The Politics of Micro-Decisions

Be it in the case of opening a website, sending an email, or high-frequency trading, bits and bytes of information have to cross numerous nodes at which micro-decisions are made. These decisions concern the most efficient path through the network, the processing speed, or the priority of incoming data packets. Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics – and of our potential opposition to it. The current debates regarding net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s revelation of NSA surveillance are only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet as we know it

Insensible and Inexplicable - On the Two Meanings of Occult

While the distinction between spiritualism and science was understood affirmatively as a demarcation of true science against pseudo-science, nowadays, after several Science Wars, it is obvious for us that this distinction does not correspond to the actual practices of science but reflects a work of ‘purification’ typical for modernity in the Latourian sense. In the physico-philosophical surroundings of this boundary epistemological foundations are shaped and modern science is constituted as the primary way to knowledge. Referring to studies on the history of the occult in the early modern period, the article shows that in order to understand the stakes of spiritualism and its technical or personal media we should trace back this boundary to a rarely recognized conceptual transformation of the ‘occult’. It shifts between insensible and inexplicable. Following this leading difference, the article traces its function in the emergence of early occultism, the debate between Leibniz and Newton, and the rise of modern spiritualism and its instrumental repertoire

Tagungsbericht: Gestirnte Kuppeln. Wie KulturwissenschaftlerInnen den Weltinnenraum des Planetariums erforschen

Florian Sprenger berichtet für die MEDIENIMPULSE von einer überaus spannenden Berliner Tagung, bei welcher der Weltinnenraum des Planetariums zwischen scientific visualization und event eingehend zum Gegenstand wurde. Was steht in den Sternen

Epistemologien des Umgebens: Zur Geschichte, Ökologie und Biopolitik künstlicher environments

Der Aufstieg des Begriffs "Environment" zur Beschreibung der Gegenwart markiert den Einfluss, den das Nachdenken über Umgebungsrelationen und die Möglichkeit der technischen Gestaltung künstlicher Umgebungen seit Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts gewonnen haben. In geschlossenen artifiziellen Welten wie Raumstationen oder künstlichen Ökosystemen wird die Verschränkung des "Environments" mit den umgebenen Organismen zum Gegenstand einer Biopolitik, die heute in autonomen Technologien der Umgebungskontrolle neue Räume erschließt. Der Autor verfolgt diese Transformation ökologischen Umgebungswissens mit dem Ziel, gegenwärtige Technologien besser zu verstehen, den Begriff unselbstverständlich zu machen und die biopolitische Dimension jeder Ökologie herauszuarbeiten

Die Kontingenz des Gegebenen - zur Zeit der Datenkritik

Critique becomes risky when it is implicit. In a historical perspective and following the etymological roots, the paper conceptualizes different modes of critique and makes their epistemological foundations explicit. The idea of a critique of data was for the first time presented by Agentur Bilwet and Frank Hartmann in the 1990s. Following these traces, the article explores how Michel Foucaults genealogical model of critique can be applied to the objects of data-critique. Consequently, it asks how critique itself can be accomplished by data, how we can judge on the given, and finally, what all this means for media studies

Action at a Distance

The mediality of transmission and the materiality of communication result today more than ever in "acting at a distance" - an action whose agency lies in a medium. This book provides an overview into this crucial phenomenon, thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality

Epistemologien des Umgebens

The rise of the term "environment" to describe the present marks the influence that reflection on environmental relations and the possibility of engineering artificial environments have gained since the mid-nineteenth century. In closed artificial worlds such as space stations or artificial ecosystems, the entanglement of the "environment" with the surrounding organisms becomes the subject of a biopolitics that today opens up new spaces in autonomous environmental control technologies. Florian Sprenger pursues this transformation of ecological environmental knowledge with the aim of better understanding current technologies, making the term understandable and highlighting the biopolitical dimension of each ecology