Mark B N Hansen
Biographic Data
| ID | 295061 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark B N Hansen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark B N |
| FAMILY NAME | Hansen |
| SIGNATURE | HANSEN M B N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Contingency of Process, or Why There Is No Computation-in-itself
This text responds to Alan Díaz Alva’s careful and compelling account of the tensions between and ultimate compatibility of Beatrice Fazi’s work on the formal incomputability of computation and my account of computational media in Feed-Forward. I recount Díaz Alva’s reconstruction of the “claim for inversion” I introduce in my book and suggest that the priority it grants the “superject” over the concrescing subject means that all process is both …
“Societies for Possibility Intensification”, or Technology as Dividuation Machine
The aim of this paper is to theorize human-technical assemblages as what I call “societies for possibility intensification” (SPI). My thesis is that SPIs constitute a form of human-technology entanglement that doesn’t begin from their separation but that is rooted in the concrete process that brings them into being, from atomic moment to atomic moment, as “real togetherness.” I develop the term “society for possibility intensification” on the bas…
Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire
Excavating Bernard Stiegler's post–Technics and Time writings, this article questions not whether Stiegler's basic approach to the human-technics coupling that is central to his thought is correct, promising, or indeed imperative but whether the terms on which he theorizes it are adequate for engaging with the contemporary operation of technics. My excavation focuses on the concept and operation of desire, which comes to the fore in Stiegler's wr…
Les media du XXI e siècle
Un nouveau type de media, propres au XXI e siècle, ne s'adresse plus à nos consciences, ni même à nos perceptions, mais vise à connecter automatiquement différents points de sensibilité du monde (y compris au sein de notre propre corps), sans plus s'adresser à des « sujets » humains. L'internet des objets a pour vocation de fonctionner tout seul, sans se laisser entraver par l'erratisme des volontés subjectives, ni ralentir par les aléas de délib…
Postnaturalism
»Postnaturalism« offers an original account of human-technological co-evolution and argues that film and media theory, in particular, needs to be re-evaluated from the perspective of our material interfaces with a constantly changing environment. Extrapolating from Frankenstein films and the resonances they establish between a hybrid monster and the spectator hooked into the machinery of the cinema, Shane Denson engages debates in science studies…
Technics Beyond the Temporal Object
ThL· essay focuses on the phenomenological origins and limitations of Bernard Stiegler's media philosophy. No critic has more thoroughly and convincingly hid bare the deep correlation of human life and culture: from the first volume of hu Technics and Time to hL· recent study of attention and technics (Taking Care), Stiegler has explored the co-evolution of technics and life and has managed to articulate a powerful neo-phenomenologkal model of me…
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon's ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the "agency" of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly to…
Foucault and Media
This essay stages an encounter between Michel Foucault's work-especially his final thought concerning biopolitics, security, and population-and contemporary theorization of media's experiential impact. The essay argues that the opportunity for such an encounter has been obscured largely due to the role played by Gilles Deleuze (in particular by the concept of "control society") in filtering Foucault's work for media theory. The essay develops an …
Critical Terms for Media Studies
Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, te…
Emergence and Embodiment
Living (with) Technical Time
This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time (including those performed by time-consciousness). The 'digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as 'the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference - a minim…
Bodies in Code
Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really moving through virtual reality. Of course these virt…
Media Theory
Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical (i.e. without functioning as a transcendental condition), they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that…
Communication as Interface or Information Exchange? A Reply to Richard Rushton
New philosophy for a new media
In 'New Philosophy for New Media' Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the digital image encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable. He places the body in a privileged position - as the agent that filters information in order to create images
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In his recent study of the internet, Mark Poster has argued for a radical approach that would do more than simply deploy new media as a "tool for determining the fate of groups as they are currently constituted" (3). As Poster sees it, the transformational potential of the new media stems from their impact on how human beings are interpellated as social ac…
The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life
Affect as Medium, or the `Digital-Facial-Image
By exploring a number of contemporary new media artworks that focus on the digitized image of the face, I propose the encounter with the `digital-facial-image' (DFI) as a new paradigm for the human interface with digital data. Whereas the currently predominant model of the human-computer-interface (HCI) functions precisely by reducing the wide-bandwidth of embodied human expressivity to a fixed repertoire of functions and icons, the DFI transfers…
Wearable Space
Let these citations stand for the two "poles" circumscribing current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. At one extreme, we encounter a fairly staid, yet nonetheless exciting, prospect for a hitherto unimaginable fluidity between human body and computer: an extension of the body that takes advantage of the rich panoply of bodily signals and internal regulatory processes. At the other extreme, we brush against a visionary, perhaps tr…
Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image
It is only at the very end of his two-volume study of the cinema, in a kind of prospective addendum, that the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze raises the problematic of the digital image. In presenting the digital image as a challenge to cinema—a challenge that can either render it obsolete or occasion its wholesale functional metamorphosis—Deleuze reasserts, one final time, the privilege of aesthetics over technology that literally pervade…
Embodying Technesis
Becoming as Creative Involution
Postmodern Culture - Volume 11, Number 1, September 2000
The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life
Media Theory
Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical (i.e. without functioning as a transcendental condition), they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that…
Living (with) Technical Time
This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time (including those performed by time-consciousness). The 'digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as 'the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference - a minim…
Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image
It is only at the very end of his two-volume study of the cinema, in a kind of prospective addendum, that the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze raises the problematic of the digital image. In presenting the digital image as a challenge to cinema—a challenge that can either render it obsolete or occasion its wholesale functional metamorphosis—Deleuze reasserts, one final time, the privilege of aesthetics over technology that literally pervade…
Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire
Excavating Bernard Stiegler's post–Technics and Time writings, this article questions not whether Stiegler's basic approach to the human-technics coupling that is central to his thought is correct, promising, or indeed imperative but whether the terms on which he theorizes it are adequate for engaging with the contemporary operation of technics. My excavation focuses on the concept and operation of desire, which comes to the fore in Stiegler's wr…
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon's ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the "agency" of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly to…
Foucault and Media
This essay stages an encounter between Michel Foucault's work-especially his final thought concerning biopolitics, security, and population-and contemporary theorization of media's experiential impact. The essay argues that the opportunity for such an encounter has been obscured largely due to the role played by Gilles Deleuze (in particular by the concept of "control society") in filtering Foucault's work for media theory. The essay develops an …
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In his recent study of the internet, Mark Poster has argued for a radical approach that would do more than simply deploy new media as a "tool for determining the fate of groups as they are currently constituted" (3). As Poster sees it, the transformational potential of the new media stems from their impact on how human beings are interpellated as social ac…
Embodying Technesis
Becoming as Creative Involution
Postmodern Culture - Volume 11, Number 1, September 2000
Wearable Space
Let these citations stand for the two "poles" circumscribing current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. At one extreme, we encounter a fairly staid, yet nonetheless exciting, prospect for a hitherto unimaginable fluidity between human body and computer: an extension of the body that takes advantage of the rich panoply of bodily signals and internal regulatory processes. At the other extreme, we brush against a visionary, perhaps tr…
Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image
It is only at the very end of his two-volume study of the cinema, in a kind of prospective addendum, that the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze raises the problematic of the digital image. In presenting the digital image as a challenge to cinema—a challenge that can either render it obsolete or occasion its wholesale functional metamorphosis—Deleuze reasserts, one final time, the privilege of aesthetics over technology that literally pervade…
Affect as Medium, or the `Digital-Facial-Image
By exploring a number of contemporary new media artworks that focus on the digitized image of the face, I propose the encounter with the `digital-facial-image' (DFI) as a new paradigm for the human interface with digital data. Whereas the currently predominant model of the human-computer-interface (HCI) functions precisely by reducing the wide-bandwidth of embodied human expressivity to a fixed repertoire of functions and icons, the DFI transfers…
Communication as Interface or Information Exchange? A Reply to Richard Rushton
New philosophy for a new media
In 'New Philosophy for New Media' Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the digital image encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable. He places the body in a privileged position - as the agent that filters information in order to create images
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address
Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In his recent study of the internet, Mark Poster has argued for a radical approach that would do more than simply deploy new media as a "tool for determining the fate of groups as they are currently constituted" (3). As Poster sees it, the transformational potential of the new media stems from their impact on how human beings are interpellated as social ac…
The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life
Bodies in Code
Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really moving through virtual reality. Of course these virt…
Media Theory
Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical (i.e. without functioning as a transcendental condition), they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that…
Emergence and Embodiment
Living (with) Technical Time
This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time (including those performed by time-consciousness). The 'digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as 'the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference - a minim…
Critical Terms for Media Studies
Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, te…
Technics Beyond the Temporal Object
ThL· essay focuses on the phenomenological origins and limitations of Bernard Stiegler's media philosophy. No critic has more thoroughly and convincingly hid bare the deep correlation of human life and culture: from the first volume of hu Technics and Time to hL· recent study of attention and technics (Taking Care), Stiegler has explored the co-evolution of technics and life and has managed to articulate a powerful neo-phenomenologkal model of me…
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media Mark B. N. Hansen (bio) In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon's ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the "agency" of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly to…
Foucault and Media
This essay stages an encounter between Michel Foucault's work-especially his final thought concerning biopolitics, security, and population-and contemporary theorization of media's experiential impact. The essay argues that the opportunity for such an encounter has been obscured largely due to the role played by Gilles Deleuze (in particular by the concept of "control society") in filtering Foucault's work for media theory. The essay develops an …
Postnaturalism
»Postnaturalism« offers an original account of human-technological co-evolution and argues that film and media theory, in particular, needs to be re-evaluated from the perspective of our material interfaces with a constantly changing environment. Extrapolating from Frankenstein films and the resonances they establish between a hybrid monster and the spectator hooked into the machinery of the cinema, Shane Denson engages debates in science studies…
Bernard Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire
Excavating Bernard Stiegler's post–Technics and Time writings, this article questions not whether Stiegler's basic approach to the human-technics coupling that is central to his thought is correct, promising, or indeed imperative but whether the terms on which he theorizes it are adequate for engaging with the contemporary operation of technics. My excavation focuses on the concept and operation of desire, which comes to the fore in Stiegler's wr…
Les media du XXI e siècle
Un nouveau type de media, propres au XXI e siècle, ne s'adresse plus à nos consciences, ni même à nos perceptions, mais vise à connecter automatiquement différents points de sensibilité du monde (y compris au sein de notre propre corps), sans plus s'adresser à des « sujets » humains. L'internet des objets a pour vocation de fonctionner tout seul, sans se laisser entraver par l'erratisme des volontés subjectives, ni ralentir par les aléas de délib…
The Contingency of Process, or Why There Is No Computation-in-itself
This text responds to Alan Díaz Alva’s careful and compelling account of the tensions between and ultimate compatibility of Beatrice Fazi’s work on the formal incomputability of computation and my account of computational media in Feed-Forward. I recount Díaz Alva’s reconstruction of the “claim for inversion” I introduce in my book and suggest that the priority it grants the “superject” over the concrescing subject means that all process is both …
“Societies for Possibility Intensification”, or Technology as Dividuation Machine
The aim of this paper is to theorize human-technical assemblages as what I call “societies for possibility intensification” (SPI). My thesis is that SPIs constitute a form of human-technology entanglement that doesn’t begin from their separation but that is rooted in the concrete process that brings them into being, from atomic moment to atomic moment, as “real togetherness.” I develop the term “society for possibility intensification” on the bas…
Computer Science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Digital Media and Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works)