The Terms of Media
Conference, 17.06.2015 – 19.06.2015
“Media determine our situation,” Friedrich Kittler infamously wrote in his introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Although this dictum is certainly extreme – and media archaeology has been critiqued for being overly dramatic and focused on technological developments – it propels us to keep thinking about media as setting the terms for which we live, socialize, communicate, organize, do scholarship etc. After all, as Kittler continued in his opening statement almost 30 years ago, our situation, “in spite or because” of media, “deserves a description.” What, then, are the terms – the limits, the conditions, the periods, the relations, the phrases – of media? And, what is the relationship between these terms and determination?