Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter?Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a "herald and precursor" of the future, of our globally-reticulated digital present. Perhaps not since Kittler has there been a study - let alone an anthology - that re-assesses and re-evaluates Nietzsche's thought in light of the technically mediated and machinic conditions of the human in the age of digital networks.Drawing on the first four years of conference-proceedings from the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, Western University, Ontario), which culminated in the "New York NWW.IV" Cyber-Nietzsche: Tunnels, Tightropes, Net-&-Meshworks (held at the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design), The Digital Dionysus explores Nietzschean themes in light of the problems and questions of digitization, information and technical mediation, offering its readers the opportunity to consider Nietzsche's contemporary relevance in light of emerging theories in new media studies, political studies, critical aesthetics, the digital humanities and contemporary post-continental philosophy.Co-edited by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University, UWO) for the CTM Documents Initiative imprint (Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School), the volume features essays and works by leading and emerging philosophers, artists, [h]activists, and political media theorists, including Babette Babich, R. Scott Bakker, Shannon Bell, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jen Boyle, Sarah Choukah, Manabrata Guha, Horst Hutter, Arthur Kroker, Nicola Masciandaro, Dan Mellamphy, Joseph Nechvatal, Julian Reid, Gary Shapiro, Heike Schotten, Eugene Thacker and Dylan Wittkower.
About the Author: Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University) are inaugural and ongoing Fellows of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons: The New School for Design and founders of the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, UWO Canada). They have published - together and independently - in journals such as Deleuze Studies; Foucault Studies; Dalhousie French Studies; Design Ecologes; Ozone; Collapse; Symposium; Janus Head; and Modern Drama (among others), and in anthologies such as Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching for Individuals & Culture; Nietzsche as Political Philosopher; Nietzsche & Political Thought; Alchemical Traditions from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde; Leper Creativity; The Imaginary App; and Marshall McLuhan's & Vilém Flusser's Communication & Aesthetic Theories Revisited (amongst others). Nandita is the also the author of The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism (Palgrave, 2011) and Dan is also the author of Beckett Beckons: Abductive Approaches to the Post-human Present (in progress).