Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
David Sittler (Siegen)
Traffic and Transport of Street-Images ─ Chicago Around 1900
My media-historical dissertation cannot be ethnographic in a narrow sense. Nevertheless it clearly understands itself as a locating media project. The historico-anthropological heuristics that form its self-reflexive and recursive composition are epistemologically and media-theoretically close to and inspired by media ethnography. My presentation will present my concepts of a traffic and transport of street-images that I developed looking on such diverse protagonists as rioters, sociologists, street-cleaners, social reformers, journalists, and temperance activists. Combining very heterogeneous traces of their media-practices. I take the formulation from the call for this conference literally and talk about “the things with which we are in traffic” on urban streets. Michigan Avenue will be the exemplary street space with which I am going to discuss media dynamics of the traffic of street-images. Street-images are understood as iconic characteristics of the way such streets functioned effectively as environments of (mis)perceptions, interpretations and also as improvised but at the same time conventionalized performative communication between strangers that were brought together by this fundamental urban infrastructure. I think this historico-anthropological case study offers insights which are valid for the discussion about future media ethnographic research as this has to historicize its scrutinized phenomena, its approaches and its concepts.
David Sittler studied Medieval and Modern History, Art History, and Eastern European History at Bonn and Göttingen University. His Magister thesis dealt with “St. Petersburg as the stage for the Russian Revolution 1917”. His Ph.D. project “History of the Metropolitan Street as a Mass Medium, Chicago 1870-1930” was started in the postgraduate program “Mediale Historiographien, Media of History - History of Media” in Erfurt/Weimar/Jena. Currently he is finishing the manuscript and developing a post-doc-project in Siegen.
His main research interests are modern urban history, media history, media theory and historical epistemology.
Recent Publications
2013: “Straßen-Bilder-Verkehr. Der Film Night on Earth als filmische Theorie der Wahrnehmung auf der urbanen Straße,” in: Chris Dähne and Nathalie Bredella (ed.), Infrastrukturen des Urbanen. Soundscapes, Landscapes, Netscapes, Bielefeld: transcript (forthcoming).
2012: “Die Urbane Straße als Medium der Nähe. Modalitäten sozialer Nähe in Chicago 1919,” in: Pablo Abend, Tobias Haupts, and Claudia Müller (ed.), Medialität der Nähe. Situationen - Praktiken - Diskurse, Bielefeld: transcript, 329–348.