Das Planetarische

Cartographies of Time

William Uricchio (Universität Utrecht/Massachussetts Institute of Technology Cambridge)

Abstract

One can find any number of sites where anonymous transnational collectives of people both produce and are bound together by images and histories. The combined images in circulation at any given moment (postcards, posters, advertisements, etc) would be an example, as would in a European setting, the imagery and texts adorning the various Euro notes and coins. But I would like to focus on deployments that are bound up with new technologies: the ways that social tagging offers both highly idiosyncratic, yet in the aggregate, highly articulate meanings in sites like Flickr; the way that Google Map mashups allow the over-writing and repurposing of standard cartographies; the ways that emergent technologies such as Microsoft’s Photosynth assemble thousands of individuals’ photos of a place into an algorithm-based, multi-perspectival whole; or the ways that virtual presences – Berlin’s ‘virtual wall’ or Art + Com's ‘The Invisible Shape of Things Past’ – offer strategies to accrete and spatialize the past.

The overarching point will be to look at the affordances of the digital as they enable collaborative visual composites, and as they re-position traditional notions of agency thanks to increasing reliance on code and software design. These new composites, I will argue, are beyond the agency of any individual, outside the frame of any nation; they reflect new logics, new possibilities, new powers, … and new collectivities. I would like to explore the manifestations of these collectivities in terms of the ‘Welt-Bild’ they generate and consider in particular their engagement with a spatial notion of the past.

Bio

William Uricchio ist Professor und Ko-Direktor der Comparative Media Studies am MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, USA, und Professor für Comparative Media History an der Universität Utrecht in den NIederlanden. Er hatte mehrere Gastprofessuren in Stockholm, an der FU Berlin und in Marburg inne und gewann mehrere Forschungspreise der Guggenheim-, Fulbright- und Humboldt-Stiftungen. Sein weiteres Forschungsfeld umfasst die Transformation von Medientechnologien in kulturelle Praktiken, insbesondere ihre Rolle in der (Re-)Konstruktion von Repräsentation, Wissen und Öffentlichkeiten. Uricchio hat breit publiziert zu den Themen 'alter' und neuer Medien, populärer Kultur und ihren Publika. Seine gegenwärtige Forschung greift diese Themen auf und verbindet sie mit Perspektiven von Medienhistoriographie über Peet-to-peer-communities bis hin zu Computerspielen und ihrer Geschichte.

Ausgewählte Veröffentlichungen

Media Cultures, Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006 (hg. gemeinsam mit Susanne Kinnebrock).

Cyberhistory: Historical Computer Games and Post-Structuralist Historiography, in: Handbook of Computer Game Studies, hrsg. von Jeffrey Goldstein und Joost Raessens, Cambridge 2005, S.327-338.

We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identity, Bristol (Intellect Books) 2008.