Florian Hoof
Florian Hoof
Am Sande 5
21335 Lüneburg
florian.hoof@leuphana.de
Dr. Florian Hoof is a media and film scholar and currently a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS). He was visiting professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano (2013), scientist in residence at Department of History of Technology, ETH, Zurich (2018/2010), visiting scholar at: University of Sydney Business School (2018), University of Sydney, Dept. of Information Systems (2015), University of New South Wales, Australian Business School (2013), Archives and Special Collection Purdue University, West Lafayette (2009). From 2007-2010 he held a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation for his PhD thesis on the media history of consulting, from 2010-2011 he was a research associate at Dept. of Media Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, from 2011-2017 he was a research associate (postdoc) at Dept. of Theatre-, Film, and Media Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2015 his PhD thesis on media and consulting was published by Konstanz University Press. It received the „Geisteswissenschaften International“ translation award of the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels and is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, New York as “Angels of Efficiency. A Media History of Consulting” (2019).
Research Project
The project investigates medial configurations of predictions, anticipation of the future and decision making in economic and cultural contexts: computer simulations, algorithmic control, decision and recommendation systems, management cockpits right up to "forecast services" offered by consulting companies.
They provide an environment that reduces contingency and stabilizes - and by that also enables - sociotechnical action contexts under the terms of uncertainty. As a fundamental structural characteristic of digital cultures, these procedures of the reduction of uncertainty gain epistemic relevance. Firstly, the project investigates how such procedures - from early "business research services" in the 1910s to systems of data aggregation and evaluation run by mainframe computers in the 1950ties - evolved into the Simulation-Supported Decision Making Systems of today.
Secondly, it focusses on the interrelationship between procedures like this and the societal-cultural foundation of decision-making and anticipation of the future. It describes how "Digital Uncertainty" leads to the convergence of societal and economic logic in medial configurations of deciding in our current culture.