Technics: Media in the Digital Age

Featuring 28 leading international media scholars, Technics rethinks technology for the contemporary digital era, with cutting-edge theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions. The volume’s contributors explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and Sylvia Wynter in conjunction with urgent questions concerning algorithmic media, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. An expansive collection of writings on media technologies in the digital age, Technics is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media studies, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of technology.

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism and coeditor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 and Unwatchable. Annie van den Oever is a Professor of Film at the University of Groningen and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg (since March 2024). Recent books: Doing Experimental Media Archaeology. Theory(De Gruyter, 2022, with Andreas Fickers); and Visual Media, Distortions, and the Grotesque as a Dominant Format Today (AUP 2024, forthcoming).