..After the Media
News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century
The media are now redundant. In an overview of developments spanning the past seventy years, Siegfried Zielinski's "[ . . . After the Media]" discusses how the means of technology-based communication assumed a systemic character and how theory, art, and criticism were operative in this process. Media-explicit thinking is contrasted with media-implicit thought. Points of contact with an arts perspective include a reinterpretation of the artist Nam June Paik and an introduction to the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman. The essay ends with two appeals. In an outline of a precise philology of exact things, Zielinski suggests possibilities of how things could proceed after the media. With a vade mecum against psychopathia medialis in the form of a manifesto, the book advocates for a distinction to be made between online existence and offline being.
Siegfried Zielinski is professor of media theory at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin as well as Michel Foucault Professor of Media Archaeology and Techno-Culture at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is also director of the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
