Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Prof. Dr. Veit Erlmann (Austin/Berlin)
Media have long ceased to be understood as neutral technologies that merely extend, amplify or enhance our sensory capabilities. Media shape our sensorium and are shaped by it. In fact, the senses increasingly become media themselves. The way we see, hear, smell, taste or touch cannot therefore be reduced to a simple input/output relationship. Our sensory engagement is deeply enmeshed with both our bodies and the materiality and operative logic of media technologies. The sense of hearing has traditionally been associated with heightened awareness, epiphany, the supernatural and the immediacy of presence. The emergence of modern media has enormously augmented the utopian power of such phantasms. An early example are the self-experiments by the pioneer of electrochemistry Johann Ritter around 1800, which will be taken as starting point for discussion in this section. Electrocuting his ears, Ritter elaborated a far-reaching theory of auditory perception that merged the human ear, electric wires and the newly invented battery into a heady mix of magic sensation, media technology, and rationality.
Veit Erlmann is a cultural historian/anthropologist/ethnomusicologist and the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin. His main areas of interest are music and popular culture in South Africa and Indonesia; sound studies; and the anthropology of intellectual property law. He is currently working on a book on intellectual property in the South African music industry that will be published by Duke University Press.
Recent Publications
2012: “Refiguring the Early Modern Voice,” in: qui parle? 22/1, 85–105.
2011: “Descartes’ Resonant Subject, differences,” in: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22/2-3, 10–30.
2010: Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality, New York: Zone Books.