Description
Book SynopsisWe regularly touch and handle media devices. At the same time, media devices such as body scanners, car seat pressure sensors, and smart phones scan and touch us. In
Horn, Henning Schmidgen reflects on the bidirectional nature of touch and the ways in which surfaces constitute sites of mediation between interior and exterior. Schmidgen uses the concept of 'horn'—whether manifested as a rhinoceros horn or a musical instrument—to stand for both natural substances and artificial objects as spaces of tactility. He enters into creative dialogue with artists, scientists, and philosophers, ranging from Salvador Dalí, William Kentridge, and Rebecca Horn to Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan, who plumb the complex interplay between tactility and technological and biological surfaces. Whether analyzing how Dalí conceived of images as tactile entities during his “rhinoceros phase” or examining the problem of tactility in Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49, Schmidgen reconfigures understandings of the dynamic phenomena of touch in media.
Trade Review"As a scholar of touch and technology but not, it must be said, of media, I was rarely surprised by the historical content or media examples. I was, however, consistently delighted by the deft argumentation, the rather bricolage- like assembly of themes and motifs, and the unexpected but convincing serendipities that connect them across the different media and their practitioners. . . . For the scholar interested in media and technology, this book serves as an entertaining crash course or manifesto in the history of tactile media." -- Mark Paterson * Technology and Culture *
Table of ContentsPreface vii
Introduction 1
1. The Captured Unicorn 13
2. Impressions of Modernity 49
3. Rhinoceros Cybernetics 88
4. A Surface Medium Par Excellence 148
5. Horn and Time 192
Conclusion 240
Notes 251
Bibliography 273
Index 293
