MEDIUM-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

The media-archaeological view considers the question of how media temporality, and especially its proper temporal figure of time-critical and microtemporal processes, is experienced through the experiment. in contrast to empirical experience of the observation of primary nature, media-experimental settings perform "culturalized" experiences of a secondary nature-with measuring media the crucial observers. a media-experimental setting is an artificial configuration based on cultural knowledge-but it is still of a physical nature because there are electro- or even quantum-physical laws at work that are not solely dependent on the respective cultural discourse.1 Ernst here combines a view of medium as measuring instrument with what he calls a time-critical approach to media, meaning an approach that foregrounds not simply the composition of media operations from time, but the requirement that digital signal processing occur within strict time windows. at the same time, ernst engages media's specific vocation to mediate between the cultural and the physical, which is equally to say, between the macrorealm of experience and the microrealm of quantum processes.