Existential Media A Media Theory of the Limit Situation

Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always been existential. Yet, as they are deeply embedded in the life-world on both individual and global scales, they currently capitalize on human existence seemingly without limit, while being mythologized as boundless harbingers
of the future and as solutions to the predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. In this situation it is imperative to move beyond either the habitual or the sublime, to recognize that media are in fact of limits-situated both in the middle of our lives and at the limit they constitute the
building blocks and brinks of being.

In order to remedy the existential deficit in the field, Existential Media revisits existential philosophy through a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers' philosophy, and of his concept of the limit situation: those ultimate moments in life-of loss, crisis and guilt-which we are called upon to seize.
Introducing the field of existential media studies in conversation with disability studies, the new materialism and the environmental humanities, the book offers a media theory of the limit situation which brings limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when we interrogate media. It
argues that the present age of deep techno-cultural saturation, and of escalating calamitous and interrelated crises, is a digital limit situation, in which there are profound stakes which heighten existential uncertainty, vulnerability as well as potential fecundity. Placing the mourner-the
coexister-at the center of media studies, by entering into the slow fields of mourning, commemorating and speaking to the dead in the online environment, brings out that existential media ambivalently offer metric parameters, caring lifelines and transcendent experiences which ultimately display
post-interactive modes of being digital in slowness, silence and waiting. The book calls forth a different ethos which powerfully challenges ideals of limitlessness, quantification and speed, and seeks out alternate intellectual and ethical coordinates for reclaiming, imagining and anticipating a
responsible future with existential media.

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is principal investigator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of
existential media studies. She heads the project: "BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds" funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, in which her group studies the lived experiences of biometric AI, for example voice and face
recognition technologies. She is the editor of Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (2019).