“Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. … This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. … The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media.”
— John Durham Peters, “Introduction” in Friedrick Kittler’s Optical Media