Symbolic Access: On Walls, Bridges, and Roman Media Infrastructures

In order to think about the state of (theoretical) material(ism)s today, this talk enlists histories of two figural techniques: walling (from imperial and city walls to computational firewalls) and bridging (from military bridges and aqueducts to network bridging). Through a specific focus on the Roman genealogies of these technologies-as-techniques, Dhaliwal demonstrates a kind of continued media-infrastructural studies that provides an intellectual historical counter to the Greek origins of thought storyline best exemplified by the oft-repeated statement (originally via Alfred North Whitehead), “Philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle.” Dhaliwal seeks to understand the role played by infrastructural features as media through history, while remarking on the oft-overlooked centrality of Roman materialisms in transhistorical conceptualizations.

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is professor of Digital Humanities, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies in the department of Arts, Media, and Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he also directs the Digital Humanities Laboratory. He is the coauthor (with Théo Lepage-Richer and Lucy Suchman) of Neural Networks (2024), and his award-winning writing—situated between media theory, literary studies, computer science, political economy, critical design, and STS—can be found in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, Social Text, American Literature, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ACM FDG, ACM UIST, Design Issues, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among other scholarly and popular venues. His major book project, “Rendering: A Political Anatomy of Computation,” shows how our cultural narratives, politico-economic formulations, and epistemic beliefs become crystallized into computational hardware and software architectures.