28 research outputs found
Pellucid Paper : Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain
Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper is an interdisciplinary study of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media history in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.QC 20181206</p
Environing media and cultural techniques: : From the history of agriculture to AI-driven smart farming
This article presents the new theoretical concept of environing media, which is developed to offer critical insight into how processes of mediation affect how we perceive of, manage and use the environment. Building on the insight that the environment has been in a continuous slow process of change that is now escalating due to human impacts, the article sketches a history of how environmental change and mediation are intertwined. Taking the history of agriculture as a case for the theoretical development, it shows how the current digitization of farming and implementation of AI systems in precision agriculture is the last of a long series in which environmental mediation come to play a crucial role in the forging of human–Earth relations. The article thereby shows the complex interplay between knowing and changing the environment as media technologies produce new epistemologies that in turn produce new interventions.QC 20221227</p
Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate—An Introduction to Environing Media
In this essay, we provide an outline of historical and contemporary examples to illustrate the theoretical concept of environing media. We first discuss how humans have environed their surroundings long before the advent of scientific modernity and the rapid evolution of media technologies that helped in making the planet governable. Against this background, we argue that a fundamental shift in the human–Earth relation happened after 1500 and that this shift is attributable to the development of environing media employed in the process of terrestrial globalisation. We see the present profound renegotiation of the human–Earth relation as a continuity, albeit with a different intensity as exemplified by the work in Earth system science. Finally, we invert Mike Hulme’s call for scientists to meet the humanities into an appeal to humanists to embrace the environmental sciences and pursue more integrative research. Recent developments in environmental history have seen an increased interest in the shaping of environments by means of technology. To this end, scholars have developed theoretical concepts like “environing technologies”, which are based on the premise that the environment is a historical formation by people and societies who form their surroundings as well as their sense of place. In the same vein, historical ecology has shown that premodern peoples also shaped the natural world to their purposes far more than what has generally been understood. The central premise is that what is understood as the environment is the result of human intervention and that environing technologies structure the way that it is used, perceived, and understood. These insights resonate with core notions in media theory, but they have never before been brought together. Given that all of our understanding of the environment today is the product of several processes of mediation, the theory of environing technology would benefit from stronger theorisation of the role of media. While the scale and intensity of information storage, processing, and transmission by media today are unprecedented, the logic of mediated data processing essentially remains the same as five centuries ago when agents of the Spanish Empire took part in shaping the understanding of the environment of the Americas and the globe. For these purposes, we propose the concept of environing media, as a means of both joining intellectual forces and pushing theoretical analysis of both branches further. The paper outlines the theory of environing media using examples from the Global South, in particular the shaping and sensing of landscapes in and around the Philippines. From early modern to late modern times, this region of the world has been influenced by environing media, most importantly circumnavigating ships and orbiting sensing satellites. The result is landscapes made and remade according to colonial and later capitalist priorities operating on a global, and eventually a planetary, scale
Pellucid Paper : Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain
Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper is an interdisciplinary study of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media history in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.QC 20181206</p
Recension: Martin Gregersen & Tobias Skiveren, Den Materielle Drejning. Natur, teknologi og krop i (nyere) dansk litteratur.
QC 20190627</p
Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II
This article studies the mapping of American natureculture in early Spanish colonial history by focusing on the critical aspects of media and anthropogenic altering of natural habitats as a discursive practice. The case of Francisco Hernández, General Physician of The Indies and director of the first scientific expedition 1570-1577, provides the base for a critical discussion of the onto-epistemology of the mapping impulse in early modern media. Hernández was sent out by Philip II to produce a natural history of the new world which resulted in over 20 volumes of text and illustrations. He also sent back a large number of plants and animals across the Atlantic. Simultaneously, the cosmographers at the Casa de Contratación in Seville were working on the same mapping project from a distance, using surveys to gather quantified data known as Relaciones geográficas. The decade of 1570-1580 in particular saw an intense activity of media practices of mapping the new world under the rule of Philip II, who became known as the paper king. He adopted the motto ‘Plus ultra’, meaning ‘further still’ in Latin, as an emblem of his transatlantic empire that came to reach over to the Pacific and the Philippines. The article draws on recent developments of media theory and environmental humanities and discusses how the colonial enterprise processed the geobotanical intervention associated with resource exploitation. It analyses the process, storage, and transmission of information and its material underpinnings and also draws on discussions of coloniality