There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from (...) this perspective, a technology that is “broken” could be defined as those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants that are intended to produce changes in the material world that either do not manage to satisfy these wants or do not produce changes in the material world, or both. This is the third edition, updated October 2015. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the connections of spatial relations and settings with narrative, and the presentation of these relations in Jüri Ehlvest’s texts. Distinctions are made between textual space (as designation, description, or rhetorical presentation) and fictional space (the space in which narrative action takes place and the site of the denouement of events). Fictional space can be expressed as textual space in one of the four following ways: (a) perceived space (b) experienced space (c) logical (...) space (d) alogical space. The multilayeredness of Ehlvest’s texts, their fragmentariness and dislocated reality, entail a complicated reception. In contrast, however, the geographical space represented in the texts is generally quite clear and accessible, with the effect of seeming real and humanly possible. Indeed, specific spatial elements are one of the sources of the verisimilitude and plausibility of Ehlvest’s texts. For the most part, the place where ehlvestian narrative plays itself out is a clear topographical environment, usually an interior; the textual representation of spaces is minimalist, avoiding descriptions, and with practically no impression of movement. In addition to representation of places, rooms, houses, and open space using ordinary, direct, (yet very minimalist) means, several more indirect strategies of creating space can be found in Ehlvest’s texts. This article calls attention to some characteristic devices from this indirect repertoire, grouping them as follows: things; window and picture; repetition, fragment, and mirror; body and emptiness. Of the four types of textual space mentioned above, the one most characteristic of Ehlvest’s stories is experienced space, which could also be described as haptic space of experience. However, due to the fragmentariness and bricolage typical of Ehlvest, there are certainly also plenty of examples of the other types, particularly perceived and alogical space. Many transformations can be noted when comparing Ehlvest’s earlier and later texts. First, many earlier images disappear (tree, mill, bridge). Second, the first-person protagonist’s bodily experience becomes more important (eating, illness, pain). Third, the borders between consciousness and the world become nebulous, yet the boundary between the protagonist and his environment does not disappear completely. Neither does the text become a meandering between consciousness and the world. Indeed, narrative emphasis shifts to this very boundary, and to the possibility of its erasure. As such, however, the plausibility of the space where action takes place is maintained, much as in Ehlvest’s earlier stories. (shrink)

Existen muchas definiciones posibles de “tecnología” y discutiré algunas de estas en este libro. Sin embargo, en esta introducción, usaré una definición intuitiva de tecnología: "aquellas actividades, dirigidas hacia la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas, "que producen cambios en el mundo material". En consecuencia, desde esta perspectiva, una tecnología "rota" podría definirse como aquellas actividades, dirigidas hacia la satisfacción de los deseos humanos destinados a producir cambios en el mundo material que no logran satisfacer estos deseos o no producen cambios (...) en el mundo material, o ambos. Cualquier definición de tecnología implica el uso de términos como "actividad" y expresiones como "dirigidas hacia" que son muy difíciles de definir sin entrar en consideraciones filosóficas profundas. Veremos que una discusión filosófica será cada vez más necesaria a medida que pasemos por los diferentes aspectos de las tecnologías rotas. (shrink)

The traditional presentation about historical time-passing consists in a linear succession of facts in which some aspects of the lifeworld evolve from others in anirreversible manner. The presentation of change is connected to the presentation of gradual or revolutionary linear changes that areirrevocable. I believe that this presentation could be considered correct for living organisms, but does not take account of some important aspects of demonstrative presentations about artefacts and technologies. For example, we can ontologically assume that “hammer-beating” evolved from (...) “stone-beating”. In this sense, the “hammer-beating-time” could be considered contemporary-time and the “stone-beating-time” could be considered past-time. However, we still beat things with stones and stone-like artefacts. The technology of the stone-beating is still been used. That means that relationship between the stone and the hammer cannot be seen as “evolutive” in the same sense that organisms “evolve” from each other. We must assume then, that the stone and the hammer must be interchangeable technologies which do not overshadow each other. This family of technologies and artefacts are contemporary to each other. Time-passing metaphors must then be substituted with metaphors of a “technological instability” that can be associated to a foundational cultural explosion. (shrink)

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’; a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic (...) and televisual genres and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect, allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation, irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye to Histoire du cinéma – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4 investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary, cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how knowledge and history is archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism, the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts. (shrink)

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)