scholarly journals Whose Virus - Whose Code

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Gómez-Venegas

This essay attempts to trace the currents of anxieties and fears that overflowed the digital during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Traveling with such flows, this work aims to model the questions that, circulating silently in a sort of latent state before the catastrophe, now haunt us as brutally unveiled; namely, to which extent the digital mediations we have attached to ourselves, to our lives, in order to know and experience this world under a protected mode, now push us to witness that that world has expelled us? To which extent these digital mediations tell us that now we belong more to them, than to that old world of which we became blind almost a century ago? Through a post-hermeneutical approach, one that analyzes some of the digital traces left by the rise of this pandemic by discussing them through the lens of media history and media theory, this work seeks to sketch a short media history of loss; the loss of many, the loss of our-selves.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawid Kasprowicz

How can the human body be integrated into a technological loop? Is it enough to measure this body? Where does the measurable body end and where does the subjective realm of a sentient body begin? This book focuses less on the distinction between measurable (Körper) and sentient bodies (Leib). Instead, it describes processes in which these distinctions become the construct of media-intensive practices of knowledge. At the centre of these practices is the concept of immersion—the plunging of bodies into technological environments. Using case studies from the train ride, cockpit design and experiments in virtual reality, this book shows how new knowledge of humans is generated through the correlations between human bodies and technological environments. Assembling knowledge from fields like the history of the body in the 20th century, the history of technology, media history and media theory, it addresses the central question of the ‘immersed body’ in terms of our subjectivity in digitalised environments.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-104
Author(s):  
Friedrich Kittler

Der Vortrag schlägt vor, nicht mehr den Menschen als letzte Referenz und vertrauten Maßstab der Architektur zu setzen, sondern Architekturen als Mediensysteme zu denken. Eine noch ungeschriebene Mediengeschichte der Architektur sollte daher auch und gerade in historischer Absicht nach formalen Entsprechungen zwischen Techniken des Entwerfens und solchen der Bauten suchen, in denen Praxis und Produkt zusammenfallen. </br></br>The paper proposes the consideration of architecture(s) as a media system, instead of imposing man as its ultimate reference and known measure. A media history of architecture – which remains to be written – should therefore search for formal correspondences between techniques of drafting and those of buildings, in which practice and product coincide.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay

`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942098684
Author(s):  
Adam Hjorthén

This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as ‘roots tourism’ has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions and its relation to the twenty-first century tourism and heritage economies, this article looks at how ancestral tourism grew out of European attempts at expanding the tourism industry after 1945. It studies the international spread of ‘person-to-person’ programs that sought to turn travelers into ‘ambassadors’, and the subsequent transformation of such initiatives into ‘homecoming’ campaigns through notions of co-descent, targeting Americans of European descent. By exploring the case of the 1966 Homecoming Year campaign in Sweden, the article shows that the attraction of ancestral tourism was grounded in its ability to combine economic and political incentives articulated in the Marshall Plan. It developed out of a liberal-democratic ideology that vested individual travelers with diplomatic agency. In the process, European tourist agencies calcified the notion that ancestral tourism served not only individual experiences, but also national economies and international relations.


1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-539
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 3544 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT G. MOYLE ◽  
R TERRY CHESSER ◽  
RICHARD O. PRUM ◽  
PETER SCHIKLER ◽  
JOEL CRACRAFT

1989 ◽  
Vol 146 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Mollon

The disabilities experienced by colour-blind people show us the biological advantages of colour vision in detecting targets, in segregating the visual field and in identifying particular objects or states. Human dichromats have especial difficulty in detecting coloured fruit against dappled foliage that varies randomly in luminosity; it is suggested that yellow and orange tropical fruits have co-evolved with the trichromatic colour vision of Old World monkeys. It is argued that the colour vision of man and of the Old World monkeys depends on two subsystems that remain parallel and independent at early stages of the visual pathway. The primordial subsystem, which is shared with most mammals, depends on a comparison of the rates of quantum catch in the short- and middle-wave cones; this system exists almost exclusively for colour vision, although the chromatic signals carry with them a local sign that allows them to sustain several of the functions of spatiochromatic vision. The second subsystem arose from the phylogenetically recent duplication of a gene on the X-chromosome, and depends on a comparison of the rates of quantum catch in the long- and middle-wave receptors. At the early stages of the visual pathway, this chromatic information is carried by a channel that is also sensitive to spatial contrast. The New World monkeys have taken a different route to trichromacy: in species that are basically dichromatic, heterozygous females gain trichromacy as a result of X-chromosome inactivation, which ensures that different photopigments are expressed in two subsets of retinal photoreceptor.


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