"With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be": An Interview with Zoe Beloff

As part of the What is Media Archaeology-book project, I also did an interview with Zoe Beloff. Her media archaeologically tuned excavations into imaginaries of past media are exemplary of the sort of audiovisual stuff that has constituted "media archaeological art".

In the interview, Beloff discusses her work and the various techniques that relate to a critique of progress and understanding new media through the pasts: " I felt we could learn from the incredibly imaginative outpouring of ideas, ranging from the philosophical to the crazy and poetic, that came hand in hand with these inventions. At the same time, I wanted to show that, in many ways, what was being hyped by corporations as the latest thing in the digital domain was no more than a reworking of 19th century technologies, like the panorama or the zoetrope. So I also think of it as very much a critique of progress in the way that Walter Benjamin discussed."

The interview has now been published in the Electronic Book Review.