What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it? To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false. The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications.

In Against Transmission Barker rethinks the history of audio-visual media as a history of analytical instruments. Rather than viewing media history as the commonly told story of synthetic media (media that make a new whole from connecting separate parts), by focusing on the analytical function of mediation Against Transmission is able to focus on the way that media that have historically been used to count, measure and analyse experience still continue to provide the condition for contemporary life. By studying the engineering of transmission, transduction and storage through the prism of process philosophy, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine may offer new ways to describe a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history? This book investigates the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, including innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture.

In Against Transmission Barker rethinks the history of audio-visual media as a history of analytical instruments. Rather than viewing media history as the commonly told story of synthetic media (media that make a new whole from connecting separate parts), by focusing on the analytical function of mediation Against Transmission is able to focus on the way that media that have historically been used to count, measure and analyse experience still continue to provide the condition for contemporary life. By studying the engineering of transmission, transduction and storage through the prism of process philosophy, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine may offer new ways to describe a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history? This book investigates the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, including innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture.

What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it? To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false. The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications.