Please find here short versions of my most important articles (questions, methods, findings).
Essay: Cultural History of Autonomous Driving
Understanding technological shifts. Analyzing historical transformations of technical objects
Commissioned by :
Key questions:
- How has the utopia of automated driving evolved? What social, cultural, and economic forces have shaped it?
- Do media portrayals and technological advancements progress in sync or independently?
- How does the promise of manual driving relate to automation, and what role do imagery and concepts play?
- Are there parallels between the automation of driving and other technological shifts?
Methods:
- Comparative analysis of representations through cultural science, art history, and sociology to trace the semiotic transformation of autonomous vehicles.
- Historical storytelling examining interwoven domains: aviation, radio, literature, cinema, transport planning, and mass motorization.
- Cross-media analysis of driverless cars in literature, imagery, advertisements, and film.
- Identifying cultural patterns and key images, tracking their evolution through textual and pictorial sources.
- Using art history and film analysis to decode key sequences in movies with the aim to reveal a cultural pattern or typology.
Findings:
- Autonomous driving oscillates between two archetypes: the weird and the wonderful.
- Technological innovations, literary fiction, and visual narratives influence each other but do not evolve simultaneously.
- The first self-driving car emerged in literary imagination.
- Automation has been historically tied to sociological trends like suburbanization and conservative ideals.
- The transition from concept to reality follows a visual trajectory: abstract to concrete, drawing to photograph, exterior to interior, collective to individual.
- Unlike other automated technologies, self-driving cars mark a cultural rupture, akin to reinventing the automobile itself.
105.000 accesses, 17 citations (January 2025)
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Article: Techno-imaginary of the Car Battery
Exploring the cultural significance of car batteries in the context of electromobility.
Commissioned by :
Key questions:
- How do batteries shape the meaning of the objects they power? Can studying car batteries reveal broader insights into rechargeable batteries as cultural artifacts?
- What hopes and fears are linked to batteries? Do they symbolize imagined futures?
- How do advertisements visualize the techno-imaginary of car batteries through analogies and allegories?
- Do batteries “animate” technology, blurring the line between culture and nature?
Methods:
- Analysis of car battery representations in visual culture using history of technology, art history, semiology, phenomenology, and cultural science.
- Examining a wide range of advertisements, identifying patterns, dominant narratives and groups.
- Selecting key ads with shared language or imagery and decoding their symbolic meaning through composition, color, and lighting analysis.
- Interpreting the common message to decode the cultural significance of batteries.
Findings:
- Advertisements both reflect and shape cultural perceptions of technology, revealing subconscious hopes and fears.
- Car batteries, like gasoline engines, contribute to the “animation” of automobiles.
- Batteries blur the boundary between technology and life, merging artificial and natural elements.
- In collective imagination, batteries are treated like living entities, symbolizing mobility, protection, and even immortality.
- As techno-imaginary objects, batteries give life to machines, extending their existence beyond physical decay.