An object, material, or substance that transfers information, especially for the benefit of human individuals. In his annexation of the vast territory of Foucauldian discourse analysis, Friedrich Kittler famously asserted that “media determine our situation.” The very technologies, instruments, channels, and devices that allow for the recording and subsequent accession of information (and therefore culture) constitute a “technical a priori,” a media dispositif that simultaneously structures people and the messages they study or produce. This was a techno-deterministic echo of Nietzsche’s famous dictum: our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. With the proliferation of cognitive and mnemonic prosthetics in the early twenty-first century, the problem of defining the object of humanistic (or, for that matter, technical) inquiry has become increasingly indistinguishable from this medial question. The tools that allow for the mechanical processing of information—and that subsequently produce new transfers and socializations of knowledge (while transforming the human’s attention span)—are “medium” in that they produce the conditions for the synthesis of thought across fields, communities, and various kinds of “records.” As supplementary to information, extending and amputating human capacities, the medium is not a neutral entity. In seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century science, the singular “medium” referred to an intermediate agent or substance that allowed phenomena to appear (as in ether). The term acquired increasingly technical connotations across the long nineteenth century, leading to its application to specialized modes of communication (as in print). Divergent understandings of the term were in the second half of the twentieth century synthesized in the theorization of the plural “media,” a term that designates the multiple conditions of transmission that constitute the relationship between a material form and a sign system. This terminological pluralization serves not to flatten the differentiated aesthetics of particular media, but rather to highlight the multiplicity of registers—sometimes not aesthetic but, for instance, socio-political—that contribute to the production and reception of meaning systems. While historical understandings of technical media (photography, the novel, cinema, etc.) have become part of distinct disciplines (history of photography, literary studies, film studies), more recent theories of media emphasize the processual ontologies of communication structures, and in doing so create analyses that cut across the established disciplinary boundaries. This shift toward the analysis of operations has developed into new methodological and institutional configurations such as Kulturtechniken and comparative media, which seek to investigate practices of inscription across assorted fields, such as acoustic engineering, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and many others. The novelty of such formations notwithstanding, it should be noted that the study of technical media such as film has always provided sites for interdisciplinary inquiry and reflection. Colloquial uses of “medium” support this transdisciplinary understanding. The reconciliatory expression “happy medium” and the moderating “medium-rare” suggest on the one hand the defiance of an idealized state (as in a dogmatic purity, or the state of being fully cooked) and on the other mark a qualitative, and therefore interestingly imprecise, state of indeterminacy.