New adventures in low fidelity: towards a media-epistemic pluralism

By staging an encounter between Friedrich Kittler's 'Gramophone, Film, Typewriter' and Ralph Ellison's autobiographical story 'Living with Music', this essay makes a case for a media-epistemic pluralism. It argues that a medium does not function autonomously, but always forms a complex constellation with other media. This constellation takes shapes with the intervention of the figure of the engineer, who functions as a negotiator between media. The engineer respects the specific, expressive modalities of a certain medium and at the same time avoids the pitfalls of medium essentialism and/or determinism. This essay proposes a new kind of agency, which emerges through these negotiations between the engineer and media.