Erich Hoerl's Sacred Channels is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of the sacred and the primitive. Hoerl offers insight into the shared ground of anthropology and media theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and presents an archeology of the philosophy of technology that underpins contemporary culture. This singular and unique project focuses on the ethnological disciplines and their phantasmatic imaginations of a prealphabetical realm of the sacred and the primitive but reads them in the context of media cultural questions as epistemic unconscious and as projections of the emerging postalphabetical condition. Drawing inspiration from work by the likes of Friedrich Kittler, Hoerl's understanding of cybernetics in the post-World War II interdisciplinary field informs a rich analysis that is of interest to media scholars and to anyone seeking to understand the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the humanities in the age of technical media.

Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political... a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought-one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate-and how-in this planet's future.

Digitalization has transformed the discourse of architecture: that discourse is now defined by a wealth of new terms and concepts that previously either had no meaning, or had different meanings, in the context of architectural theory and design. Its concepts and strategies are increasingly shaped by influences emerging at the intersection with scientific and cultural notions from modern information technology. The new series Context Architecture seeks to take a critical selection of concepts that play a vital role in the current discourse and put them up for discussion.

In the context of discussions of the medial, the notion of simulation plays a central role in architecture as illusion and imitation. In dialogue with information technology and computer science, however, that notion has now taken on a new quality in architectural discourse. Today when we speak of simulation we primarily think of "computer simulation," the technical ability to simulate processes.

Whereas simulation used to refer to a mode of presentation, it now connects architecture with the sciences and represents a strategic and methodological instrument, a tool of discovery. With the scientific principle of simulation the focus shifts to the idea of "modeling a dynamic system" (Norbert Wiener), not just presenting finished products but going in search of solutions and developing systems!