Recursions
About the Book Series
The book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques provides a platform for cutting- edge research in the field of media culture studies with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of communication. The series aims to be an internationally significant and exciting opening into emerging ideas in media theory ranging from media materialism and hardware-oriented studies to ecology, the post-human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contributions to media archaeology.
The series revolves around key themes:
The material underpinning of media theory
New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy
Studies in cultural techniques
These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international media studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge formations and new materialities expressed through biological and technological developments are changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also interested in the mediatic conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing them as media theory.
Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques
1st Edition
By Bernhard Rieder
January 10, 2026
Software has become a key component of contemporary life and algorithms that rank, classify, or recommend are everywhere. Building on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and the cultural techniques tradition, this book examines the constructive and cumulative character of software and retraces the ...
List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed
1st Edition
By Liam Young
January 10, 2026
We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary ...
Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics
1st Edition
By Ute Holl
January 09, 2026
We've all had the experience of watching a film and feeling like we've been in a trance. This book takes that experience seriously, explaining cinema as a cultural technique of trance, one that unconsciously transforms our perceptions. Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema ...
Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities
1st Edition
Edited
By Axel Volmar, Kyle Stine
January 09, 2026
In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in ...
Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social
1st Edition
Edited
By Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, Eivind Røssaak
January 09, 2026
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? Phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory....
Zootechnologies: A Media History of Swarm Research
1st Edition
By Sebastian Vehlken
January 09, 2026
Swarming has become a fundamental cultural technique related to dynamic processes and an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of society. This book examines the media history of swarm research and its significance to current socio-technological processes. It shows that the hype about ...
American Folk Music as Tactical Media
1st Edition
By Henry Adam Svec
December 01, 2025
American folk music has long presented a problematic conception of authenticity, but the reality of the folk scene, and its relationship to media, is far more complicated. This book draws on the fields of media archaeology, performance studies, and sound studies to explore the various modes of ...
Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration
1st Edition
By Jane Birkin
December 01, 2025
This alternative study of archive and photography brings many types of image assemblages into view, always in relation to the regulated systems operating within the institutional milieu. The archive catalogue is presented as a critical tool for mapping image time, and the language of image ...
Guerrilla Networks: An Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies
1st Edition
By Michael Goddard
December 01, 2025
The radical youth movements of the 1960s and '70s gave rise to both militant political groups ranging from urban guerrilla groups to autonomist counterculture, as well as radical media, including radio, music, film, video, and television. This book is concerned with both of those tendencies ...
New Media Archaeologies
1st Edition
Edited
By Ben Roberts, Mark Goodall
December 01, 2025
This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the developing field of media archaeology. It explores the relationship between theory and practice and the relationship between media archaeology and other disciplines. There are three sections to the collection proposing new possible fields ...
Remediating McLuhan
1st Edition
By Richard Cavell
December 01, 2025
While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were ...
Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity
1st Edition
By Wolfgang Ernst
December 01, 2025
Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a ...