Machinology

We are happy to announce that the collection Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities , edited by Axel Volmar and Kyle Stine is out in the Recursions series both as Open Access and as hardback (for libraries).

“In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in their features of instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and continually improved speed. They construct temporal infrastructures that affect the rhythms of lived experience and shape social relations and practices of cooperation. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.”

The book is also the last volume we (myself, Anna Tuschling, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young) published as founding editors of Recursions (2014-2021). From Sybille Krämer’s Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy to the two books out this year (Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time and Jane Birkin’s Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration) we managed to publish key works by both established senior philosophers and from emerging talented scholars in ways that we hope contributed to the international media theory discussions in a significant way. While we have expressed our wish to the publisher, Amsterdam University Press, to discontinue the series, we will continue to support the published books and their authors to ensure they get the attention they deserve.

As a reminder, have a look at the full list of Recursions volumes.