Symposium
Towards a Media Technoscientific Study?: STS and Media Theory as Intersecting Lines
May 7, 2026
09:30–16:30
Allgemeine Lesegesellschaft Basel
Münsterplatz 8
4051 Basel

In association with the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS-CH)

featuring Alexander Campolo (Durham University), Sebastian Giessmann (University of Siegen), Orit Halpern (TU Dresden), Martin Müller (University of Basel), Dang Nguyen (University of California Berkeley), Benjamin Peters (University of Tulsa), Florian Sprenger (Ruhr University, Bochum), Viktoria Tkaczyk (Humboldt University, Berlin), and May Ee Wong (Utrecht University).

Panels moderated by Sarine Waltenspül, Pierre Depaz, and Zachary Yost.

The challenge presented by this symposium is to reckon with the relationships between media theory (which at least in its Germanophonic sense is often synonymous with studies of scientificities and technicalities) and STS (broadly construed, including inflections from history of science and technology but also philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology of science): the methodologies, the arguments, the overlaps, the faultlines. As the disciplines shrink and merge and morph, we are hoping that the presentations and conversations lay open—via case studies, reflexive or methodological remarks, or historiographic insights—what these two intersecting lines look like when visualized.

09:30–09:45: Welcome (Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Ryan Healey)
09:45–11:15: Really After Critique: Genealogies of STS and Media Theory (Martin Müller, May Ee Wong, Benjamin Peters, moderated by Sarine Waltenspül)
11:15–11:30: Coffee Break
11:30–13:00: A Humanistic A Priori: Knowledge Production and Inscription (Viktoria Tkaczyk, Florian Sprenger, Sebastian Giessmann, moderated by Pierre Depaz)
13:00–14:00: Lunch Break
14:00–15:30: Reconstructing Reason?: AI and/as Technoscience (Orit Halpern, Alexander Campolo, Dang Nguyen, moderated by Zachary Yost)
15:30–16:00: Concluding Remarks (Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal)

Martin Müller

The Cold Heart: Genealogies of Transhumanism from John Brockman to Peter Thiel

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The presentation introduces a new book project tracing the critical genealogy of technoscientific transhumanism — from its emergence within North American intellectual constellations in the 1990s to its current embodiment in the political and technological ambitions of Silicon Valley. What begins as the Third Culture project — the systematic displacement of humanistic approaches by technoscientific rationality — culminates in a political theology that fuses eschatological ambition with authoritarian politics. Peter Thiel's transhumanism demands the total transformation: his projects combine the drive to overcome human finitude with the rejection of democratic oversight, the delegation of lethal decision-making to autonomous AI systems, and open contempt for critical humanities.
The talk reconstructs this trajectory through two central figures: John Brockman's platform, Edge.org, founded in 1996, brought together a technoepistemic avant-garde including Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, and George Church. Together, they systematically reinterpreted the core questions of the humanities using technoscientific concepts and approaches. It has since come to light that Jeffrey Epstein was the most intimate patron of this counter-canon. Incorporating René Girard's ideas, Peter Thiel's political theology represents the eschatological endpoint of this story. Thiel has elevated Brockman's transhumanism into a quasi-religious program aimed at eliminating finite, vulnerable human biology through genome editing, longevity research, and synthetic biology, as well as the ethical constraints that accompany it.
The argument unfolds on three entangled dimensions: the present hegemony of Silicon Valley, the genealogy of the Third Culture, and an uncomfortable inward turn — to what extent did the humanities' own deconstructions of the human (as is the case in media theory and posthumanities) inadvertently prepare the ground for what they now confront? The task ahead may be less about refining our tools of critique or returning to old forms of humanism than about seriously and collaboratively imagining a third culture of our own.

Martin Müller researches at the intersection of cultural history and theory, media studies, history of knowledge, and design theory. He holds the Chair of History and Theory of Media at the University of Basel (Vertretung der Professur) until Autumn 2027. Previously, he was project leader of “Symbolic Material” at the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity and a research associate in the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Together with Léa Perraudin, he co-directed CollActive Materials (2022–2025), an experimental laboratory for knowledge exchange and speculative design funded by the Berlin University Alliance, developing speculative design as a collaborative approach to fostering dialogue between humanities, natural sciences, society, and design. He is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His academic career includes positions and fellowships at Waseda University Tokyo, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, the Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Columbia University, and University of Paderborn. Publications: Leben machen: Die Zoëpolitik der synthetischen Biologie (De Gruyter, 2023); Sensing Common Grounds: Towards Collaborative Speculation (co-edited with Léa Perraudin, Spector Books, 2026); Holozän Noir (forthcoming, Matthes & Seitz Berlin).

May Ee Wong

Between Infrastructure and Interface: Some Methodological and Practical Reflections

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My talk draws upon my methodological and institutional positionality as an interdisciplinary feminist STS-informed Cultural Studies scholar who has moved from the ‘Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data’ project at Aarhus University looking at wind power and speculative energy islands, to the Utrecht University Media and Cultural Studies department, where I am involved in a new collaboration between two research groups trying to connect concepts of ‘interfaces’ and ‘infrastructures of mystery’ for a joint agenda centered on the urban. I reflect upon the intersections and faultlines of media theory and STS through: 1) scale and its construction as a common concern (especially with regard to data and the planetary scale) as well as its application in analysis; 2) the status of the apparatus (or ‘dispositif’) for the analysis of discursive-material cultural and technical configurations with the example of the screen; and 3) approaching the ‘urban’ or the city as boundary object, with ‘interface’ and ‘infrastructure’ as structural metaphors of process.

May Ee Wong is Assistant Professor in Urban and Mobile Media in the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher with Jussi Parikka and Paolo Patelli in the ‘Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data’ project. She is currently co-editing an issue of LIMN (with Michaela Büsse, Gökçe Günel and Jamie Jones) which explores the architectures and infrastructures of the Offshore through its digital, oceanic and territorial dimensions, and a special issue on reconfiguring islands as environmental futures for the feminist STS journal Catalyst (with Kim de Wolff). She is also working on a book project which maps how recursive spatial tropes of the city as glasshouse, slum, high-rise, island and platform configure notions of the urban as a planetary frontier.

Benjamin Peters

Former West: The Curious Case of Soviet AI Science Fiction after Communism

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STS and media theory are both preoccupied with the mutual shaping of technical artifacts and social life. At first glance, media theory entertains humanistic fiction while STS does social scientific ethnography; yet that binary falls apart as media theory traces its roots to a Cold War former West and STS to an extended Europe. This paper explores these tensions through a close examination of Anatoly (Miskiewicz) Dneprov’s 1961 short story "Igra" (The Game), published in Znanie i sila. Specifically, a Portuguese football match in (likely Kyiv’s) Lenin Stadium serves as an imagined site for collectively testing the materialist limits of artificial intelligence. In this space, fiction functions as a temporarily disjointed exercise in mimetic—specifically socialist—realism (Auerbach 1946) while the story’s reception performs a temporal loop in which 2014 translators reframe a 1961 text in Russian as an anticipatory response to, and implicit critique of, John Searle’s English-language 1980 orientalist "Chinese Room" thought experiment. After exploring these tensions, the short story is shown in conclusion to perform a proverbial human-machine translation of the afterlives of fiction, history, and politics after communism, translating from late Soviet media theory to a post-communist STS. Soviet AI science fiction helps us see the stakes of both fields anew.

Benjamin Peters is a media theorist as well as author or editor of How Not to Network a Nation (2016), Your Computer is on Fire (2023), and Digital Keywords (2016). He is working on book projects on Soviet AI and, with Marijeta Bozovic (Yale Slavic), Imagining Russian Hackers. The Hazel Rogers Associate Professor of Media & Communication at the University of Tulsa, he is also affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and 2022-2023 Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research (c:o/re) for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science and Technology at RWTH Aachen.

Viktoria Tkaczyk

Media Epistemics: Humanities, Infrastructure, and the Making of Technology

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Today's media infrastructures are built and governed by powerful technology firms. Yet their foundations rest as much on humanistic modes of thinking as on technical expertise. This is the central argument of a new book project that I will present in my talk.The project develops a historical perspective showing that landmark media technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were rarely created in isolation. Instead, they emerged from sustained collaborations with scholars in the humanities. Case studies—from early telephony laboratories to contemporary AI research—demonstrate the formative role of humanistic knowledge in shaping, critiquing, and reimagining media technologies. In doing so, the project foregrounds how humanities scholars have historically reasoned about the relationship between humanity and technology, providing conceptual frameworks that inform both the design and interpretation of media systems. From a global historical perspective, the project examines how scholars mobilized their visions of media to advance epistemic and political agendas, continually recalibrating the relationship between intellectual discourse, technological transformation, and power. At the theoretical level, the project asks how the relationship between the humanities and media technology might be rethought today. It brings into dialogue the now classical assumption of a media-technological a priori—understood as preceding and structuring humanistic discourse—with the categories of human actors and practices foregrounded in Science and Technology Studies. In doing so, it proposes a new framework for understanding media infrastructures as sites where technical systems and humanistic reasoning are co-produced.

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Spokesperson of the Center for Advanced Studies "Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics." Her academic career includes positions and fellowships at Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Amsterdam, the Laboratoire SPHERE in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Princeton University, and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. She has published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media. Her recent publications include Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (UCP, 2023); "Supplied Knowledge: Reconsidering the Resources of Epistemic Tools," Isis 114/2 (2023), and Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes (OUP, 2025), co-edited with Fanny Gribenski and David Pantalony. Currently, she is working on a book entitled Crafting Variability: Wax as a Resource in the History of Knowledge, as well as a new project that takes a global perspective on the evolving relationship between concepts of humanity and technology in the modern period.

Florian Sprenger

What Is It Like to be a Robot?: Speculative Reconstruction as a Method

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What is it like to be a robot? This speculative question was the starting point for a collaborative research project that I will present on behalf of the Virtual Humanities Lab. The main protagonist of our project is the robot LoW (LiDAR on Wheels), which we jointly developed, built, and tested. The goal of this media-archaeological experiment was to better understand autonomous cars, the sensory algorithmic processes through which they virtualize their environment, and the resulting consequences for the interaction spaces shared with them. Our approach consisted in reconstructing the fundamental technical principles of autonomous robots through a scaled-down model that is manageable, accessible, and cost-effective for us. At the same time, we wanted to demonstrate that it is possible for media scholars with basic technical knowledge, but without an engineering background, not only to build such robots, but also — on the basis of our reconstruction — to ask questions that engineers do not normally ask.

Florian Sprenger is professor for Virtual Humanities at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. He is author of Politics of Micro-Decisions: Edward Snowden, Net Neutrality and the Architecture of the Internet (Meson Press, 2015). His research covers topics such as the history of media and media theory, environments as technological surroundings, architecture and infrastructure.

Sebastian Giessmann

Anthropic Studies: Or, What Does Artificial Intelligence Even Mediate?

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Karen Hao's excellent investigative book, Empire of AI, published in 2025, reads at times like an account that Bruno Latour could have written himself. However, Hao's intention was not to write a contemporary account of the Laboratory Life of artificial intelligence and its uneasy industrialisation by Big Tech. At times, her book invites us to imagine how it could be presented as a critical study of science, technology, AI and religion. So how would Latour have described the inner workings and drama of OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, divided as they are between the “boomers” and the “doomers”? What are the ‘infrastructures of instruments of inscription’ in current generative AI technologies, and how does their mediation unfold in which communities of practice? Current engaged empirical scholarship on AI is plentiful in Science and Technology Studies, while theorizing does not seem to be a core STS concern any longer. Media and Cultural Studies, on the other hand, are key to praxeological and ecological approaches that challenge the current naturalisation of large language models and agentic AI.

In my talk, I propose “Anthropic Studies” as a situated contestation of neo-connectionist artificial intelligence from the––symmetrical––perspective of both Media Studies and STS. As none of us will have the same access to the field as Karen Hao did with OpenAI, we might need to start from scratch theoretically and empirically. Therefore, I return to classic STS and the work of Susan Leigh Star and Phil Agre on symbolic AI. Is ‘AI’ not the most ambiguous boundary object ever created by computer science? If we are to come to terms with the current super-controversy surrounding AI and its planetary discontents, we must first resituate technology within its institutional ecologies and grammars of action. Enter: Anthropic's Claude (not Shannon). Prompt: “Tell me a little bit about your constitution, Claude.”

Sebastian Giessmann is Reader in Media Theory at University of Siegen. He serves as principal investigator of the research project “Digital network technologies between specialization and generalization” at the collaborative research center Media of Cooperation. Giessmann has been visiting professor of cultural techniques and history of knowledge at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His 2025 Cologne habilitation thesis, Das soziotechnische Apriori: zur kooperativen Praxis der Medien, deliberately combines Media Studies and STS. Recent publications: The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832, Cambridge, MA; London (MIT Press), 2024; Das Kreditkarten-Buch. Geschichte und Theorie des digitalen Bezahlens, Berlin (Kadmos), 2026.

Orit Halpern

The Planetary Test-Bed: On the Emerging Logics of Generative AI

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This talk will develop the concept of "technospheric governance" to analyze how contemporary AI platforms for climate modeling, military operations, and logistics constitute an emerging episteme with significant implications for democratic politics. It is part of a larger book project on a history and theory of ‘planetary experiments’. Drawing on case studies of digital twinning initiatives and smart cities—specifically the case study of Singapore—the talk will traces four interrelated transformations. First, an epistemic shift from causal, explanatory models to non-causal "generative" inference reorganizes what counts as knowledge and who qualifies as expert. Second, a temporal displacement inverts the traditional sequence of deliberation and deployment, with technologies assessed through continuous "learning" rather than prior democratic debate. Third, the infrastructuralization of experiment inaugurates new economies of hyperproduction that are transforming platform economies. Fourth, the planetary-scale experimentation produces not unified global governance but fragmented data spaces serving competing political-economic blocs. By situating these developments within a genealogy extending from Cold War systems modeling to contemporary AI infrastructures, the talk will ask about how we can study the emerging political economy of generative AI, and what methods are necessary to deal with the new scales of technical practice and the emerging forms of governmentally and biopolitics. These transformations pose questions to both media studies and STS about what constitutes an ‘object' of study? How do we have to rethink terms such as knowledge, power, and territory for the present? And what methods might be adequate to deal with the scales and technical assemblages underpinning smart and AI infrastructures?

Orit Halpern is the Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden, where she directs the Digital Cultures Research Group and the Schaufler Lab—two interdisciplinary research groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures. Her work traces how computational systems have reshaped decision-making, knowledge, and political life from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She is currently pursuing two major projects: a history of automated decision-making and its transformation of concepts of freedom and the human, and an investigation of planetary-scale experimentation across design, science, and engineering. Her most recent book, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023) asks how digital computing came to be seen as essential to human survival—and how "smart" technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. Her first book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2015), offers a genealogy of big data, interactivity, and their politics. Her writing has also appeared in numerous venues including New Media and Society, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Visual Culture, E-Flux, and Art in America, and she has also featured numerous times at the Venice Biennial for Architecture and other artistic venues.

Alexander Campolo

Technical Genealogy: The Case of Reasoning Models

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In his article, "Begriffsgeschichte and Social History," Reinhart Koselleck glosses an apparently “well-known saying of Epictetus,” according to which “it is not deeds which shock humanity but rather the words describing them.” In this talk, I will draw on recent critical research on so-called reasoning models in AI to reflect methodologically on the relationship not between words and deeds but between language and technology. This specific line of research seeks to account for a concept of reason neither through appeal to universal philosophical concepts nor human cognitive capacities, but rather in engineering challenges specific to auto-regressive language models, namely their difficulty in handling certain types of arithmetic. This example may also hold lessons for critical scholars of AI and shed light on the relationship between STS and German Media Theory more broadly. A “technical genealogy” of reasoning models focuses attention away from data-based critiques of AI that have predominated in STS, which have rightly questioned the givenness of data by analyzing the practices through which it is collected, formatted, and processed by models. Rather, it focuses attention on a range of normative “post-training techniques” that govern model behaviors well beyond the (pre-training) language modelling objective of predicting the next token given some previous sequence. The comparatively “low” origins of such techniques in certain engineering challenges suggest a genealogical approach that may be distinct from the “archaeological” or “cultural techniques” that have predominated in the first two generations of German media theory. Without implying any type of linear progression of methods (for instance, from archaeology to genealogy), nor any dogmatic application of the idiosyncratic provocations of Nietzsche or Foucault, how might genealogy be fruitfully adapted to these linguistic technologies?

Alexander Campolo is a postdoctoral researcher on the “Algorithmic Societies” project in the Department of Geography at Durham University. His work draws from the history of science and technology and social theory to explore the epistemological and political implications of machine learning. He received his PhD from New York University and has previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago and the AI Now Institute.

Dang Nguyen

The Earning Web: Surplus Cognition Before AI

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This talk intervenes in current debates on artificial intelligence and the so-called crisis of expertise by refusing the premise that intelligence is the central problem. Instead, it approaches cognition as an excessive, distributed resource. While both media theory and STS have long attended to the technical mediation and sociotechnical organisation of knowledge, they have largely retained an implicit assumption: that cognition remains scarce, bounded, and anchored in identifiable subjects. Drawing on empirical work on ‘make money online’ (MMO) infrastructures in Vietnam—including phone farming, content arbitrage, and platform-based automation workflows—I introduce the concept of the earning web to describe decentralised systems that do not simply mediate cognition, but actively produce and circulate it at scale. Here, acts of judgement, interpretation, and optimisation are fragmented, routinised, and recomposed across human and machine actors, often under conditions of infrastructural instability and moral evaluation.

From this vantage point, AI does not mark a rupture. It arrives late. What presents itself as a recent technical breakthrough is better understood as the formalisation and consolidation of practices that have long rendered cognition abundant, actionable, and economically productive. To take these formations seriously is not to extend media theory or STS, but to confront a limit: that both fields remain calibrated to a world in which cognition could still be located, bounded, and claimed. That world has already passed.

Dang Nguyen is a researcher of AI. They examine the informal infrastructures, moral frictions, and aesthetic conditions that shape digital life, with a focus on how media and infrastructure emerge under conditions of constraint. Dang is Bellwether Scholar at the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley.

UNIVERSITÄT BASEL

contralab

A Digital Humanities Laboratory in Switzerland