Recursions – serie

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a quest to replicate the human brain, promising frictionless cognition and a future of seamless automation. But what if this pervasive narrative obscures a deeper, more “errant” truth?Errant Intelligence challenges the prevailing biological and individualistic interpretations of machine learning, arguing instead for a radical understanding of machine intelligence. The book embraces the deviations, inconsistencies, and “errant behaviour” as fundamental to the discovery of new knowledge, moving beyond the illusion of mere optimisation. Drawing on media theory, cybernetics, and a unique psychoanalytic lens, it explores the “technological unconscious” of machine learning. It traces the historical roots of AI, from early automatons and the Turing machine to natural language processing and contemporary machine learning systems. Challenging the idea of an autonomous, self-generating AI, the book exposes the hidden labour, assumed logics, and inherent biases that animate its operation. It re-evaluates computational thinking, insisting on its inherently social, collective, and symbolic character, and revealing how language and logical paradoxes are not obstacles but constitutive forces that shape intelligent machines.Errant Intelligence offers a vital new framework for understanding the profound co-evolution of human and machine learning. It’s time to “unlearn” our assumptions and embrace the productive ambiguity and fallibility at the core ofmachine intelligence.

American folk music has long presented a problematic conception of authenticity, but the reality of the folk scene, and its relationship to media, is far more complicated. This book draws on the fields of media archaeology, performance studies, and sound studies to explore the various modes of communication that can be uncovered from the long American folk revival. From Alan Lomax's cybernetic visions to Bob Dylan's noisy writing machines, this book retrieves a subterranean discourse on the concept of media that might help us to reimagine the potential of the networks in which we work, play, and sing.

This alternative study of archive and photography brings many types of image assemblages into view, always in relation to the regulated systems operating within the institutional milieu. The archive catalogue is presented as a critical tool for mapping image time, and the language of image description is seen as having a life, a worth and an aesthetic value of its own. Functioning at the intersection of text and image, the book combines media culture, archival techniques, and contemporary discourse on art and conceptual writing.

We've all had the experience of watching a film and feeling like we've been in a trance. This book takes that experience seriously, explaining cinema as a cultural technique of trance, one that unconsciously transforms our perceptions. Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema through nineteenth-century psychological laboratories, which she shows developed techniques for testing, measuring, and classifying the mind that can be seen as a prehistory of cinema, one that allows us to see the links among cinema, anthropology, psychology, and cybernetics. Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema through nineteenth-century psychological laboratories, which she shows developed techniques for testing, measuring, and classifying the mind that can be seen as a prehistory of cinema.

Software has become a key component of contemporary life and algorithms that rank, classify, or recommend are everywhere. Building on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and the cultural techniques tradition, this book examines the constructive and cumulative character of software and retraces the historical trajectories of a series of algorithmic techniques that have become the building blocks for contemporary practices of ordering. Developed in opposition to centuries of library tradition, these techniques instantiate dynamic, perspectivist, and interested forms of knowing. Embedded in technical infrastructures and economic logics, they have become engines of order that transform how we arrange information, ideas, and people.

The radical youth movements of the 1960s and '70s gave rise to both militant political groups ranging from urban guerrilla groups to autonomist counterculture, as well as radical media, including radio, music, film, video, and television. This book is concerned with both of those tendencies considered as bifurcations of radical media ecologies in the 1970s. While some of the forms of media creativity and invention mapped here, such as militant film and video, pirate radio and guerrilla television, fit within conventional definitions of media, others, such as urban guerrilla groups and autonomous movements, do not. Nevertheless what was at stake in all these ventures was the use of available means of expression in order to produce transformative effects, and they were all in different ways responding to ideas and practices of guerrilla struggle and specifically of guerrilla media. This book examines these radical media ecologies as guerrilla networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of radical media and political practices.

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.

In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in their features of instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and continually improved speed. They construct temporal infrastructures that affect the rhythms of lived experience and shape social relations and practices of cooperation. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.

How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? Phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho.

This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the developing field of media archaeology. It explores the relationship between theory and practice and the relationship between media archaeology and other disciplines. There are three sections to the collection proposing new possible fields of research for media studies: Media Archaeological Theory; Experimental Media Archaeology; Media Archaeology at the Interface. The book includes essays from acknowledged experts in this expanding field, such as Thomas Elsaesser, Wanda Strauven and Jussi Parikka.

While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

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.

Swarming has become a fundamental cultural technique related to dynamic processes and an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of society. This book examines the media history of swarm research and its significance to current socio-technological processes. It shows that the hype about collective intelligence is based on a reciprocal computerization of biology and biologization of computer science: After decades of painstaking biological observations in the ocean, experiments in aquariums, and mathematical model-making, it was swarms-inspired computer simulation which provided biological researchers with enduring knowledge about animal collectives. At the same time, a turn to biological principles of self-organization made it possible to adapt to unclearly delineated sets of problems and clarify the operation of opaque systems - from logistics to architecture, or from crowd control to robot collectives. As zootechnologies, swarms offer performative, synthetic, and approximate solutions in cases where analytical approaches are doomed to fail.

Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema through nineteenth-century psychological laboratories, which she shows developed techniques for testing, measuring, and classifying the mind that can be seen as a prehistory of cinema

Medium, Messenger, Transmission uses the figure of the messenger as a key metaphor for the function of all transmission media.

This book is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of holy and the primitive.

This book examines radical media ecologies as guerrilla networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of radical media and political practices.

Sonic Time Machines presents 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.

This collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

This volume makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.

This collection offers a set of essays that discuss the new technology of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.

This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the emerging field of media archaeology.

This rich study provides a comprehensive introduction to media philosophy while offering a new perspective on the concept and function of transmission media in all systems of exchange. Krämer uses the figure of the messenger as a key metaphor, examining a diverse range of transmission events, including the circulation of money, translation of languages, angelic visitations, spread of infectious diseases, and processes of transference and counter-transference that occur during psychoanalysis.

This book draws on the fields of media archaeology, performance studies, and sound studies to explore the various modes of communication that can be uncovered from the long American folk revival.

Building on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and the cultural techniques tradition, this book examines the constructive and cumulative character of software and retraces the historical trajectories of a series of algorithmic techniques that have become the building blocks for contemporary practices of ordering.

This book examines the media history of swarm research and its significance to current socio-technological processes.

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a quest to replicate the human brain, promising frictionless cognition and a future of seamless automation. But what if this pervasive narrative obscures a deeper, more “errant” truth?Errant Intelligence challenges the prevailing biological and individualistic interpretations of machine learning, arguing instead for a radical understanding of machine intelligence. The book embraces the deviations, inconsistencies, and “errant behaviour” as fundamental to the discovery of new knowledge, moving beyond the illusion of mere optimisation. Drawing on media theory, cybernetics, and a unique psychoanalytic lens, it explores the “technological unconscious” of machine learning. It traces the historical roots of AI, from early automatons and the Turing machine to natural language processing and contemporary machine learning systems. Challenging the idea of an autonomous, self-generating AI, the book exposes the hidden labour, assumed logics, and inherent biases that animate its operation. It re-evaluates computational thinking, insisting on its inherently social, collective, and symbolic character, and revealing how language and logical paradoxes are not obstacles but constitutive forces that shape intelligent machines.Errant Intelligence offers a vital new framework for understanding the profound co-evolution of human and machine learning. It’s time to “unlearn” our assumptions and embrace the productive ambiguity and fallibility at the core ofmachine intelligence.

In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time.