Grant Bollmer is senior lecturer of digital media at the University of Queensland. He is author of Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection;Theorizing Digital Cultures; and Materialist Media Theory.

• Contents Introduction: Techniques of the Affect Lab 1. William James’s Planchette 2. Books of Faces 3. The Prison Dynograph 4. E-Meter Metaphysics Conclusion: The Epistemology and Aesthetics of Empathy Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

"Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’"-David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing   "The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological-and, most fundamentally, far from being universal-affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience."-Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media

Grant Bollmer is senior lecturer of digital media at the University of Queensland. He is author of Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection;Theorizing Digital Cultures; and Materialist Media Theory.

• Contents Introduction: Techniques of the Affect Lab 1. William James’s Planchette 2. Books of Faces 3. The Prison Dynograph 4. E-Meter Metaphysics Conclusion: The Epistemology and Aesthetics of Empathy Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

"Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’"-David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing   "The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological-and, most fundamentally, far from being universal-affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience."-Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media

Grant Bollmer is senior lecturer of digital media at the University of Queensland. He is author of Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection;Theorizing Digital Cultures; and Materialist Media Theory.

• Contents Introduction: Techniques of the Affect Lab 1. William James’s Planchette 2. Books of Faces 3. The Prison Dynograph 4. E-Meter Metaphysics Conclusion: The Epistemology and Aesthetics of Empathy Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

"Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’"-David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing   "The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological-and, most fundamentally, far from being universal-affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience."-Mark B. N. Hansen, author of Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media