Variantology 2. On Deep Time

What does a 13th century Majorcan missionary have to do with logical machines? Were the astrolabes of the late Middle Ages really only devices to calculate the orbits of stars and planets and not also philosophical instruments? Could computers ever write love letters, and where do radar angels live? What do the creation of the lottery and arithmetically inspired musical compositions have in common? Was the first avant-garde in Russia more interested in Jesuit affect theory or in H. G. Wells' time machine? I failure a category that is reserved for the arts as a privilege? The adventure of these excursions into the profundity of the relations between the arts, the sciences and technology continues with such disparate questions. The authors are philosophers, artists, theologians, physicists, musicologists and art theorists from different parts of the world. They want neither to write a new history of art nor a new history of the media. By generously interpreting the objects of their own research, however, they seriously question our understanding of what we have up to now defined as art and what we have conceived of as the media.
In dieser Textsammlung äußern sich Philosophen, Künstler, Theologen, Physiker, Mathematik-, Technik- und Wissenschaftshistoriker, Biologen, Filmhistoriker, Musikologen und Kunsttheoretiker aus verschiedenen Teilen der Welt zu disparatesten Themen. Sie wollen weder eine neue Kunst-, noch eine neue Mediengeschichte schreiben. Indem sie großzügig Gegenstände ihrer eigenen Forschungen interpretieren, stellen sie allerdings unser Verständnis dessen, was wir bisher als Kunst definiert und was wir als Medien begriffen haben, erheblich in Frage.