44 BrocK, chaTeau, coleMaN, deNsoN, eGBe, FuruhaTa, GuNNiNG, KirKWood, MulveY, PlaNTiN the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017) as “virtualities becoming concrete.” What nineteenth-century psychophysicists could still not account for, however, was how the concrete could then become virtual, that is, how the line could describe all of geometry, how the discrete could be made continuous, and how purely technical sequences could produce something like the supple forms of meaning that def ine a mind. As I argue in Endless Intervals, it was early cinema and its artful regulation and management of the technical absences central to the experience of moving images that alloyed technics and semiosis. Already by the late nineteenth century, an aspiration took shape to explain how systems of discrete functions that def ined the mind as a machine could signify for a larger unity that was not reducible to the bare stopping and starting of dead mechanisms. As but one instance, Ernst Kapp drew equally on Hegel and the theoretical engineering titan Franz Reuleaux to argue in his remarkable 1877 magnum opus, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture, that human consciousness, bodily autonomy, and cultural systems of signif ication all emerged from a dialectical interaction with technologies through a process of what he called “organ projection.” In the introduction to the 2018 edition of that volume, my co-editor Leif Weatherby and I showed that not only was the purely operational sense of the German term Technik established by Kapp foundational to later understandings of the human that would follow, in work by everyone from Sigmund Freud to Friedrich Kittler to Donna Haraway, but that no conception of human culture or meaning was possible in the absence of technics. It’s not a shocking proposition to someone familiar with the vaguely def ined terrain of media theory that technics underlies, or is at the very least inseparably interwoven with, any viable notion of meaning-making. Martin Heidegger, borrowing (or more likely stealing!) the term Weltbild from an acrimonious debate between physicists Ernst Mach and Max Planck in 1908 that I describe in the article, “Ernst Mach and the Technological Fact of Counterfactuals” (2018), famously argued that the very coherence of any idea of the world relies on the revelations afforded by period-specif ic technologies (Heidegger 1977a). Kittler, likewise, pla