This seminar focuses on Kittler’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project, Musik und Mathematik. This work aims to present a cultural history of the Western world in four volumes, starting in ancient Greece, then passing through Rome, the middle ages and up to the present computerized age. In the Fall of 2009, alternating between locations at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, organizers Sander van Maas en Jan Hein Hoogstad invite scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds to join in the reading.
Monthly Archives: June 2009
down the drain
A presentation that I gave at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis on the 29th of April 2009 for the How To Do Cultural Analysis and Why (Not) lecture series organized by Murat Aydemir.
new adventures in low-fidelity
This essay makes a case for media-epistemic pluralism, by staging an encounter between Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Ralph Ellison’s autobiographical story ‘Living with Music’. It argues that a medium does not function autonomously, but always forms a complex constellation with other media. This constellation takes shapes through the interventions of the conceptual persona of the engineer.
oh baby, i like it raw
A presentation that I gave on the 27th of October 2008 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the Music and Sound Studies Initiative lecture series organized by Sumanth Gopinath.
noise is the new meaning
A presentation that I gave on the 17th of November 2008 at the English Department of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the eNow! lecture series organized by Terri Sutton.
about pluralizing rhythm
The volume Pluralizing Rhythm aims to rid rhythm of its harmless, nearly esoteric, reputation as a cosmic unifier by understanding it in the light of the contemporary medial turn. It consists of contributions that combine the political, aesthetic, musical and theoretical dimension of rhythm, by performing a close analysis of text and objects from contemporary arts, music and politics. In short, Pluralizing Rhythm complicates, disturbs and pluralizes the notion of rhythm.
about intellectual image
In this research project, I conceive agency as an attribute of medial operations rather than of individuals. Certain combinations of operations produce an agent, which may or may not coincide with an actual person. Consequently, I argue that the term “intellectual” invokes an outdated practice. Not the intellectual is an endangered species, but his text-based and text-biased medial operations. As an alternative, I have looked at sound and music engineering as a practice of knowledge production.
about time tracks
The monograph Time Tracks constructs anachronistic and eclectic constellations of philosophical concepts, biographical narratives and popular music. It stages unexpected encounters between Gilles Deleuze, Prince, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Vilém Flusser, Marvin Gaye, Michel Foucault, Camille and Marshall McLuhan. What brings this wide range of philosophers, media theorists, authors, and artists together is a shared concern; they all struggle with time.
about me
Jan Hein Hoogstad is a lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
about medial operations
How do media – old and new – shape and transform knowledge? The research-in-progress website, Medial Operations, focuses on the complex transitions between noise, non-sense, information, and knowledge.