Hideo Nakata's film version of THE RING sets up a remarkable constellation of technical and spiritualist media that has re-established the genre of psycho-horror films. The film is not just about a ghost story but, unlike the novels by Kôji Suzuki, about a primeval scene of the fear of media that initiates the eventuation of a "video curse", thereby raising the issue of the technology of fear as a history of media.

For a long time, ‘culture’ appears only to be an effect of the power of discourses and media in Friedrich Kittler’s works. But in his Berlin lecture series on the cultural history of cultural studies, he discusses the historical formations in which a discrete science of culture could emerge. His perspective not only highlights the historical foundations but also the blind spots of cultural studies.

One of the central questions in modern poetics is, how literary writing proceeds from the creative richness of its material to an aesthetic determination as autonomous art. Sten Nadolnys lectures on his poetics enable an astonishing insight into the self-organisation of operations beyond writing, which can be considered as a theory of self-values in literature.