Media Technologies and Posthuman Intimacy

Reviews / Votes

Stasienko takes media studies into a journey to their roots in the humanities, only to realize they have always been posthuman. * Carmel Vaisman, Professor of Digital Culture, Tel Aviv University, Israel * This is an extraordinary book based on questions that still sound strange for a lot of us in the present cultural context and among the common academic research fields. "Is it possible to place our feelings in algorithms, digital representations, images and sounds?" and "who or what is the non-human other situated in the media apparatus?" are two of the many thrilling hypotheses raised by the author. Jan Stasienko is discussing with us "the scope of possibility of building subjective relations between the users of the various media technologies and the senses communicated through the latter." Stasienko is actually creating a theory of intimacy processes between human subjects and computer programs, discussing, mainly from the perspective of posthumanism, what kind of relation could it be, as well as the boundaries between pleasure and violence in doing so. Are we altered by the mechanical 'other'? Or we just need new, posthuman, ontologies? All these amazing things are openly discussed here, in an academic book that at the same time can work as a coursebook and as breathtaking science fiction. I have enjoyed it very much! * Evi Sampanikou, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, University of the Aegean, Greece * In this theoretically rich and multidisciplinary study, Jan Stasienko visits various eras and environments of traditional and digital media to find and draw a map of posthuman intimacy built in media apparatuses. Stasienko carefully tracks how and when our existence becomes posthuman by entering various technological realms to look at how our corporeality, sexuality and intimacy are radically reconfigured in these historical and contemporary spaces. The desire to show the profound complexity of the human-information relations coincides here with the ability to build an engaging narrative about what it is like to love and hate codes and meanings shaped in the form of avatars, cartoon characters, CGI personas or immaterial objects of sexual desire. * Krystina Madej, Professor of the Practice, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA *