Making Media Theory

O’Gorman’s Making Media Theory provides a hands-on guide to making objects without screens that serve as vehicles for media theory. In celebrating “broken tools and misfit toys,” he curates a series of creative exercises developed at the Critical Media Lab while also unfolding a larger philosophical meditation that challenges technoscientific false consciousness. This wise and whimsical how-to manual for understanding our current hyper-mediated state is essential reading for asserting the value of the arts and humanities and the pleasures of what Jack Halberstam has called “low theory.” With tales of tofu robots, sentient rabbits, wobbly furniture, electrified play-dough, high-tech hot dog eating, and a disembodied pink tentacle wielding a Swiss army knife, O’Gorman invites us to think through and with a collection of weird and misshapen media objects. * Elizabeth Losh, Professor of New Media Ecologies, College of William & Mary, USA *
Marcel O’Gorman’s splendid book features rabbits, rabbit holes, 3D prints and prosthetic limbs, conductive play dough, and soil sensors; it features philosophy and thinkering, matters and mattering, a good dose of critical crapentry , and a labful of insightful media theory. That teaser list is just one way of saying: this book is a must-read that I recommend to use as an operating manual. * Jussi Parikka, Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics, University of Southampton, UK and FAMU, Czech Republic *