Horn, or The Counterside of Media

“In this prescient and urgent intervention, unicorns, rhinoceroses, and trumpet players guide us through an imagined exhibition of possible technical experiences. Using ‘horn’ as a structuring concept linking the materiality of bodies, the boundary of death and life, sensation, technology, and aesthetic practices, Henning Schmidgen creates a powerfully novel account of media. At a time when our lives have never been more mediated, Horn provides a necessary corrective to our stilted, unimaginative conceptions of the future world as either a society of control or a techno-utopia.” - Orit Halpern, author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

“Horn is that exceedingly rare book whose originality extends from its thesis to its form. Henning Schmidgen shows not only stunning yet unobtrusive learning but also felicitous juxtapositions of texts, of texts and images, and of images and images. His curatorial approach effortlessly brings together literature, the visual arts, architecture, scientific drawings, and theoretical interventions with a compelling and unexpected coherence. Horn will be of utmost interest to scholars and students of media culture and theory as well as historians of visual and digital art.” - Helmut Müller-Sievers, author of The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference

"As a scholar of touch and technology but not, it must be said, of media, I was rarely surprised by the historical content or media examples. I was, however, consistently delighted by the deft argumentation, the rather bricolage- like assembly of themes and motifs, and the unexpected but convincing serendipities that connect them across the different media and their practitioners. . . . For the scholar interested in media and technology, this book serves as an entertaining crash course or manifesto in the history of tactile media." - Mark Paterson, Technology and Culture