Description
Book SynopsisThis major new book provides a concise history of optical media from Renaissance linear perspective to late twentieth-century computer graphics. Kittler begins by looking at European painting since the Renaissance in order to discern the principles according to which modern optical perception was organized.
Trade Review'Friedrich Kittler's Optical Media is not only, as its jacket-copy and introduction claim, its author's "best book for the uninitiated"; it is also one of his wittiest.'
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
'Kittler's lectures provide stimulating and provocative reading.'
New Formations
'Kittler's analysis is always rich and involving, describing a complex path of theoretical and factual relations.'
Neural
'Optical Media is the most engaging and accessible of Friedrich Kittler's books. It starts out with a clear presentation of Kittler'smedia-theoretical premises and then offers a fascinating tour through the history of storing, manipulating and projecting light. Witty, insightful, provocative, at times outrageous but always stimulating, Optical Media is not only an overlooked back entrance into the study of visual media from the Renaissance to the present, it is also an equally helpful back entrance into Kittler's own theory.'
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
'Kittler is the preeminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. Brilliant and remarkably original, he offers a kind of media analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. No one interested in what it means to live in a media-saturated age can neglecthis vital and controversial work.'
John Durham Peters, The University of Iowa
Table of ContentsPreliminary Remarks
1. Theoretical Presuppositions
2. Technologies of the Fine Arts
2.1 Camera Obscura and Linear Perspective
2.1.1 Prehistory
2.1.1.1 Greeks and Arabs
2.1.2 Implementation
2.1.2.1 Brunelleschi
2.1.2.2 Alberti
2.1.3 Impact
2.1.3.1 Perspective and Letterpress
2.1.3.2 The Self-Printing of Nature
2.1.3.3 Europe’s Colonial Power
2.2 Laterna Magica and the Age of the World Picture
2.2.1 Magic Lanterns in Action
2.2.2 Implementation
2.2.3 Impact
2.2.3.1 Propaganda
2.2.3.2 Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture
2.2.3.3 Jesuits and Optical Media
2.3.3.4 Travelling People
2.2.3.5 Jesuit Churches
2.2.3.6 Jesuit Theatre
2.3 Enlightenment and Image War
2.3.1 Brockes
2.3.2 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel
2.3.3 Ghost Seer
2.3.3.1 Schiller
2.3.3.2 Hoffmann
2.3.4 Romantic Poetry
3. Optical Media
3.1 Photography
3.1.1 Prehistory
3.1.2 Implementation
3.1.2.1 Niépce and Daguerre
3.1.2.2 Talbot
3.1.3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs
3.2 Film
3.2.1 Preludes
3.2.2 Implementation
3.2.2.1 Marey and Muybridge
3.2.2 Silent Film
3.2.3 Sound Film
3.2.4 Colour Film
3.3 Television
4. Computer
