ABOUT THIS BOOKFeaturing 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYNicholas 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 Distinguished Visiting Professor (University of Johannesburg) and, until recently, Professor of Film (University Groningen) and Extraordinary Professor of Film and Visual Media (University of the Free State). She published Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory in 2022, with Andreas Fickers, and Technics in 2024, with Nicholas Baer.
REVIEWS"Technics: Media in the Digital Age is a multi-modal, transdisciplinary, and free-ranging challenge to “come to terms” with how we talk about digital media’s micro and macro materials, practices, and cultural force fields. Responding in roundtable discussion, conversational snapchats, and longer essays, the contributors expand, transform, and/or leave terms behind with a contemporary eye on “everything, everywhere, all at once.” In its entirety, this is a serious, delirious, and oddly comforting must-read that not only records but also models our present moment."
—Vivian Sobchack, author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
"At the cusp of the “deep” machine learning breakthrough in so-called digital culture, and in the midst of a Babylonian confusion of philosophical discourses on the essence of technical beings, this scholarly collection comes just in time for an urgent updating and differentiation of media-archaeological key terms and categories like techne, (cultural) techniques, technics, and technologies. The methodologically rich chorus of various textual forms and approaches to technical phenomenology and nonlinear media times is not limited to the human perspective but grants a voice to the apparatus itself."
—Wolfgang Ernst, author of Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology & the Computational Machine
"Technics is an important and critical rethinking of contemporary media technology. It offers readers a careful orientation to significant genealogies of techne, technique, technology, and technics, and artfully mobilizes these concepts to stitch together the past and future of media studies."
—Nicole Starosielski, author of Media Hot and Cold
"This book is a treasure trove of insights about technics from 16mm to AI, from concepts to epistemic virtues. The impressive list of contributors helps to understand the fundamental impact technologies and techniques have on our disciplines and how to move transversally between those disciplines thanks to such traveling concepts."
—Jussi Parikka, author of Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual
"Fans of the Key Debates series and especially volume 4, Techne/Technology, will marvel that it’s only a decade later that the field is undergoing such a massive paradigm shift. In volume 10, Technics, the boldest scholars weigh in on the changes that generative AI and algorithmic media have wrought and dare to predict where we are going. Now is the time to read this book and more importantly to teach this book!"
—Jane Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?
"Digital technologies have triggered a paradigm shift in media and film culture research. Technics offers multiple theoretical and analytical prisms to understand these shifts. A parade of distinguished academics enlightens us about many aspects of recent technologies and their effects on film and media. A delightful read for visual culture aficionados with a knack for theoretical grounding!"
—José van Dijck, author of The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media
