This chapter deconstructs the history of erotic art from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Instead of holding as self-evident the meanings of “art” and “eroticism,” it traces a history of how and why some forms of representation have been deemed erotic and the ambiguities of “art” versus “pornography.” Four related phenomena are used as anchors to explore erotic art’s long history: script, sustained long-distance contact, print, and the use of lenses and photography. These relate in turn to three important dimensions of world history: networks, or physical and informational connections between different regions of the world; technologies, mainly the means for creating and circulating visual representations but also including the pivotal technology of contraceptives; and ideologies, or how sex, eroticism, and art are defined and regarded. Contemporary conceptions of erotic art are in many ways directly traceable to key paradigm shifts in sexuality that originated in cultural, intellectual, and material interactions since the early modern period (approximately the sixteenth century). Like human history generally, the history of erotic art has been riven by hierarchies – including gendered ones usually privileging the perspectives of men – exploitation, and violence. But artistic representations of sex have also challenged long-defended hegemonies.

The chapter focuses on two key aspects of Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. First, drawing on Kittler’s account of changing ‘discourse networks’, the cycle is seen (and heard) as a highly media-conscious total work of art that rises from noise into meaning and ultimately returns back to noise. Music and words are able to create and transmit messages by analysing their own technical properties. The second aspect is the modernisation of war. With the help of his Valkyrie daughters, Wagner’s Wotan turns into a modern warlord who no longer bullies unwilling conscripts or mercenaries but instead mobilises the affect of modern soldier-subjects  Wagner’s Siegfried, in turn, embodies military reforms that go by the name of mission tactics. He is the human equivalent of a fully autonomous drone: the new and independently operating soldier or partisan programmed from above to think on his own.

In order to outline W.G. Sebald’s perspective on media technology, it is instructive to consider the similarities between Sebald and Friedrich Kittler, who is generally considered the founding father of German Media Theory. Sebald’s use of the photocopier – in order to intentionally degrade the images used in his works – is reminiscent of Kittler’s interest in ‘noise’, i.e. disturbances that distort the information a medium is supposed to relay. Also, the portrayals of visual apparatuses in Sebald’s texts – as found in painting, photography, film, and video – often focus on these disturbances or ‘noise.’ The reader’s attention is thus directed away from the medial messages and onto the materialities involved in conveying them. Furthermore, Sebald’s descriptions of photography, film, and video repeatedly illustrate how medial noise intereferes with practices of memory. Against this background, media technologies in Sebald appear as a transitory and stubborn materiality which refuses to convey universal meaning.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.