Title: Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media
Contributors: Ebony Coletu, Kay Dickinson, Stefano Harney, Matthew Hockenberry, Tung-Hui Hu, Shannon Mattern, Fred Moten, Michael Palm, Ned Rossiter, Nicole Starosielski, Liam Cole Young, Susan Zieger
Publication Date: September 10, 2021
Publisher: Duke University Press
Formats: Hardcover
Pages: 264
ISBN-10: 147800973X
ISBN-13: 978-1478009733
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Assembly Codes
The Logistics of Media
The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics.
The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film production and the construction of internet infrastructure to the environmental impact of the creation, distribution, and sale of vinyl records. They also reveal how logistical technologies have generated new aesthetic and performative practices. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, Assembly Codes demonstrates that media and logistics are co-constitutive and that one cannot be understood apart from the other.
Praise
for Assembly Codes
“Logistical media” isn’t a common term in the world of libraries and archives; a cursory search for it in the database LISTA returns zero results. Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media persuaded me within about three pages, however, that it should be.
College and Research Libraries
Assembly Codes presents a host of rich possibilities for interdisciplinary conversation around media, logistics, governance, and the afterlives of data and information that will support vibrant ongoing inquiry.
reviewer, E3W
In this exciting volume, leading and innovative scholars outline how logistics brings about new ways of seeing, imagining, and engaging the world as well as the ways in which logistics and media technologies underpin each other. Unparalleled in its conceptual richness and empirical diversity, Assembly Codes makes a major contribution to scholarly debates about logistics and will shape research to come.
author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade
Extending vital histories of transportation and communication, this book explores mediation’s long dance with logistics. Media are not static: they form via the coordinated movement of materials, the calculating logics of supply chains, and the dynamic activities of networks. Assembly Codes gathers top thinkers who unfurl new paths for understanding media and logistics and boldly confront issues of difference, geopolitics, and planetary resources in the process.
Distinguished Professor of Film & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara