'Technology that we Represent.' Why Rethinking Technology and its Histories is Constitutive

Édouard Glissant has frequently been labeled as anti-technology or a technophobe in reference to an understanding of technology as these highly-specialized machinic entities of the last few decades. While for many readers, Glissant may not have engaged with technology in a straightforward way, his work, most prominently the concept of opacity, has resonated strongly in the last 20 years in film and media studies (and related fields such as STS, surveillance studies, etc.) which can be understood as a reflection of the media technological condition of the same time. However, Glissant’s work does offer another entry point. In my short talk, I want to invite the audience to think about technology with me, precisely in a sense that Yuk Hui has advanced through his concepts of «cosmotechnics» and «technodiversity», and to think through the experience of technological life today.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a research assistant at Technical University in Dresden, Germany with the Chair for Digital Cultures. She is interested in black studies, media & technology, poetics & politics, critical pedagogy & practice and speaks, writes and workshops for magazines, organizations and institutions. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant, histories of technology and cybernetics is finished at Leuphana University Lüneburg where she is also associated with the Centre for Digital Cultures and an alumna of the research training group «Cultures of Critique». In 2021, she was a lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, from October 2018 to May 2019 she was a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, Montréal. Nelly is a Senior Fellow with Humanity in Action, part of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) and member of the DFG Network »Gender, Media, Affect«.