Techniques of Mediation

This workshop explores how technologies of inscription, mediation, information, and archives create the social world, by examining a wide range of historical and contemporary assemblages of people, machines, and organizations that have shaped complex diagrams of power and of social life. From index cards to databases, from the alphabet to ASCII, and from the abacus to the algorithm, the workshop will explore concrete cases of mediation’s effectivity, and by doing so expand our assessment of mediation to the status of technically - and materially - determinate processes of world-making and knowledge production.