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This article analyses the encounter of Neo-Avant-garde artists with engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 9 Evenings. Theatre and Engineering (1966) in an Armory in New York. In the process of engineering, the traffic of signals was reinterpreted from information processing to electronic transmission. The 9 Evenings show exemplarily the importance of artists' work, being part of a new ubiquitous worldorder of networking understood as resonance and vibration, signal traffic, feedback and complexity in systems engineering. Hence, the use of media and their performativity should be part of the history of knowledge and of media theory.

Irritation of Life explores the political and emotive potential of contemporary auteur cinema. Viewing the work of celebrated directors Michael Haneke, David Lynch and Lars von Trier through the film-historical lenses of melodrama and the avantgarde, Loren and Metelmann illustrate how convention and deviance interact to establish an aesthetics of irritation. If one is willing to play the game of participatory viewership such an aesthetics initiates, one cannot but enter into a series of negotiations in which habitual viewing practices and epistemological assumptions about the visual are dislodged. With melodrama as what Linda Williams has termed a body genre, not only are novel forms of cognitive experience at stake in subversive melodrama's aesthetics of irritation, but also the invigoration of cinematic affect. Accordingly, the authors develop a strategy for interpreting filmic conventions and departure therefrom that integrates a phenomenological approach "through the senses" (Elsaesser/Hagener). Their densely illustrated readings of Haneke, Lynch and von Trier ultimately rehabilitate a question recurrent throughout the many discourses on melodrama and deviant aesthetics: what social impact might art forms like narrative film hope to achieve? This book suggests that subversive melodrama's political work is characterized by processes of empathetic unsettlement (LaCapra), encouraging new perceptual cartographies in and beyond the cinema, or novel ways of seeing being. Exploration into these uncharted territories constitutes not an Imitation but an Irritation of Life.