Technológos in Being

Wolfgang Ernst is Full Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of The Delayed Present (2017), Digital Memory and the Archive (2012), and Chronopoetics (2016).

• IntroductionPart I: Media Archaeology as Method of a Media Science, and as Techno-Logical Practice1. Towards a More Radical Understanding of Media as Technology and Logotechnics2. (Re)Enacting Media Techno-Logically: 'Digitality', Literally3. Human Performance vs. Technical Operation: Mechanically Informed Music from the Past4. Discretely Confronting Artefactual Materialities and Metarealities: Radical Media ArchaeologyPart 2: Radical Media Archaeology in Close Alliance with Operative Log-Technics (Computing)5. The (With)In-Human Symbolic Machine6. A Process-oriented Approach to Computation7. Chronologos: The Untimeliness of the Time-Discrete Computing8. Computing For and As Architecture: Between Cultural Technique and Technology9. A New Kind of 'Love for Logos': Humanities of the Digital10. Against Digital Metaphysics: AI 2.0 and "Deep" Machine Learning11. Preliminary Conclusions from the Question Concerning TehcnologosBibliographyIndex

Wolfgang Ernst offers a contrarian vision for media studies that circumvents two of the major streams of the field over the past decades: the ecocritical expansion of the media concept and the politically engaged cultural studies approach that asks about what affordances media yield to people. Instead he focuses on the material logics and artifacts by which thought is rendered concrete and hardware is rendered intelligent. He brings a vast technical knowledge of different kinds of technical machines and their context in the history of technology and their basis in mathematics. His approach is bracingly hardcore as opposed to sentimental. Technologos in Being offers a distinct voice in a crowded landscape and will help all of us figure out how better to live with the so-called smart machines that are our devices—and ourselves.