Ontographies proposes a radical shift, moving beyond the crisis of representation by embracing a philosophy of immanence, and offering a vital new perspective for understanding our media-saturated world.In light of recent media developments in algorithmic, digital and picture-based mediaspheres, we must accept that received models of representation (in politics, in the realm of signs, in philosophies of consciousness) have long since collapsed. Nothing stands for anything ...

Media philosophy can only be found and revealed in media themselves. The essays collected in this volume thus approach television as a medium both of thought and of action in its own right. Through its specific forms and practices, television implements and reflects on aspects of time, such as synchronicity and succession, seriality and event, history and memory. Additionally, television stages new forms of thinking causality and agency, subject-object relations, tactility, choice, and oth...

Media and human modes of existence are always already intertwined and interdependent. The notion of the anthropocene has further stimulated a new examination of ideas about human agency and responsibility. Various approaches all emphasize relational concepts and the situatedness and embodiment of human-and also non-human-existences and experiences. Their common interest has shifted from any so-called 'human nature' to the multitude of cultural, topographical, technical, historical, social,...

Television is the most powerful system of images in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nonetheless, TV has attained only little philosophical attention so far, especially compared to other (visual) media such as film. This book looks at TV as what happens on the screen and beyond it; which is mainly the operation of switching images. It therefore proposes a new definition of TV as the first picture that can be switched on, off, and over, which stresses that TV is more tactile than vis...

A theoretically informed investigation that relates the philosophies of aesthetics and imagination to understanding design practice.In The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, Mads Folkmann investigates design in both material and immaterial terms. Design objects, Folkmann argues, will always be dual phenomena—material and immaterial, sensual and conceptual, actual and possible. Drawing on formal theories of aesthetics and the phenomenology of imagination,...

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital g...

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done.Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied...

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information g...

An art-historical perspective on interactive media art that provides theoretical and methodological tools for understanding and analyzing digital art.Since the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator have received extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present a challenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aesthetic experience enabled by these new media ...

This survey provides an overview of German meta-discourse on theories and mathematics education as a scientific discipline, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Two theory strands are offered: a semiotic view related to Peirce and Wittgenstein (presented by Willibald Dörfler), and the theory of learning activity by Joachim Lompscher (presented by Regina Bruder and Oliver Schmitt). By networking the two theoretical approaches in a case study of learning fractions, it clarifies the nature of the two...

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods.“Machine art” is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann ...

Digitalization is inexorably conquering our lives - also with artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Search engine operators, social network operators and shipping platform operators know more and more about us, about our buying and living habits. User data has become a valuable commodity. We live and work with computer systems that behave intelligently or are even intelligent. Questions like "Can machines be intelligent?" or "Can they have emotions or a consciousness?" keep popping up....