Media Matter
The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium

What is a medium? If Nietzsche was right in claiming that “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” that media help us "think," and if different media allow for different ways of thinking, then the "body" of the respective medium in question, its materiality, shapes and influences the range and direction of how media make us think. Shouldn't we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized information?

Launching Bloomsbury's Thinking Media series, Media Matter introduces readers to the nascent field of media-philosophy. Contributors urge readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies, by both extending the understanding of "medium" in such a way as to include a concept of materiality that also includes "non-human" transmitters (elements such as water, earth, fire, air) and by understanding media not only in the context of cultural or discursive systems or apparatuses, relays, transistors, hardware or "discourse networks," but more inclusively, in terms of a "media ecology."

Beginning with more general essays on media and then focusing on particular themes (neuroplasticity, photography, sculpture and music), especially in relation to film, Herzogenrath and contributors redefine the concept of "medium" in order to think through media, rather than about them.

Media Matter: An Introduction
Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany)

Theory-Matter

Chapter 1: The Meta-Physics of Media
Walter Seitter (University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria)

Chapter 2: Media Matter: Materiality and Performativity in Media Theory
Katerina Krtilova (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany)

Text-Matter

Chapter 3: Between Print Matter and Page Matter: The Codex Platform as Media Suppoort
Garrett Stewart (University of Iowa, USA)

Chapter 4: 'Local Color': Light in Faulkner
Hanjo Berressem (University of Cologne, Germany)

Film-Matter

Chapter 5: Figure-Ground: Stills from the Films of Bill Morrison
Bill Morrison (Hypnotic Pictures)

Chapter 6: Matter that Images: Bill Morrison's Decasia
Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany)

Chapter 7: Moving Images as Ontographic Images
Lorenz Engell (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany)

Chapter 8: Brain Matter and New Phrenologies; Challenging Brains with Melancholy and Vice Versa
Benjamin Betka (Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany)

Chapter 9: The Media Boundary Objects Concept: Theorizing Film and Media
Florian Hoof (Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany)