170137 PS Introductory Seminar "Media Theory" (2021S)

Vertigo is considered an epitome of modernity emerging in the course of the 19th century alongside concepts such as speed, metropolis, and intoxication. By 1800, however, vertigo had already become the subject of systematic experimentation and self-experimentation. As such, it is part of a history of sensory and perceptual physiology, at the end of which stood the discovery of the sense of ewuilibrium in the inner ear, at the end of the 1860s.

The readings of the seminar intertwine these two perspectives. They combine media-theoretical, historical-epistemological and aesthetic approaches and reconstruct the experimentalisation of vertigo starting from a history of the means of transport (ship - railway - aeroplane - spaceship) and vertiginous apparatuses that form the material and media framework and dispositives of vertigo.

The aim of the seminar is to apply these different methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives to the object of investigation, which is to be analysed as a state of exception of the subject and a psychophysical borderline phenomenon between the control of the ego (equilibrium) and its loss (dizziness, delirium).