Friedrich Kittler: The Modern World

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Friedrich Kittler, German historian and theorist, lecturing on the history of writing. In this lecture he talks about manuscript culture vs printed culture rising out of Gutenberg's innovation, the copyleft culture of the Gutenberg technologies, how the scientific revolution really started with these texts that were printed after the discovery of woodcuts copper plates and paper mills, how the printing press facilitated the transmission of technical knowledge, how the Jesuits entered the Chinese empire of Peking; typecutters, fonts and cryptography, and Leon Battista Alberti, the development of capital letters, the development of common mathematical symbols by Johannes Widmann (the +/- sign), Raphael Bombolli and Gerolamo Cardano (equations), Simon Stevin and the Dutch zero, and François Viète, the harmony of the fifth in tuning systems, how innovations in common mathematical notation and intercultural participation made possible musical innovations, how the end of notation in Latin was the beginning of open-source knowledge, algebraic notation, the need for symbols, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and binary arithmetic, 18th century mathematicians and algorithms, Jacques du Vaucanson's digesting duck, Leonard Euler and mechanical sytheses of voices, the 18th century German school system, changes in paper production in material media history, Canadian lumber, semaphores as optical system of signs, optical telegraphy speeding up military communications, invention of the typewriter by Remington, Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's first sound recording of Au Claire de la Lune, the effect of these changes on literature of the 19th century, Sir Flinders Petrie, Alan Turing's Turing machine, cryptography, Pearl Harbor, closing remarks on the need to learn program languages to see the limits of language, Assembler programming language, Q&A.
Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS), Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland, Europe. Friedrich Kittler. 2011.

Friedrich Adolf Kittler (1943 -2011) was a post-Structuralist philosopher, as well as historian and theorist of media communications and technology. Kittler studied German Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg/Breisgau. In 1976, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. His work was heavily influenced by both Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Kittler became a Professor of German at Freiburg in the early eighties. During the decade he held positions as a visiting lecturer and professor at the University of California, in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and later at the University of Stanford and the University of Basel. In 1984, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau, and from 1986-1990 headed the DFG's Literature and Media Analysis project in Kassel. Kittler was a Membre associé of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris from 1983-1986. In 1987, Kittler was appointed Professor of Modern German Studies, at Ruhr University and began working as Professor of German at the University of Bochum.

In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. Kittler was also a member of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Culture and the Bild Schrift Zahl research group.

In 1996, Friedrich Kittler was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar by Yale University, and in 1997 as Distinguished Visiting Professor by Columbia University.