Having been academically trained as a historian (PhD) and classicist (Latin Philology and Classical Archaeology) with an ongoing interest in cultural temporalities, Wolfgang Ernst grew into the emergent technology-oriented "German school" of media science. His academic focus has been on archival theory and museology, before attending to media materialities. Until his retirement in October 2024, Ernst held the Chair of Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. His current research covers "radical" media archaeology as method, epistemology of technológos, theory of storage, technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analytics ("sonicity") from a media-epistemological point of view.

Books in English (focus technical media): Digital Memory and the Archive (2013); Chronopoetics. The temporal being and operativity of technological media (2016); Sonic Time Machines. Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices and Implicit Sonicity in Terms of Media Knowledge, Amsterdam (2016); The Delayed Present. Media-induced interventions into contempor(e)alities, Berlin (Sternberg Press) 2017; Technológos in Being. Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine, New York et al. (Bloomsbury Academic) 2021.