Friedrich Kittler. Electricity, Electronics and the March of Technology. 2010

http://www.egs.edu/ Friedrich Kittler talking about vectors in media technology, historical roots in the physical sciences and geography through ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the 18th and 19th Century, World War I, World War II and Post War Western engineering sciences. Kittler describes our return to Greek language in science as linked to that civilization's unique origination of the natural sciences, and traces technology's accelerated march forward, sign-posting the work of Leyden, Lavosier, Volta, Galvani, Oersted, Faraday, Watt, Carnot, Boltzman, Gauss, Helmholtz, Siemens, Braun, Edison, Maxwell, Hertz, Marconi, Deforrest, Bessel, Chebychev, Butterworth, Venebar Bush, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2010 Friedrich Kittler.
Friedrich Adolf Kittler, Ph.D., (b. 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scientist and media theorist. His research and work is focused on media, history, communications, technology, and the military. Friedrich Kittler studied German Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg/Breisgau. In 1976, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and became an Assistant Professor in German at Freiburg for the next decade. During that time he worked as visiting lecturer and assistant professor at several universities in the United States, including the University of California, Berkeley in 1982, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Stanford University from 1982--83, the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1986, and he was a Membre associé of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris from 1983--86. In 1984, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau.

From 1986--1990, Friedrich Kittler headed the DFG's Literature and Media Analysis project in Kassel. In 1987, he was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies at the Ruhr University, and in the same year he started working as a Professor of German at the University of Bochum (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) until he was appointed to the chair for Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University, Berlin in 1993.

In 1993, Friedrich Kittler was awarded the 'Siemens Media Arts Prize' (Siemens-Medienkunstpreis) by ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, or 'Center for Art and Media') for his research in the field of media theory. From 1995--97, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. He was recognized in 1996 as a Distinguished Scholar at Yale University and in 1997 as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York. Friedrich Kittler is a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the research group 'Bild Schrift Zahl' ('Picture Writing Number') (DFG).

Friedrich Kittler sees an autonomy in technology and therefore disagrees with Marshall McLuhan's reading of the media as 'extensions of man': 'Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it'.

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