Start Making Sense?
The Question of Interpretation under the Condition of Technology’s Ongoing Provocation
6th Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies, Princeton, NJ, June 19 – 26, 2016
Participants:
1. Lluis Blanco, Princeton University, School of Architecture
Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco is a New York based architect and scholar. He is chief curator of the OAT 2016 together with the After Belonging Agency. He is currently a PhD Candidate at Princeton University. Casanovas was trained as an architect at ETSABarcelona and the Edinburgh College of Art, and graduated from the MSc in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia GSAPP. Casanovas has co-curated the lecture series “Margins and Hyphens” at Princeton SOA, and the symposium “Conflict of Interests” on architectural research at Columbia GSAPP. He has collaborated with different design offices and research institutions as the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture or the GSAPP Global Africa Lab. Casanovas has taught studios at Barnard College, Princeton University, and ETSA Barcelona. His current interests include the aesthetic agendas of the architectures resulting from institutional practices (such as the New York’s network of homeless shelters or the Smithsonian), or the relationship between the history of the senses and architecture.
2. Wendelin Brühwiler, MA, University of Zurich
Wendelin Brühwiler studied History, Economics and German Literature at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Since April 2014 he is research assistant in the Department of History at University of Zurich and member of the DFG Research Group Media and Mimesis based at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany, writing a PhD thesis on 19th century trade marks. He got his master's degree in 2010 with a thesis on the significance of scientific photography in the Swiss Magazine DU (“Biologie der Bilder. Imaginationen der Natur in der Kulturzeitschrift DU, 1941-1955”). Between 2010 and 2014 he has been holding different positions in the private sector.
3. Ross Etherton, University of Colorado, Department of Slavic and German Languages
Ross Etherton is a PhD candidate in German at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His dissertation examines the machine gun as a technical object full of philosophical and poetic sense, arguing that the machine gun’s internal and external operations (together with public perception of the gun as it appears on battlefields and in cities) triggers a specific type of literary, artistic, and cultural production, which he terms “machine gun modernism.” Etherton’s methodology takes the form of a chiasm: he brings hermeneutic arguments to bear on a technical object by describing the history, the cultural impact, and the metaphysics of the machine gun; and brings technical analyses to bear on literary texts and artworks, which are described in their formal, functional, and performative qualities. In 2014-15, Etherton was an Associate Junior Fellow at the IKKM, with the support of a DAAD long-term research grant.
4. Moritz Hiller, Humboldt Universität, Berlin
Moritz Hiller is a doctoral candidate at the chair for media studies at Humboldt University Berlin, where he is currently teaching and working on his PhD thesis on Posthuman Philology. He is also part of the team of editors of Friedrich Kittler’s collected works.
5. Laura Kenner, Harvard, History of Art and Architecture
Laura Kenner is a PhD Student in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art with a specific emphasis on the intersections of media theory and post-feminist practices of the 1980s and 1990s. Laura received her BA from Columbia University in 2013.
6. Melle Kromhout, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Melle Kromhout (Amsterdam, 1984) is PhD-fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. His project ‘Noise Identities,’ due to be finished in fall 2016, focuses on a revaluation of noise in recorded music as a key for assessing the relation of sound recording to the production of musical significance. He presented his work on conference around the globe and published on such matters as the concept of an ‘other music’ in the work of Friedrich Kittler, the topic of noise reduction technologies, the work of British industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the issue of lo-fi recording methods.
7. William John Locket, NYU Media, Culture and Communication
My research considers the domestication of the computer from the perspective of elementary cultural techniques of alphabetization and numeracy. In postwar America, the computer rode a wave of interest in scientific approaches to studying the learning process. The science of learning was a heterodox medial domain through which philosophical systems and technical knowledges could translate their principles and mechanisms into user tests and unorthodox laboratories. The classroom, the curriculum, and the home were sites where the child became the experimental materials through which the technical excesses of the second war were articulated with the formless inner life of youth. The quantification of the uninterpretability of the child’s formless skill acquisition capacities; this was the prerogative of the science of learning. Such quantification took place by means of computer programs that could match, command, or agitate the form-receiving sensitivity of pre-technical intelligence. I argue that the first stage in the domestication of the computer was this probing of the child’s inner space. I’m currently a year-3 doctoral student in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This research is an extension of my work on digital games, phenomenology, and contemporary art at McGill’s department of Art History and Communication and is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
8. Dan Murphy, Notre Dame, English
Dan Murphy is PhD candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame where he studies twenty first and twentieth-century American literature, film, media theory, and epistemology. His dissertation, entitled "The Technics of New Realism" examines how technological exigencies influence different strains of socially minded realism in and across different media venues after 1960.
9. Wendy Pringle, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Communication Studies
Wendy Pringle holds an MA from McGill University and is currently a PhD student in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication. Her research, grounded in Canada, examines the medicalization of the end of life through the lens of feminist biopolitics. Bringing the long history of feminist scholarly engagement with the medicalized body and reproductive rights to bear on recent debates about 'dying with dignity,' her project traces a shift toward greater autonomy from medical authority in the rituals and representations of dying.
10. Anna Rick, Universität Siegen
Anna Rick studied Literary Studies: Literature, Culture, Media at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her research interests include: paratexts, media materialities, the philological and cultural technique of note-taking.
11. Jorge V. Rodrigues, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Jorge V. Rodrigues has completed his Licenciatura and Master degrees in Lisbon (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), furthering his studies in Paris (Paris IV and Paris VIII). His main interests include Art Theory and History, Visual Culture and contemporary Philosophy. He is currently beginning his research on the work of Andy Warhol and its impact on the conceptions of Art.
12. Jakob Schillinger, Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology
Jakob Schillinger is a curator and critic. He is currently a doctoral student at the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Previous positions include 2013 curator of MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 in New York, dean of the School for Worldly Companions at dOCUMENTA (13), co-curator of based in Berlin at Hamburger Bahnhof, KW and other venues in Berlin (2011), and Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2009). He is a contributor to Artforum and has written for exhibition catalogues and publications, including Flash Art International, May, Mousse, and Texte zur Kunst.
13. Martin Siegler, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Martin Siegler is a doctoral student at the “Competence Center for Media Anthropology” (Bauhaus Universität Weimar) and currently works as a research assistant at the research group “Media and Mimesis” (Weimar, Bochum). He received his M.A. in media studies from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with a thesis on “Emergency Objects.” Between 2012 and 2015 he worked as a research assistant at the “Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie” (IKKM) and at the Chair for Media History (Bauhaus Universität Weimar). From 2014-2015 he also was a research assistant at the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (HKW) in Berlin. His research interests include the ontology of technical objects, emergency technologies, assistance systems, and the philosophy of existence. His current research focuses on “signs of life” and the technologies of existential communication.
14. Mingyi Yu, Harvard University, Film and Visual Studies
"Mingyi Yu is a third-year PhD student in the Film and Visual Studies program at Harvard University. His primary area of research is the media philosophy of information systems, with a specific focus on the transition era of early electronic digital computers between the 1950s and 1970s, from a device oriented to the performance of calculations, to an audiovisual medium operated via interface and a basic grammar of ‘body techniques’ (typing, clicking, swiping, etc.). Particular topics of interest include: the cathode-ray tube as a component of the computer; hardcopy output devices; humanistic tendencies in computing discourse of the 1950s. Beyond this historical moment, interests extend both: (1) toward the present day ubiquity of so-called ‘digital culture’; (2) toward the deep histories of computing techniques and the expanded field of computational styles of thought (the calculus of symbolic notations, index cards, filing systems, note-taking and reference strategies, etc.)."