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 gathered by social media sites.
In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society.
Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

Digital Memory and the Archive (Volume 39) (Electronic Mediations)

Arts & Photography

Ernst, Wolfgang

Photography & Video

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology & the Computational Machine (Thinking Media)

Wolfgang Ernst's new work, Technológos in Being, in its explicit media-scientific approach, aligns with the politics of the thinking media series to publish innovative works that advance media studies towards the 'new sciences.' Ernst's invites readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies: the conviction that an extended understanding of "medium" needs to include a concept of materiality that focuses on "non- human" agencies as well. The book grounds media analysis radically in the technological apparatuses, relays, transistors, hard- and software, to precisely locate the scenes, operations and frictions where reasoning logos and 'informable' matter interfere.

Humor & Entertainment

Bloomsbury Academic

Wolfgang Ernst's new work, Technológos in Being, in its explicit media-scientific approach, aligns with the politics of the thinking media series to publish innovative works that advance media studies towards the 'new sciences.'\nErnst's invites readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies: the conviction that an extended understanding of "medium" needs to include a concept of materiality that focuses on "non- human" agencies as well. The book grounds media analysis radically in the technological apparatuses, relays, transistors, hard- and software, to precisely locate the scenes, operations and frictions where reasoning logos and 'informable' matter interfere.

Computers & Technology

Web Development & Design

For a millennium, Roman Law has been part and parcel of the Western legal canon. This book follows the interpretation efforts triggered by a specific problem concerning multiple tortfeasorsÆ liabilities for homicide. The complete evolution of Roman law scholarship is reflected in the discussions of one single problem.

Justinian's Digest 9.2.51 in the Western Legal Canon: Roman Legal Thought and Modern Causality Concepts

Legal History

Intersentia

Seit Beginn menschlicher Kultur waren Heilkundige bemüht, Kranken auch mit geeigneten Worten zu helfen. Archaische und mittelalterliche Heilspruchtexte, bisher als magische oder per Wortakt performierende Instrumente gedeutet, werden vom Autor erstmals nach neurobiologisch möglichen Funktionsabläufen unter die Lupe genommen. Textinhalte und Wortfiguren werden nach Kriterien emotionaler Verarbeitung per frontaler Regulierung, als Reaktion auf kognitive Inkongruenzen, als Imagination von Regression und als extro- und introversive Katharsis beschrieben. Dabei zeigt sich, daß fließende reziproke Vermittlungen von Kultur zu Natur möglich waren: Wort und Ritus konnten zur Aktivierung innerer Bilder und damit neuronaler Aktivitäten bis zu immunologischen Veränderungen beitragen.

Gehirn und Zauberspruch: Archaische und mittelalterliche psychoperformative Heilspruchtexte und ihre natürlichen Wirkkomponenten- Eine interdisziplinäre Studie (German Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses

Kulturverlag Kadmos

In the media theatre of contemporary culture, a drama unfolds: While the human sense of “the present” is challenged by the immediacy of analog signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non-)sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves. At that moment, human-related phenomenological analysis clashes with the media-archaeological close reading of the technological event, in an impossible effort to let the temporeal articulate itself.The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 04Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum

The Delayed Present: Media-Induced Tempor(e)Alities & Techno-Traumatic Irritations of the Contemporary (Contemporary Condition)

History & Criticism

Sternberg Press

Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.

Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (Recursions)

Amsterdam University Press

Since 2004, Open has conducted an interdisciplinary investigation into the changing conditions of public space, fostering new ideas about the public sphere and focusing on the impact of current processes of privatization, mediatization and globalization on society and cultural production. This volume collects key texts from Open, published between 2004 and 2012.

Open! Key Texts, 2004-2012: Art, Culture & the Public Domain

Groys, Boris

Holmes, Brian

Lütticken, Sven

Architecture

nai010 publishers

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