film exam essay topics Flashcards
(5 cards)
How is the ability to record a human super-power?
Recording is synthetic memory: a species-level prosthesis that lets humans project agency across mortality, geography, and hierarchy.
Source 1:
Plato Phaedrus (pre-SB): Socrates fears writing will “make men forget”—but forgetting in the flesh is the price for remembering outside it.
Source 2:
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pp. 1-20: inscription without interpretation—machine memory indifferent to meaning.
Source 3:
Holmes, “Stereoscope & Stereograph”: truth becomes mechanical imprint.
Fire analogy: like fire, photography is creative destruction—burning away context while forging evidence. (from lecture)
How do media disembody and re-embody us?
Media always perform a double move: they extract sensations from flesh (disembodiment) and re-skin them in new technical bodies (re-embodiment).
Source 1:
McLuhan, “Gadget Lover / Narcissus as Narcosis” + lecture “Formatting the Body”: every extension (hammer, smartphone) first numbs, then augments.
Source 2:
Sofia draws analogies between containers and bodies (e.g., the skin as a permeable container), suggesting that the materiality of containers mediates the relationship between inside and outside, self and environment.
Source 3:
Evens, The Digital and its Discontents on ChatGPT: language models detach cognition yet feed it back as dialogue—synthetic interlocutors.
Can machines think? Can media embody mind?
Yes—machines think insofar as thinking = materially executing symbol transformations; media have embodied mind since the clay tablet. What machines still lack is sentience, not cognition.
Source 1:
Turing, “Computing Machinery & Intelligence” (4 / 14 lecture) – the Imitation Game reframes thinking as performance.
Source 2:
Plato Phaedrus – Socrates doesn’t argue that writing has no argument, he just argues that you cannot negotiate or have a conversation with something static.
Source 3: Evens, “ChatGPT” – stochastic parrots vs. combinatorial infinity
Write a deep history of artificial intelligence starting well before the digital era.
Artificial intelligence is the teleological horizon of a 5,000-year project to externalize rule-based thought. From abacus beads to algorithmic image diffusion, each medium pushes cognition farther from neurons toward infrastructure
Source 1:
Plato, Phaedrus: writing = proto-algorithm storing logic.
Source 2:
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pp. 1-20: inscription without interpretation—machine memory indifferent to meaning.
Source 3:
Evens, The Digital and its Discontents on ChatGPT: language models detach cognition yet feed it back as dialogue—synthetic interlocutors. / Somaini – Algorithmic Images
How are media about time, space, and power?
Every medium is a political geometry: it re-draws the map of who can act when and where.
Source 1:
Winkler, “Geometry of Time”: time ↔ space convertibility; power = mastery of the conversion rate.
Source 2:
Calendar, Clock, Tower (Peters) – who sets the schedule governs bodies.
Source 3:
Ben Lerner, “The Custodians.” Digital archives reshape cultural capital.
