Horn, or The Counterside of Media (Sign, Storage, Transmission)

Schmidgen, Henning

ISBN 10: 1478017724 / ISBN 13: 9781478017721

Published by Duke University Press, 2022

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781478017721

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Horn, or The Counterside of Media (Sign, Storage, Transmission)
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478017724
• ISBN 13: 9781478017721
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

We regularly touch and handle media devices. At the same time, media devices such as body scanners, car seat pressure sensors, and smart phones scan and touch us. In Horn, Henning Schmidgen reflects on the bidirectional nature of touch and the ways in which surfaces constitute sites of mediation between interior and exterior. Schmidgen uses the concept of "horn"—whether manifested as a rhinoceros horn or a musical instrument—to stand for both natural substances and artificial objects as spaces of tactility. He enters into creative dialogue with artists, scientists, and philosophers, ranging from Salvador Dalí, William Kentridge, and Rebecca Horn to Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan, who plumb the complex interplay between tactility and technological and biological surfaces. Whether analyzing how Dalí conceived of images as tactile entities during his “rhinoceros phase” or examining the problem of tactility in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Schmidgen reconfigures understandings of the dynamic phenomena of touch in media.

About the Author

Henning Schmidgen is Professor of Media Studies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and author of Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography and The Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time.