Abstract
We live in an age where we are surrounded by ‘smart’ objects that monitor our movements, scan and recognise our fingerprints or our faces, talk to us, and predict our behaviour. Henning Schmingen's book Horn explores the ‘tactile agency of media technologies’ (p. 4) with the aim of sketching ‘a symmetrical theory of the tactile’ (p. 4). His interest lies in locating the sense of touch not only among humans but also among various media/technical objects. He calls his work ‘an experimental book’ of media theory. In his own words, the book ‘is concerned not with connections between human and machine but with the in-between itself, that is, with the faces, surfaces, and interfaces that separate body and technics to reestablish contact between them in a different way’ (p. vi). What he attempts to do is to align media theory with media art by focusing on the horn as both ‘a simple and a complex motif in media art’ (p. 7), and a natural material and an artificial object. The book is split into an Introduction, five substantial chapters and a Conclusion. The substantial chapters are structured as a fictitious exhibition, drawing upon a range of texts, photographs, paintings, sculptures, illustrations of horns, etc. The author refers to the chapters as chapter-rooms staging ‘an encounter between science, art, and technics’ (p. 10). The specific topics covered in each of the chapters are: the captured unicorn, impressions of modernity, rhinoceros cybernetics, a surface medium par excellence, and horn and time.