Optical Media

'Kittler's lectures provide stimulating and provocative reading.'
New Formations

'Kittler's analysis is always rich and involving, describing a complex path of theoretical and factual relations.'
Neural

"Optical Media is the most engaging and accessible of Friedrich Kittler's books. It starts out with a clear presentation of Kittler'smedia-theoretical premises and then offers a fascinating tour through the history of storing, manipulating and projecting light. Witty, insightful, provocative, at times outrageous but always stimulating, Optical Media is not only an overlooked back entrance into the study of visual media from the Renaissance to the present, it is also an equally helpful back entrance into Kittler's own theory."
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, University of British Columbia

"Kittler is the preeminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. Brilliant and remarkably original, he offers a kind of media analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. No one interested in what it means to live in a media-saturated age can neglecthis vital and controversial work."
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa