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Il testo ignoto è una promessa
Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto

Immaginiamo di trovarci al cospetto di un “oggetto semiotico” ignoto. Potrebbe trattarsi di un dipinto, di un brano di letteratura, di un pezzo musicale, di un programma informatico, di un artefatto culturale in senso lato: poco importa al momento, ciò che ci interessa è il carattere di estraneità di questo oggetto, di cui ignoriamo al momento tutto. Attardiamoci per un attimo in questo limbo interpretativo. Nella realtà, questa sorta di tabula rasa sostanzialmente non esiste, ogni oggetto ci arriva già...
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  • electronic music
  • media theory
  • music
  • reading
  • time
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • semiotics and semiology
  • utopia
  • communication media
  • linguistics
  • science fiction
  • communication

 

Topics
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • semiotics and semiology
    • chromatics / colour science
    • color
    • image and imagery
    • monochrome
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • poetics
    • astonishment
    • poetology of knowledge
    • idleness
    • potentiality
    • history of knowledge
    • experiment
    • epistemology
    • literary studies
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • discourse history
    • economics
    • financial crisis
    • economization
    • economy
    • financial markets
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • mirror
    • observer
    • gaze
    • optical illusion

 

Photographs tend to suggest infinity
Photographs tend to suggest infinity

Siegfried Kracauer

The Photographic Approach (1951)

The photographic approach – that is, the effort to utilize the inherent abilities of the camera – is responsible for the particular nature of photographs. In the days of Zola and the Impressionists, the properties of photographs were commonly held to be the hallmarks of art in general; but no sooner did painting and literature break away from realism than these properties assumed an exclusive character. Since they depend upon techniques peculiar to the medium, they have remained stable throughout its evolution....
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  • Siegfried Kracauer
  • photography
  • media theory
  • History of photography
  • film
Current Texts

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

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