Endless Intervals Av Jeffrey West Kirkwood

<P><B>Revealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the human</B></P><P>Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In <I>Endless Intervals,</I> he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.</P><P>Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and co