1. Abstract Machines

Interview with Gary Tomlinson

Abstract

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Du?sseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days.

About Gary Tomlinson:

Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Tomlinson has taught and written about the history of opera and early-modern musical thought and practice, but also on the philosophy of history and anthropological theory. In his current research, he combines humanistic theory with evolutionary science and archaeology to search for the role of culture in the evolution of man. Following A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (MIT Press, 2015), his new book Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago, 2018) deepens the theoretical framework on how culture has shaped biology.