Terms of Media

“Media determine our situation”, Friedrich Kittler infamously wrote in his introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Although this dictum is certainly extreme – and media archaeology has been critiqued for being overly dramatic and focused on technological developments – it propels us to keep thinking about media as setting the terms for which we live, socialize, communicate, organize, do scholarship etc. After all, as Kittler continued in his opening statement almost 30 years ago, our situation, “in spite or because” of media, “deserves a description.” What, then, are the terms – the limits, the conditions, the periods, the relations, the phrases – of media?  And, what is the relationship between these terms and determination?

This project, which entails two international conferences, to take place at Brown University and at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, and a series of publications based on these conferences, seeks to repose and update this fundamental question of media theory. Does our situation indicate a new term, understood as temporal shifts of mediatic conditioning, which deserves a re-description? How and on what terms are media changing, reflecting changes in media itself? What are the terms of conditions that we negotiate as subjects of media? How do the terms of media theory relate to such conditions? What are the terms of conditions of media theory itself?