Promotional Information

Deep Time of Media is an extraordinary gift. Next to the canonical geniuses of the past, Siegfried Zielinski introduces us to a host of unknown philosophers, visionaries, and inventors who turn out to be great precursors to the world of modern media. His book will not only encourage the revision of received wisdom in the history of ideas and of science, but also inspire the geniuses of the future. -- Zbig Rybczynski, Filmmaker We know that to understand the world, we have to understand the media. To understand the media, and our times, we have to understand the deep time of the media. We learn to hear and see our contemporary scenes by learning the archaeology of hearing and seeing. Zielinski's book uncovers this archaeology for us in the best possible way. -- Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, coeditor of Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art and Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy Deep Time of the Media is a revealing book that only Siegfried Zielinksi could have written. It is a book that doesn't legitimize our contemporary technological culture as the logical outcome of a long cultural evolution but instead sees media history as a dynamic process shaped by the accident(al) and the imaginative. Zielinski broadens our view by transgressing different time periods and knowledge fields and exploring obscure archives where hermetics and alchemy reveal the genius of misfits and the art of unforeseen events. -- Alex Adriaansens, irector, V2, Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam

About the Author

Siegfried Zielinski, a founder of the new field of media archaeology, is Founding Director of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where he is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and is developing a workshop for a variantology of the media. He has published more than a dozen books and many articles. Deep Time of the Media is the second of his books to appear in English.

Timothy Druckrey is an independent curator and writer and editor of Ars Electronica- Facing the Future (MIT Press, 1999). He lectures internationally on the social impact of digital media, the transformations of representation, and communication in interactive and networked environments.

Reviews

Siegfried Zielinski has combed the technical history of the media from cave painting to the World Wide Web and arrived at some surprising new insights... A brilliant study on the subtext of European history of technology and science.—Frank Hartmann Falter