Variantology 2. On Deep Time. Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies

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.
Edited by Siegfried Zielinski and David Link with Eckhard Fuerlus and Nadine Minkwitz, this work includes text edited by Gloria Custance. It features texts by Amit R. Alexander, Peter Blegvad, Arianna Borrelli, Oksana Bulgakova, Eckhard Furlus, Andrea Hacker, Sebastian Klotz, David Link, Alla Mitrofanova, Miklos Paternak, Koen Vermeir, Peter Weibel, Mara Mills, Steven Vanden Broecke, Amador Vega, Lioudmila Voropai, Gabor Zemplen.
This second volume continues to explore the profundity of the relations between the arts, sciences and technology communities. Philosophers, artists, theologians, physicists, musicologists and art theorists from different sides of the world seriously question the understanding of what we have up to now defined as art and what we have conceived as the media. They ask such disparate questions as: 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? What do the creation of the lottery and arithmetically inspired musical compositions have in common?