Media Devices of Spatiality

Space as such does not exist independently of the cultural techniques of controlling, visualizing and producing space. Studying the history of spatiality in its multiple declinations and articulations is therefore a way to question the medialities of the gaze at the heart of different “spatial revolutions”.

Woodcut illustration of Robert Hooke’s design for the “Picture Box”, from Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke, ed. W. Derham, London 1726 — Woodcut illustration of Robert Hooke’s design for the “Picture Box”, from *Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke*, ed. W. Derham, London 1726

Woodcut illustration of Robert Hooke’s design for the “Picture Box”, from *Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke*, ed. W. Derham, London 1726

This line of research focuses on the workings of media and media devices, on the way they take root in space and shape it, by bringing together the German philosophical tradition (Kant, Cassirer, Schmitt) and studies that define cinema as the “eye of the twentieth century”. If texts, monuments, images, maps and films are clearly agents of the construction of space, then studying their technologies of production and the way they function, the position they assign to the observer and the operations and gestures they require or make possible, becomes crucial to shift the inquiry from the object – the medium – to its functioning: mediation.