Das Schiff

Even in Sophocles' time, the ship was regarded as the first of all cultural techniques through which humanity has made the Earth subservient to itself. Today, a philosophy of elemental media also considers the ship as an "arch-medium," meaning a primordial or original medium. For at sea, one cannot forget that human existence is technically based. Therefore, humans draw their metaphors of existence from the sea. The Archive for Media History gathers in its twentieth edition contributions that address the ship as a world-making medium, as a generator and transformer of environments, visibility, and even history itself. Media history as a historiographical practice faces the challenge of changed media-theoretical questions and interests. The media-ecological paradigm has long begun to shift the boundaries of the popular understanding of "media." Currently, media increasingly take on the meaning of "milieus," of environments or surroundings. Thus, it is about understanding media not as techniques and technologies for storing and disseminating messages, but as enabling environments or even as "infrastructures of being." On one hand, this type of media history will examine technologies for their environment-generating, transforming, and creating effects. On the other hand, the idea can also be reversed: then environments are also media – and they are more so the more the indistinguishability of nature and technology increases. Discovering how far this intertwining of media as environments and environments as media reaches historically is part of the aforementioned challenge of media history. To explore the possibilities and methods of media histories that focus on media as enabling infrastructures, Volume 20 of the Archive for Media History is dedicated to the ship.