Making Media Theory

Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses in digital design and the philosophy of technology, at the University of Waterloo, Canada. O’Gorman has published widely about the impacts of technology on society, including his most recent book Necromedia (2015) and articles in Slate, The Atlantic, and The Globe and Mail. He is also a digital artist with an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.

O’Gorman’s Making Media Theory provides a hands-on guide to making objects without screens that serve as vehicles for media theory. In celebrating “broken tools and misfit toys,” he curates a series of creative exercises developed at the Critical Media Lab while also unfolding a larger philosophical meditation that challenges technoscientific false consciousness. This wise and whimsical how-to manual for understanding our current hyper-mediated state is essential reading for asserting the value of the arts and humanities and the pleasures of what Jack Halberstam has called “low theory.” With tales of tofu robots, sentient rabbits, wobbly furniture, electrified play-dough, high-tech hot dog eating, and a disembodied pink tentacle wielding a Swiss army knife, O’Gorman invites us to think through and with a collection of weird and misshapen media objects.

• 1. Making, Media, and Theory2. Workshop: Conductive Play Dough3. In Defence of Uselessness4. Workshop: Useless Box5. Writing with a Soldering Iron6. Workshop: Smartphone Basket7. Designing Technological Comportment: Wearables, Digital Rituals, and Non-Users8. Workshop: Resistor CaseEpilogue: Dirty MediaBibliographyIndex