Cartographies of Media Archaeology

Search For a Method-panel - TM12

2012-02-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

We had a great "media archaeology" panel at Transmediale 2012 -- organized by Timothy Druckrey, with Inke Arns, Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst and me. Really good interventions, and the discussions that ensued were helpful for people, I am sure, in carving out the different approaches. Much of the emphases went to a Zielinski vs. Ernst debate, that was probably for theatrical reasons a bit overemphasized -- but still, there are significant differences too: Ernst kept on emphasizing the importance of the mathematical and non-semantic mobilized also as media archaeological method (hence not just a theme for analysis), and Zielinski was keen to defend his poetics of difference, deep times, and so forth.

My talk "Exhumation as Artistic Methodology" can be found here.

Image from Transmediale Flickr. © Genz, Lindner / transmediale

Complicity with Anonymous Media

2012-01-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote a short post on Negarestani -- or perhaps more like riffing off Negarestani, to speculate about speculative media archaeology. It's on my other blog, and titled Complicity with Anonymous Media. (Yes, there is the obvious Negarestani reference, but also a nod towards Siegfried Giedion).

What is Media Archaeology-talk -- Cambridge

2011-12-19T16:07:00.001-08:00

A forthcoming talk at University of Cambridge on my new my forthcoming book - What is Media Archaeology?

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

2011-12-05T12:40:00.000-08:00

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.

First signs of...What is Media Archaeology

2011-11-20T14:50:00.001-08:00

Ta daa: a key reason why this blog was started -- as the working blog for my sabbatical year and it's main project, my new book on Media Archaeology -- has now become one step more concrete. You can find here, on Polity Press webpages, more information on What is Media Archaeology? It will be out around May 2012!

Sometimes Hayden White can help you

2011-10-28T08:34:00.001-07:00

Funnily enough, one can find keys to understanding for instance how Kittler uses literature and how Ernst thinks of the medium through this Hayden White quote:

“every discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter.” (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [London / Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 4.)

Media Philosophy Dossier - more notes on Cultural Techniques

2011-10-14T05:47:00.000-07:00

Heads up on what looks like a great little Dossier of German Media Philosophy – in the new issue of Radical Philosophy (169). Indeed, as Eric Alliez in his short (hence telegraphic?) afterwords points out, this is not philosophy of media, as we might tend to think, for instance in the English language academia. It is not so much of philosophy about the media, but how philosophy and media share a certain a priori.

I myself co-edited a collection of Continental Media Philosophy in Finnish in 2008, following this idea of (positive) separatism of a certain German agenda concerning philosophy in the age of media. And it’s not only the slightly worn idea that we need to rethink philosophy because we have the internet, but understanding how the a priori of humanities might actually be technical media. This is not a techno-determinist statement in the a-historical sense, but something that at least tries to account for the birth of modern humanities in the 19^th century at the same time technical media was giving us a new ontology (and hence epistemology) of the world.

What is disturbing about this special issue is the generic problem of German academia and often media theory: it’s lack of women. Whereas one could say that the dossier and the conference at Kingston University that preceded it just honestly replicates the situation, it merely replicates the bias. Lack of such people like Sybille Krämer, Marie-Louise Angerer or Eva Horn – or any younger scholars! – is unfortunate, and it seems that this blind spot was transported along with the conference, the translations to Radical Philosophy now.

This of course does not take strength away from some of the texts. Without offering a full-fledged review of the issue, I just want to point out the joy it brings me to read Bernhard Siegert. This time his short text “ The Map Is The Territory” is about something, well, not obvious to media studies: maps. But what the article turns out to be is both an investigation into the epistemological cultural practice, or technique, of map-making, the question of representation and explication what Cultural Techniques are for the German media theorists. As pointed out in a recent e-mail to me, Geoff Winthrop-Young (who is the true expert in these matters) too underlines how important of a concept it is, and represents something that the Anglo-American reception of “German media theory” has still not started to grasp. As such, for the English speaking audience, Siegert’s text is the best entry point to the concept that does not reduce itself to Marcel Mauss’ bodily techniques, nor even completely to Michel Foucault’s ideas of practices (where it however takes a lot of its inspiration).

As Siegert emphasizes, the concept is post-media but not as leaving media behind, but post as in “post-new-media” and wanting to take distance from Internet studies or mass media studies (not a surprise if you are a scholar in the Kittlerian vein). It seems like a mixed bag, the way he outlines it, inclusive of techniques of measurement and time, like calendars, to techniques of hallucination and trance. And yet, as a mixed bag, it resonates closely with what emerged since the 1980s as “German media studies” – often referred to as media archaeology too:

“The concept of cultural techniques thereby took up a feature that had been specific to German media theory since the 1980s. This specific feature set apart German media studies from Anglo-American media studies, as well as from French and German studies of communications let alone sociology, which, under the spell of enlightenment, in principle wanted to consider media only with respect to the public. German media analysis placed at the basis of changes in cultural and intellectual history inconspicuous techniques of knowledge like card indexes, media of pedagogy like the slate, discourse operators like quotation marks, uses of the phonograph in phonetics, or techniques of forming the individual like practices of teaching to read and write. Thus media, symbolic operators and practices were selected out, which are today systematically related to each other by the concept of cultural techniques.” (14)

I think that long quotation was worth it to illuminate the centrality of the concept, which has enjoyed a bit of visibility in the name of such institutions as the Berlin Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Techniques.

In another context, Siegert has called this media archaeological 1980s as a phase of gay science– of exploration and fresh ideas. Indeed, I have to agree on some of his critique that he points towards some of the dogmatic media and cultural studies that already from the beginning know the research results: The Marxists always find the commodity form, and Cultural studies always finds race, gender and class. Interestingly, whereas a lot of Cultural and Media Studies for instance in the Anglo-American world brought with it a suspicion of ontology as something that still smells like the old library books of metaphysics, and a focus on epistemology (preferably linguistically determined, representational, or at least empirical), the emphasis on knowledge and epistemology that one finds in cultural techniques is slightly different. Epistemology is indeed embedded in a range of practices from the body to science (obviously), but at the same time Siegert insists that part of the work of analysis of cultural techniques is to investigate how cultural practices are everywhere – to take his example, for instance no time outside techniques of time. And yet, Siegert does not turn his back on ontology. Let’s quote again: “ This does not imply, however, that writing the history of cultural techniques is meant to be an anti-ontological project. On the contrary, it implies more than it includes a historical ontology, which however does not base that which exists in ideas, adequate reason or an eidos, as was common in the tradition of metaphysics, but in media operations, which work as conditions of possibility for artefacts, knowledge, the production of political or aesthetic or religious actants.” (15) There is no mention of Ian Hacking in this context by Siegert, but for someone with a bit time on their hands, there are possibilities to track some connections to recent years of “new materialism” too.

When Siegert picks up on Gilbert Simondon, the critique of hylomorphism and embracing the idea of cultural techniques (and as I too have called media archaeology) as Deleuze-Guattarian nomadic science, we are on to the specific emphasis on materiality again. This however is not a materiality determined by a clean-cut causality chains from scientific-engineering solutions, but one that investigates them in a bundle with techniques of various ranges. Across a historical hylomorphic assumption of separation of content and form, things interfere across such regimes – like in maps, materiality infects the content. And as such, the interference offered by some such texts might be a really excellent distraction if you are bored reading the introductions to mass media or introductions to representations of media content, that still fills our media studies understanding.

Operative Media Archaeology - on Ernst

2011-09-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

Happy to announce that my article on the German - and Berlin - media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst is out. Ernst is one of the important German media theorists less well known in the English speaking world. Often he is seen as a "student of Kittler's", but this is not 100% accurate -- also for the reason that he never was a student of Kittler...

Another reason is that Kittler himself denounced his affiliation with Media Archaeology (despite so many attaching the term especially to his name, and of course, Bernhard Siegert talking of 1980s and 1990s German media theory as media archaeology as Nietzschean gay science.)

Anyhow, have a look at the article in the most recent Theory, Culture & Society - such a great journal, which constantly features especially Friedrich Kittler's work. Now a bit of Ernst too.

And next year, or so, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press a whole book of Wolfgang Ernst writings...

The gay science of Media Archaeology

2011-09-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

The influence of German media theory --or what could partly be called the "gay science" of 1980s media archaeology (these are Bernhard Siegert's words)-- to American discussions is of major interest to a wider range of theoretical debates. Digital Humanities is (=should be) one of these, in it's insistence to bridge art and science-knowledge. In this context, John Durham Peters' text "Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in America and Germany" is of great us. In short, it outlines through a comparative perspective and through two key figures (James Carey and Friedrich Kittler) some of the peculiarities of both traditions. What we get in Peters' text is an insightful mapping of some of the debates why things have picked up - and not. It chooses to try to synchronize some of the ideas that at times stand way apart, but in a historical fashion.

Indeed, what Peters is able to show is how the differences are not matters of merely translation and language - but the wider academic background from which ideas come from. Suffice to quote him in full:

"The standards in German media scholarship are so much higher - in terms of knowledge of languages, history of science and technology, philosophy, the arts, and literature - that I sometimes despair of German media theory ever fully crossing the Atlantic. Bernhard Siegert's splendid Passage des Digitalen, for instance, provides quotations in seven languages and features mathematical equations; American publishers I have tried to interest in its translation tend to quiver in fear. Doctoral students in the United States in media studies are generally expected to be publishing three or four years after the bachelor's degree, and many of them barely learn to read another language, let alone mathematics, history, philosophy, physics, literature, or programming. However iconoclastic Kittler may seem, he is a traditional Ordinarius in his deep and deeply footnoted command over a domain of learning."

And yet, the recent years of American media theory - platform studies, software studies, computer forensics - have been able to offer their own exciting further-development of some media materialist themes. Some of these have been insisting on a fuller understanding of the scientific basis through which humanities can really be become particular - not by distancing but engaging head on. The take on "revisiting humanities" that Peters maps as one of the useful legacies of German theory is something that Digital Humanities seems to want to do -- and with an emphasis on digital, computing tools, but the epistemological consequences and field is much deeper than tools. To follow Peters's reasoning, reading Kittler, we have a long tradition of science-arts collaboration, and quantification as part of what the humanities is about. Perhaps it was only because of the birth of social sciences and such, as part of biopolitical regimes of national modernity since the 19th century that gave such a bad name to quantification (and which scholars like Latour are trying to salvage with help from Gabriel Tarde). Indeed, a critique of "language/meaning/interpretation-only humanities" (such as Gadamer) has become a stock in trade part of material critique of some humanities (I myself have carried my own arguments into that debate of "against interpretation, against Gadamer", but in Finnish mostly).

Peters writes:
"The split of Geist and Natur, even when it produced some compelling accounts of the uniquely humane office of language, literature, and history by figures such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt, ultimately impoverishes self-knowledge among us humanoids. There is no human world without a medium: whether the body, the voice, the text, or the computer screen, there's always a medium with its carrying capacities and standards. Human life is mediated - by nature, medicine, texts, buildings, lenses, hearing aids, digital bits, not to mention drugs, food, climates, water supplies, microbes, and other people."

Despite the shortcomings of various theorists, for instance Kittler, of not addressing gender, being disinterested in political economy, and often being a bit too much at home in the conservative political camp, some of the inspiration of the approaches is still for me, exactly as Siegert flags it, "gay science": exciting, fresh, and different.

(note: Siegert talks of media archaeology as gay science in the 2007 translated, Winter 2008 issue of Grey Room. The article is called "Cacography or Communication?" and is translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young).

Pedagogics of Mathematics according to V. Bush

2011-08-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

Digital Humanities debates have been enthusiastically -- and for a good reason -- addressing the technologically enhanced research and education situations. Such debates have been asking the question 'what happens when we are able to rethink (I am tempted to say "deterritorialize") our institutional and personal habits when it comes down to processing knowledge'. As such, this is not very new. The long histories of optical technologies as part of the academic and teaching processes are known, and similarly we should look at more recent histories of computing in this light. Indeed, what is curiously often missing is an acknowledgement of cybernetics as a mode of thinking across the disciplinary boundaries. Naturally not without its problems whether pinpointed in terms of the ethics of research (the certain control-based mode of understanding knowledge/systems) or institutional affiliations (military ties for instance), cybernetics however was able to build such islands of crosstalk between disciplines that are now being hailed as new with computational methods in humanities. Other people are pretty much on the ball on this one when it comes down to elaborating the debates - see for instance Ian Bogost's recent writings - and I have been more interested in thinking what is left on the outskirts of the debates; for instance media theory, or more specifically media archaeological approaches.

Whether media archaeology is part of "Digital Humanities" is another question; but at least it can provide further insights into ways of thinking computationally. A good example is the work of Vannevar Bush - well known especially for his Memex-device which surely features in some Digital Humanities self-reflections - and his differential analyzer. Besides being a tool for solving, well, differential calculations obviously, it ties interestingly as part of histories of not only computation but also data visualisation. Bush was occupied with the "integraph" calculating instrument already in the 1920s, for integrating functions, where the method of drawing graphical curves was an essential part of the process (of course, dealing with analog computing). (See Mindell's Between Human and Machine, p.153-154).

Already Mindell flags the idea that we are dealing here, very concretely, with a graphical user interface, but also the wider interest Bush had in graphical notation. For Bush, such modes of calculation+graphics was a way to think in terms of diagrams, and learn mathematics through the mechanical aid. As such, for Bush it was part of a wider pedagogic way of thinking: mathematics could be taught in such machinic assemblages. Such realizations from the 1930s and 1940s serve as good reminders of the various early ideas in terms of methodologies for enhanced learning - and environments of technical learning. We need to keep both eyes open - one for the technical side, the other for the graphic/aesthetic side that often becomes more understandable through methodologies known from visual culture studies -- but also media archaeology.

In other ways too, Mindell's book mentioned above is a great source. It shows the work of pre-cybernetics as a significant platform for signal based technical media cultures. Furthermore, it is able to introduce many forgotten ideas and contexts. One such fascinating one that contributes to a further visual media+computation-link is Gordon Brown's 1938 dissertation on the "cinema integraph" that continued the work in combining graphical methods with mathematics of integration. Again, part of the histories of analog computing, but something that in a fascinating way highlights the reliance on other media materials of its time. In short, Brown's innovation (suggested by N. Wiener) was to continue the work in using photocells for tracking and analyzing curves necessary for the calculation - but enhancing this with the transparency of the film material so as to be able to increase the speed of the operation: "Norbert Wiener, who advised the Bush laboratory on calculating machines suggested a way to speed up calculation by lightening the load, literally, on the mechanisms. Plot images of functions on film, Wiener suggested, shine light through the film and electronically integrate the light passing through it with a photocell." (Mindell, 2002, 164). This idea that never picked up really was however a good example of the various intermedial relations in those earlier cultures of innovation -- already completely "multi-media".

Robida's imaginary futures

2011-08-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

In the midst of final edits and polishing the manuscript of What is Media Archaeology?, I am going sorting out the images for the book. One contender to feature in the chapter on Imaginary Media is Albert Robida - whose novels from the 19th century are such a storehouse for ironic "future predictions". Here are two examples from Le Le Vingtième Siècle (1882), imagining the future museum (Robin Boast will love this) as a consumer oriented media spectacle, and one showing Robida's central theme: airships and the infiltration of advertising media to every little corner possible...

Chemical Media Archaeology: Recrystallization

2011-08-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from the recent Recrystallization workshop by Jonathan Kemp, Martin Howse and Ryan Jordan that took place in Berlin July 18-20, 2011.

The workshop consisted of dismantling with various means computer hardware down to its material bits, including gold, so as to excavate some of the components of "digital life." This is less metaphoric than experimental approach to look at the continuum between the material and the political economic.

"recrystallization was convened around the premise that while life itself starts from aperiodic crystals that encode infinite futures within a small number of atoms, the digital crystallization of the flesh by capital limits these futures to the point of exhaustion."

In more detail, recrystallization (following from an earlier workshop by Kemp and Jordan in London) consisted of:

Three sets of concurrent, feedbacking play and activities across three days:

1] Attempting to recover minerals and metals (including copper, gold and silver) from abandoned computers through execution of various volatile and chemical processes

2] The re-crystallisation of these minerals in novel arrays using raw/renditioned mineral assemblies including piezoelectrics, positive feedback, colloidal dispersions

3] The re-purposing and embedding of components and structures within wider geological and geophysical systems

Microresearch lab's performances and projects touch a new side in media archaeology that opens up our constituent machines, with various means including the chemical, in order to excavate what kind of modulations of light and energy sustain our contemporary hallucinations.

Related was the recent live (on Berlin Reboot FM) "data carvery":

"Data carving treats the user’s hard drive (and memory chips) as a surface for constant excavation. Reverse engineering daily data sediments promotes new forms of digital archaeology, with hard disk trouvee as rich seams to be opened and mined for mineral and personal gems."

Digital archaeology is mobilized into new, artistic-experimental operations.

At times, media archaeology might come with a Health and Safety warning.

The image(s) by: Martin Howse and Kathrin Günter.

Kill the darling part 13: less imaginary

2011-08-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

Returning to killing text – this passage from my chapter on Imaginary Media!

It illustrates a point concerning imaginary media research not being only about objects and ideas imagined, but how practices of media consumption always draw from a variety of influences, including various discursive contexts. In short, this text paraphrases Erkki Huhtamo’s idea (from his chapter in the Book of Imaginary Media, 2006, edited by Eric Kluitenberg):

Imaginary media objects can be both devices but also practices of using media. Thus, for example “peeping” as a media practice (Huhtamo 2006) can be described in its various links between actual practices and devices, and the wider discursive contexts of desire, sexuality, and embodied activity.
For Huhtamo, peeping travels across such examples and from desktops of early religious worldviews, to later curiosity cabinet devices, it folds as part of 19th century visual culture of stereoscopes and other devices – and attaches to the topic of “armchair travelling” (2006: 111-113)[1] and later to 20th century avant-garde practices such as Oscar Fischinger’s use of Mutoscope and Marcel Duchamps employment of peeping in Hand-made Stereopticon Slide (Hand Stereoscopy, 1918-1919) and Rayon vert (1947). (137).
One of the characteristics of imaginary media as mobilized by Huhtamo’s (2006, cf. 2011) method of topos-analysis is that it is not placed solely on one already existing media apparatus, but is more like a link, a network between a variety of source materials, discourses of “real” and “fiction” and hence a travelling mode of practice/knowledge.

[1] For a literary example from the late 18th century, see Xavier Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre-novel (1794) – “A Journey Around my Room”.

For those of you interested in more imaginary media research (before my chapter comes out), check out Huhtamo’s and Kluitenberg’s chapters in Media Archaeology.

The Media of Analysis

2011-07-25T01:26:00.000-07:00

Lev Manovich taps into a wonderful, post-hermeneutic topic in his "cultural analytics" project and for instance in the short text "Against Search". His notes are perceptive, and the project as a way to think outside signification based interpretation is important.

Basically his argument stems from the observation that we in cultural and media studies and humanities more widely are confronted with a sea of possibilities - having "access to unprecedented amounts of media." It's a claim that relates to both the ways in which we produce media in unprecedented amounts - but more importantly, as an archival question, how we approach it. A wonderful point: we also access media mediatically:

"The popular media access technologies of the 19th and 20th century such as slide lanterns, film projectors, microfilm readers, Moviola and Steenbeck, record players, audio and video tape recorders, VCR, and DVD players were designed to access single media items at a time at a limited range of speeds."

And this relates to Manovich claim concerning theories and methods of interpretation:

"Together, these distribution and classification systems encouraged 20th century media researchers to decide before hand what media items to see, hear, or read."

Manovich continues to argue that even computer search does not take us away from this restricted mode of accessing and hence analyzing cultural data - referring to the "blank frame" of search. I won't continue on the point of "Against Search", but just point two questions/comments on the overall framing;

1) as also Robin Boast noted on Twitter, already 19th century cultural institutions were reacting to the flood of information, which was transforming the way we think about theory and data. We could continue about the obvious points concerning birth of new ways of thinking about data in sociological disciplines (and as Foucault analyzed, birth of biopolitics) in late 19th century - or the ingenious ways in which Gabriel Tarde was proposing his microsociological investigations as one solution in this context. But already the earlier changes in ways of interpretation and for instance producing commentaries as part of academic practice are reactions against the flood of data - new interfaces, new methods of reading and writing, interpreting - something that among others Friedrich Kittler has flagged.

2) Related to this point, the sheer existence of huge amounts of data does not have automatic requirements that we need to use quantitative methods. This fact that data exists and its connection to methods of analysing it need more careful framing - otherwise we risk the being too close to naive positivism or just producing more data for its own sake (as so often with data visualization). If we are faced with unprecedented amount of data I hope we can also be inventive, imaginative enough to come up with unprecedented methods, theories, ideas and transversal modes of producing knowledge. Perhaps such cultural analytics has the possibility of being thought in relation to the politics of knowledge, institutions, crossdisciplinary, transversal modes of knowledge production in the midst of the global crisis of public sectors.

Excavating the microchip

2011-07-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

I remember a meeting with a professor of Art History in Toronto in 2007 - part of a job interview related situation, I was challenged by him concerning media archaeology, claimed that it was "all metaphorical", this use of "archaeology" in that brand of research.

Indeed, this has perhaps plagued some of the media archaeological research that is more discursive in its nature. And yet, there are various contexts in which the term is used far from metaphorically. On the one hand, the variety of media archaeology often associated with Sophienstrasse 22 address in Berlin has insisted on the technological agency of objects/signals and materiality of the networks in which our methodologies of media research of the past have to function. On the other hand, now in other context "digital archaeologists" are taking up the challenge and focusing for instance on microchips as excavation sites for digging down, unpacking and taking apart. The link contains a fascinating take on 6502 microchip that stems from mid-1970s; it points towards the important realization that to understand the media archaeology of technical media, we need to focus on the components - such as chips - and not just the "end results", the media-objects that we usually recognize as media.

Crystallize

2011-07-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have been for a while big fan of the projects of Microresearch Lab and Martin Howse. I had yesterday the pleasure of interviewing him about his work and the forthcoming workshop Recrystallization. Martin's work is to me inspiring in its aesthetico-technical regime, but I have to say, I am often lost in terms of what on earth is going on. So was rewarding to be able to chat to Martin directly and get his elaboration on his artistic methods. The interview is forthcoming in the Creative Technologies Review.

For me, even if not explicitly and only media archaeology, these projects have again an edge that lends itself to media archaeological inquiry - concerning obsoleteness, the intertwining of the imaginary and the material, of "under-the-hood" methodologies, Pynchon, Ballard and more.

Decrystallization.

Recrystallization.

Workshops in collaboration between Ryan Jordan, Jonathan Kemp and Martin Howse.

In Kenya, media never dies

2011-07-09T03:10:00.000-07:00

This is true zombie media – undeads. Take that, planned obsolescence.

“…in Kenya, like everywhere else on the continent, mobile phones literally never die, because of the technical expertise of thousands of meticulous workers constantly dismantling phones, studying circuit by circuit, re-adapting spare parts, never giving up until they learn how to fix the handset or to unlock it. But this creativity goes further: modified phones with dual SIM cards, helping to cope with poor network coverage or high interconnection fees, solar or car battery-powered mobile chargers for area not yet covered by mains electricity – the list of opportunities sought after by jua cali entrepreneurs is endless, in a constant form of struggle for the appropriation of a technology designed elsewhere and originally with the devices' planned obsolescence in mind.”
(Ugo Vallauri, “Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dialectic of End-Of-Life” International Review of Information Ethics vol. 11 (10/2009, p.23)

Media - input/output

2011-07-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Communication museum, Berlin.

Energetics of Tesla

2011-06-30T03:06:00.000-07:00

After being recently occupied with waste and energy – not least to inspiration from reading lots of Sean Cubitt, and of course other great texts – these passages from a Nikola Tesla talk from 1893 seemed resonate really well with current discussions concerning post-CO2-economies. In short, we are now starting to understand that the 1990s started (marketing) hype about post-atom and hence post-co2 based mode of production is completely false, and the immateriality of digital technologies is embedded in a very energy-heavy infrastructure (see Cubitt, Hassan and Volkmer in Media, Culture & Society).

Tesla is talking in his great speech first of the primary significance of the eye for our being in the world, and then continuing how this is reliant on light – some beautiful passages concerning light’s importance there. For Tesla the eye and light make human beings the species they are – light is their specification. Yet he does this in a manner that is evolutionary, admitting that other species might have different organs for same purposes, but it is the eye that makes us man: the specific relation to the world it affords us. And indeed, this specificity of man is related to the world of physics through light, and its vibrant manner. “There is no death of matter, for throughout the infinite universe, all has to move, to vibrate, that is, to live.” (300)

He quickly however continues to talk about its material basis in waves, and hence connecting to other forms of wave-phenomena and “high frequency phenomena.” Here, he makes his move towards electricity, affiliating light with other vibrant forms of matter. What is curious is how he talks about energy economies indeed, and already then, starts talking about the post-CO2 worlds of electricity – and yet, in a manner that does not take us away from energy, but insists on alternative forms of energy production at the core of this new mediatic situation. Electricity is here the transporting force for such energy economies. And to emphasize, my interest is less in the accuracy/inaccuracy of his scientific reading, but in the vision that sees energy at the core of this coming cultural situation.

Therefore the phenomena of light and heat and others besides these, may be called electrical phenomena. Thus electrical science has become the mother science of all and its study has become all important. The day when we shall know exactly what "electricity" is, will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps, of man will depend upon that wonderful agent. For our existence and comfort we require heat, light and mechanical power. How do we now get all these? We get them from fuel, we get them by consuming material. What will man do when the forests disappear, when the coal fields are exhausted ? Only one thing, according to our present knowledge will remain; that is, to transmit power at great distances. Men will go to the waterfalls, to the tides, which are the stores of an infinitesimal part of Nature's immeasurable energy. There will they harness the energy and transmit the same to their settlements, to warm their homes by, to give them light, and to keep their obedient slaves, the machines, toiling. But how will they transmit this energy if not by electricity? Judge then, if the comfort, nay, the very existence, of man will not depend on electricity. I am aware that this view is not that of a practical engineer, but neither is it that of an illusionist, for it is certain, that power transmission, which at present is merely a stimulus to enterprise, will some day be a dire necessity. (Martin 1894: 301)

from:

Martin, Thomas Commorford (1894) The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (New York: The Electrical Engineer/D. van Nostrand Company).

Transmit, Process, Store: Launching Media Archaeology

2011-06-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

It is indeed out! Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and myself, published by University of California Press sums up years of work on this project and also sums up a range of approaches that we have grown accustomed to call "media archaeology": from various traditions such as new film history, media arts as well as digital culture research, it has emerged as one synthetic approach to think old media and new media intertwined. Hence, we are celebrating its launch in Berlin (and further events are planned, hopefully one in the UK too).

Welcome to our July 15 event at Institute of Media Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin - where we are both celebrating the launch of Media Archaeology and even more importantly, processing (excuse the pun) the closing of a certain era of German media theory. The by now legendary address of Sophienstrasse 22 is closing down and the institutes are moving premises. This is the address where Friedrich Kittler worked, and a whole generation of German media theorists can consider their alma mater...

TRANSMIT, PROCESS, STORE
Goodbye Sophienstrasse - Book presentation Media Archaeology

On the 15th of July 2011, the time of the Institute for Media Studies at Sophienstraße 22a is coming to an end and together with the other institutes, we will relocate to the Pergamon Palais on Kupfergraben, on the site of Hegel's house. This transmission marks an occasion to bring together teachers, researchers, students and friends of Sophienstraße to process and store the times and ideas which emerged in this spot, in order to duly celebrate our farewell. Furthermore, we will present the new volume Media Archaeology, edited by our current research fellow Jussi Parikka together with Erkki Huhtamo.

We cordially invite you to join us in talks, discussion and celebration on Friday, July 15th 2011, starting 4 p.m. Berlin's best book store Pro qm will be present with a book table.

Program:

Location: Medientheater (ground floor of Sophienstrasse 22a):

4 p.m.
Welcome: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, Paul Feigelfeld und Dr. Jussi Parikka
4.15 - 5.45
Contributions by: Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kittler, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, Prof. Dr. Claus Pias, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hagen

5.45
Book presentation "Media Archaeology" (University of California Press), edited by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo. Talks and discussion with Jussi Parikka, Paul Demarinis, Claus Pias and Wolfgang Ernst.

Followed by drinks and music, until security shuts us down.

Kill the darling part 12: off with yet another quote

2011-06-09T01:39:00.001-07:00

I am getting there, with the reduction of word count, but means that I need to shorten quotes. Hence, Sean Cubitt stays of course, but not the full quote from The Cinema Effect on the history of processes of perception:

There is a history of the processes of perception. The nineteenth century moved from the physics of light to the physiology of vision [Crary 1990]. The twentieth shifted from the physiological thesis of retinal retention to the cognitive thesis of the Phi effect, from the eye smoothing over the gaps to the brain interjecting the “missing” elements by intermittent images […] Looking back from the twenty-first century, film’s visual coherence depends on suturing light, eye, and brain, optics, physiology, and psyche—the ensemble of film theory calls the cinematic apparatus.” (Cubitt 2003: 66).

Kill the darling part 11: forget the non-conscious

2011-05-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

In Chapter 2, I try to make a path from new film history research into the multiple media histories of sensation in cinematic cultures. Moving onwards to affect and software culture, I try to expand this articulation and rethinking of the sensation as a Benjaminian, layered, historical mode of being. In that context, I was thinking of mobilizing some ideas from Katherine Hayles and Thrift, but now only in reduced form which means that I need to cut this nice quote, that to me is somehow crystallising great ideas concerning ubiquitous media cultures :

...
These kinds of challenges to cinema and human sensation-based media theories relate perhaps to what in part have been accelerated by software embedded media cultures, and what Katherine Hayles has (following Nigel Thrift’s lead) formulated as the technological non-conscious --- the fact that

"[h]uman cognition increasingly takes place within environments where human behaviour is entrained by intelligent machines through such everyday activities as cursor movement and scrolling, interacting with computerized voice trees, talking and text messaging on cell phones, and searching the Web to find whatever information is needed at the moment. As computation moves out of the desktop into the environment with embedded sensors, smart coatings on walls, fabrics, and appliances, and radio frequency ID (RFID) tags, the cognitive systems entraining human behaviour become even more pervasive, flexible and powerful in their effects on human conscious and non-conscious cognition." (Hayles 2008:27-28).
...

Kill the darling part 10: off with the quote!

2011-05-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

This one is a short one. Would have been nice to keep it in a longer form (now only a reduced reference) as it articulates well the lack of politics in a lot of media archaeology; or lets put it more diplomatically, the danger of veering towards enthusiasm for what Tim Druckrey aptly calls "oddball paleontologies". This quote is from Druckrey's Foreword to Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media.

"How a media archaeology can constitute itself against self-legitimation or self-reflexivity is crucial as if it is to circumvent the reinvention of unifying, progressive, or “anticipatory” history—even as it is challenged to constitute these very vague histories as an antidote to the gaping lapses in traditional historiography. Indeed it is this very problem that afflicts media archaeology. The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establishment of oddball paleontologies, of idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain lineages, the excavation of antique technologies or images, the account of erratic technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient to the building of a coherent discursive methodology.” (Druckrey 2006: ix).

Kill the darling part 9: dismember the augmented

2011-05-25T01:54:00.000-07:00

This bit will feature only in shortened form - a footnote on Engelbart, interface technologies and the changing insights into what the image is as an active surface (Licklider). This is from chapter IV where I discuss "material media theory" - mostly so-called German media theory (Kittler, Siegert, Pias, etc) and briefly connect it to debates surrounding new materialism.

Instead of just part of discourses of artificial intelligence, many of such were more accurately understood as Augmented Intelligence, as Douglas Engelbart underlined. The question hence was not posthumanism in the sense of replacement of Man from the picture altogether, but a new ecosystem of sorts where humans and machines were synchornized through various equipments and input/output-procedures. This is how Pias (2002: 92-98) sees this culture of interface development, where pedagogy of the non-human algorithmic world was to be fine-tuned as part of the possibilities and speeds of the human one. This involved a perspective on the hardware-software-and wetware (human) systems, even if the last term is of more recent origin. Engelbart’s team was interested in both gestural integration of computers and perception systems (new forms of computer displays) as well as cognitive handling and use of such systems, for example file systems. See Engelbart and English 1968. Also easily found on the web is the famous 1968 tele-presentation by Douglas Engelbart from the San Francisco Computer Conference, where he introduces key elements for future computing interaction, including the mouse and shared collaborative online work platforms. See for example http://www.dougengelbart.org. What is significant, and what is underlined by for example Licklider (1969) is that the fundamentals of computer graphics lie not only in their representation technical values such as colour, detail and such, but in how it is approachable now as an image – the potential for interaction. Licklider (1969: 619) writes: “In my assessment, however, communication is essentially a two-way process, and in my scale of values, interaction predominates over detail, gray scale, color, and even motion. In my judgment, the most important problem in computer graphics is that of establishing excellent interaction—excellent two-way man-computer communication—in a language that recognizes, not only points, lines, triangles, squares, circles, rings, plexes, and three-way associations, but also such ideas as force, flow, field, cause, effect, hierarchy, probability, transformation, and randomness.” The image is, by definition, a call for action and a relation to the perceiving, gesturing body. Any archaeology of contemporary understanding of augmented reality devices for example on smart phones should start with the considerations expressed already by these earlier researchers. Bardini (2000) offers a good elaboration of Engelbart’s work and the early development of a variety of sensory-motor interface systems for computer interaction beyond that of the hand: the knee, the back and the head were considered in various experiments (102, 112-114).

Kill the darling part 8: a mechanized slaughter of Giedion

2011-05-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

This is from the introduction - where I give a brief overview of the various themes (and thinkers) through which we could start media archaeology. Themes include "cinema", "modernity", "histories of the present" and "alternative histories", and thinkers include - well - several. One of the most important ones is of course Giedion (here briefly approached through a summary by Paul Demarinis):

Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948):

To illustrate the media archaeological relevance of Giedion’s seminal book, it is worthwhile to mention Paul DeMarinis’s 1990 performance Mechanization Takes Command. DeMarinis, himself at the forefront of media archaeological art, writes of the book in such ways that highlights its key role as a transdisciplinary take on history of modernity and technics that is at the same time much more than “just history” and hence summarizes so much of the book but also of the inspiration where media archaeology has been drawing from: “The title’s active present tense conveys the once-fresh immediacy of the bygone mechanical age that spanned the 19^th century, during which human invention overwhelmed and re-defined the human being. Contrasting the natural resources, availability of skilled labor, and historical proclivities of Europe and America, he examines, chapter by chapter, the effects of mechanization on the various realms of human endeavour. The lock and key, bread baking, slaughterhouses, furniture and the very notion of comfort, kitchen appliances, and bathing are among the subjects of Giedion’s scrutiny. Ever attentive to the impact of mechanization on the organic world, our lives and our bodies, Giedion’s critical perspective surpasses mere historical documentation, teleological theory, or scientistic adulation: he bares the roots of the many contradictions underlying our current global crises of life and humanity versus the corporate mechanism and the ruling taste. Mechanization Takes Command is a sourcebook of problems, solutions, and the solutions that became problems.” (Demarinis 2010: 211).

Kill the darling part 7: ghosts are dead

2011-05-23T01:42:00.000-07:00

In the chapter on Imaginary Media I touch on things haunted (inspired by Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media, among other theorists). And yet there are too many things already dead and occult in that chapter so getting rid of some passages like this reference to Baron von Schrenck-Notzing - a link between spiritualist medium techniques and media technologies:

An illustrative example is Baron von Schrenck-Notzing’s Materialisations-Phänomene (1914) which outlines through especially a case study with a medium Eva C key themes of the medium of the medium, in its direct relation to media technologies, such as photography, as well as indirect relations to cinema through phenomena such as somnambulism and psycho-physiological disorders analysed by Väliaho (2010) and Crary (2000). “Mediumship” becomes itself a practice of communication, and as such presented by Schrenck-Notzing as a speculative future practice closely related to science and apparatuses of recording and measurement: “So long as spiritism develops outside scientific laboratories, the traditional usages of the sittings must be put up with. It is only when science has seriously tackled the subject that one can attempt to reduce the phenomena to a system. Modern spiritism has the same relation to the future science of mediumistic processes as astrology had to astronomy, and alchemy to chemistry. We must, therefore, endeavour to get beyond the state of raw empiricism in which we stand at present, to increase the confidence of the mediums in science and its representatives, and use of physical instruments and apparatus. Better even than dynamometers, balances and metronomes, in Morselli’s opinion, is the photographic camera, since it gives positive proofs in the real sense of the word.” (Schrenck-Notzing 1923: 12). A media archaeological reworking of the Schrenck-Notzing case, and the medium in case, Eva C, see Zoe Beloff’s Installation The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C (2004).

Another fascinating character in that chapter is Baron Carl du Prel - a 19th century mysticist from Germany too whose ideas resonate with the emergence of the scientific world view, offering both a curious way to understand human evolution (in relation to posthuman theories too) and its mediatic contexts:

Carl Du Prel’s writings were part of his larger worldview that outlined a mystical overview of evolution that developed continuously new transcendental spheres of apperception. What is important to note is that he tried to tie the mysticist views together with sciences such as Darwin, as well as physiological research, even if denying that he was a materialist. Instead, Du Prel emphasized being interested in what seems to escape the scientific methods and modes of observation. One can see how the psychophysiological theories of his age, such as Helmholz’s, had influenced him in how he underlined that such “circuits of knowledge” were entirely tied to both “the number of its senses” as well as the “strength of the stimuli on which its senses react.” (Du Prel 1889: xxiv). He continued to argue that biological development and such phenomena as somnambulism are interlinked, and the latter also had to do with the “displacement of the threshold of sensibility”, and acted as a signal of what he called the “future biological form” (xxv). Hence, we can see such mysticists as part of the larger redefinition of nature and the invisible world that had suddenly scientific backing through Maxwell and other key scientists in relation to “media” phenomena. New media and technologies, echoing in advance what Benjamin wrote of the photographic and cinematic as the scientific-surgeonlike cutting to non-human perceptions and depths, are for du Prel (1889: 8) something we would now call posthuman: “as there are parts of nature which remain invisible to us, being out of relation to our sense of sight—for instance, the microscopic world—so are there parts of nature not existing for us, owing to entire absence of relation to our organism.”

Kill the darling part 6: bury the archaeology

2011-05-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

It's time to say goodbyes to "information archaeologies" - Timothy Lenoir's concept, or at least the longer version of the footnote. I love Lenoir's work, but there is no way to keep this in the long form so it is time to bury it. This was in the context of Chapter VI on the concepts of the archive and archival practices for understanding media culture.

In addition to arts contexts, the question of archiving and excavating digital material is one that is crucial for post World War II scientific cultures, and hence histories of science and technology. For such cultures of innovation, where for the first time scientific research was inherently articulated through computational media, the materials left for “future archaeologists” present practical problems. As flagged by Tim Lenoir, such “information archaeologies” point towards how a mapping of science is a mapping of the software and hardware platforms instrumental to the research. Of course, also the development of so many aesthetic innovation in terms of HCI and screen technologies rose from similar science-tech labs too. In Lenoir’s (2007: 365-366) words: “Historians will need to add new tools of information archaeology to their tool-kit in order to write the history of recent science and technology born digitally. Among the types of tools we need are, for instance, emulators of older systems, such as the IBM 360, and other machines, such as Burrough’s machines, Osborn’s, and others that do not have legacy systems maintained by large companies or successor firms. Even early-generation Silicon Graphics machines that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s are becoming scarce today. In order to research the programs that ranon these machines, we need to construct emulators that run on current generation machines. Beyond this we need to render the original programs in forms readable by current disk drives and other data-reading technologies. While genealogies of software and software languages are being constructed, more attention will have to be devoted to the history of software languages, and their implementations.”

Kill the darling part 5: the voice was dead anyway

2011-05-21T03:25:00.000-07:00

This is going to hurt. A small but still to me nice footnote about the intertwinings of the imaginaries of the dead (voice) as part of the phonographic culture and psychoanalytic readings of the haunted voice. Well, if it was dead anyway, better let it go.

A footnote from what will be chapter III on Imaginary Media:

Actually, it’s not the people that are alive, but the fragments made possible by technical media. Voice is in itself an interesting special case due to its historical relation to death and the uncanny through the technical recording of meticulous accuracy (“vocal vibrations of air waves” as the above-mentioned Scientific American story explains) that was much awed at in the early reports from 1870s onwards as well as in theoretical sense. Mladen Dolar’s (2006) work on the uncannyness of the voice is masterful in how it outlines how the voice always has a possessive, excessive and haunting quality that questions the solidity of body boundaries. The voice seems to have a relation to the body, but we do not own our voices. With speech synthesis technologies, voice becomes furthermore detached from the human organic bodies, inhabiting a further uncanny quality of the dislocated voice as addressed by the sound artist Paul DeMarinis (2010: 212): “The voice, once it is taken away from the body and reconstituted as a being without corporeal substance, without status or place, without viewpoint, without the fleshy vulnerability a bared throat offers, is re-incarnated as a new clarified being. Perhaps a voice of authority, or an oracle that can speak from beyond the grave. It gives us deliriously false confidence, this chest resonance without chest, these nasals without nose, plosives without lips or tongue, this singer of songs-without-throats.”

Kill the darling part 4, Dijkstra's last words

2011-05-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

One more - this time it's time to say goodbyes to a reference to Edsger Dijkstra's classic text mentioned in the context of Kittler's media theory. I am not sure if this passage would have worked anyway, but the idea was to elaborate Kittler's media ontology and some of its post-structuralist underpinnings with the help of programming languages. In addition to language speaking in us, it's technical media languages etc. that speak (in) us. I would still like to do something with his text, but perhaps in another context - and for those wanting to find out a bit more, check out Wendy Chun's new book on Programmed Visions where she tackles software histories, including structured programming.

In this classic of software history and structured programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra’s (1968: 147. Cf. Chun 2004) “Go To Statements” considered harmful he writes:

[…] although the programmer’s activity ends when he has constructed a correct program, the process taking place under control of his program is the true subject matter of his activity, for it is this process that has to accomplish the desired effect; it is this process that in its dynamic behavior has to satisfy the desired specifications. Yet, once the program has been made, the ‘making’ of the corresponding process is delegated to the machine.”

If read through the media theoretical lenses of Kittler and materialist media theory, such an idea is not only part of the emergence of structured programming in the 1960s, but a good crystallization of the bootstrapped autonomy of process of language – also software.

Kill the darling part 3: Tesla gets electrocuted

2011-05-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

And now it's turn for Tesla and Nollet. This was from a passage concerning the spectacle of electricity...:

Reading Nollet’s (1749) Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénomènes électriques gives an insight to the enthusiasm concerning the Leyden jar at that time, and Nollet’s continous experiments that had to do with the different material characteristics of bodies – organic and non-organic – to convey, to communicate with each other through the medium of electricity. Later, a similar enthusiasm surrounding Tesla’s performances in his laboratory at Colorado Springs were reported both in wider public as well as specialist publications. The Tesla Coil was a spectacular demonstration of the powers of electricity – and the new worlds of different materialism emerging with that worldview, not without implications to how we approach and think about media technology:

“As early as 1890 this savant had produced electrical disturbances in his laboratory at Colorado Springs equal to the lightning produced by Nature. Although a number of years have elapsed since these experiments were conducted, not a single scientist or engineer has been able to produce such awe-inspiring, electrical performance as did Dr. Tesla. It is true that he is far ahead of his time in many of his inventions, yet he has ably demonstrated that it is possible to imitate some of Nature’s secret forces, but he was performing certain experiments on the problem of radio transmission of electrical energy through space.”

(Samuel Cohen, “ “Lightning Made to Order”, The Electrical Experimenter, New York, November 1916, 474. Quoted from Tesla 1961: 93-94).

Kill the darling, part 2: Brewster gets the boot

2011-05-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

More garbage coming out from the Media Archaeology and Digital Culture: yet another footnote who hit the wrong note, had a date with the guillotine, and finished his days. This one on Brewster's kaleidoscope.

Sir David Brewster’s ideas concerning the ontological and practical implications of his device are intriguing and hint both towards a history of genetic algorithms and the birth of the creative industries. He outlines the kaleidoscope as an machine for infinity of forms, where to paraphrase Brewster (1858: 132) even one single line as the object of the device is able to vary into “an infinite number of figures from this single line.” Patterns emerging out from objects, lines, and mathematical simplicity reminds of the artificial life patterning that took hold of the aesthetics of the 1990s digital culture, but it also points towards how Brewster imagined this to revolutionalize design and the creative process. Indeed, in the midst of the industrial revolution in England, it was not only the manufacturing of “simple” objects such as pins that could be automated – but visual culture too: “When we consider, that in this busy island thousands of individuals are wholly occupied with the composition of symmetrical designs, and that there is scarcely any profession into which these designs do not enter as a necessary part, so as to employ a portion of the time of every artist, we shall not hesitate in admitting, that an instrument must have no small degree of utility which abridges the labour of so many individuals. If we reflect further on the nature of the designs which are thus composed, and on the methods which must be employed in their composition, the Kaleidoscope will assume the character of the highest class of machinery, which improves at the same time that it abridges the exertions of individuals. There are few machines, indeed, which rise higher above the operations of human skill. It will create, in a single hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year; and while it works with such unexampled rapidity, it works also with a corresponding beauty and precision.” (Ibid.: 136).

Kill the darling: burial for a footnote

2011-05-17T01:31:00.000-07:00

After realizing I am already now way over with my word count for Media Archaeology and Digital Culture I am starting a frantic "cut and kill"-operation. Kill the darling-phase. Of course, it hurts, as you think every word and footnote is important (just the vanity of an author). In order to fool myself, I am hence burying one of the footnotes here, and saying goodbye to it. It is from Chapter 2, where I talk about new film history, multimodality and affect, and the footnote referred to haptic interface design:

As an example, see Sutherland (1965) for early speculation of haptic and embodied display design in computer graphic environments, but also mentioning displays based on smell and taste. Of course, what has to be noted is that even the notion of “touch” is itself complex and does not automatically translate as haptic, but is divided into more than one system of sensation. To quote from a haptic interface design perspective: “As described by Klatzky and Lederman [Klatzky and Lederman 2003], touch is one of the main avenues of sensation, and it can be divided into cutaneous, kinesthetic, and haptic systems, based on the underlying neural inputs..The cutaneous system employs receptors embedded in the skin, while the kinesthetic system employs receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints. The haptic sensory system employs both cutaneous and kinesthetic receptors, but it differs in the sense that it is associated with an active procedure. Touch becomes active when the sensory inputs are combined with controlled body motion. For example, cutaneous touch becomes active when we explore a surface or grasp an object, while kinesthetic touch becomes active when we manipulate an object and touch other objects with it.” (Otaduy and Lin 2005: 1)

Vilém Flusser - post-historical and techno-images

2011-05-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

There won't be too much of Flusser in my new book. This is not a judgment against Flusser, just a question of me not having enough time to really dig deep enough into his work, and figuring out where exactly he would sit comfortably in relation to "media archaeology". He has his place, which is evidenced by his writings popping up in media archaeological teaching curricula, through his relation to some of the variantology and Zielinski-direction writings, by the intensive work by such scholars as Erick Felinto and others. And now, several translations of his work are out (see the Electronic Mediations-series) - so we can expect an intensive interest, perhaps.

And indeed, we can find great ideas in Flusser. His essay on the typewriter ("Why do typewriters go 'click'") is one of my favourites, and similarly in this text on "Text and Image" Flusser's thoughts amount to a medium-specific understanding why technical media demands a different attitude to that of a focus on narrative and story-telling. In short, Flusser is saying that it is almost an ethical demand that we do not see technical media such as TV as story-telling...

Hence, his way of pointing towards a post-historical attitude is curious in relation to media archaeology as a possibly post-historical, mediatic way of understanding for instance perception, consciousness and time.

"The new post-historical existential climate which characterises the technoimage culture articulates itself in many ways, for instance in structuralism, cybernetics, scenario-based politology, or trans-ideologisation. It may be concretely observed in the programs impressed into the memories of computers, intelligent tools, and miniprocessors. However, it is as yet very far from having become entirely conscious. We live, all of us, as yet on the magico-mythical and on the historical level. We decipher, all of us, TV programmes as if they were traditional images or as if they were linear texts telling some story. Which means that we find ourselves in the same situation that illiterate Israelites found themselves in faced by the Sinai stone tablets. Instead of deciphering these programmes critically, we adore them. It is difficult for us to live and think on the level on which techno-images are made. This is why they tend to programme us, just as texts programmed the masses during their illiterate situation. Unless we learn how to decipher techno-images, unless we may achieve what may be called "conscious techno-imagination" , we are bound to become dominated by the apparatus-operator complex. Which seems to function objectively, but which in reality manipulates us from the subjective, although inhuman, point of view of the apparatus." (Flusser, in Variantology 4. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World and Beyond, edited by Siegfried Zielinski and Echard Fürlus. Walther König, Köln 2010: 115).¨

You can find echoes of such a relation to media competency in Zielinski too (Deep Time of the Media, for instance the final chapter), and it's relation to understanding digital image cultures is intriguing. The links to media archaeology are multiple, and probably we will soon more good work that explicates these links in more detail.

A talk in Malmö on Media Archaeological art

2011-04-22T04:19:00.000-07:00

I am giving next week (28th of April, 2011) a talk in Malmö (at MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative , 15.15 pm) that draws on the chapter I am writing at the moment - on media archaeological art methods.

In the chapter I investigate media archaeological art from DeMarinis and Beloff on to more recent practitioners such as the Institute for Algorhythmics and for instance Rosa Menkmann's work. I try to offer both an overview of different ways of thinking media archaeology as an art method that ranges from thematically addressing media history in fresh ways that intertwine it with "new media" cultures to work with concrete archives, themes of obsolete media, rethinking and doing alternative media histories and concretely opening up technologies - a new twist to the idea of "descent" that we find in Foucault's genealogy.

Here is the short abstract for the talk:

Practicing Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation and Creation

This talk focuses on some ideas and examples from media archaeological art practice. By visiting projects by prominent artists from Zoe Beloff to Paul Demarinis, as well as some more recent names, it aims to elaborate some ideas of how such media archaeological art is able to address questions of the “material”, temporality and nature. As such, the projects are themselves excellent articulations of some of the challenges media archaeology faces in terms of developing itself as an innovative approach to digital culture – practically and theoretically.

Image credits: © Zoe Beloff, from her Charming Augustine 3D 16 mm film.

Hagen, Helmholtz, affect

2011-04-13T04:23:00.000-07:00

Wolfgang Hagen is not the best known of German media theorists outside of Germany - despite his long career, and such huge books as on the history of radio. Hagen's way of thinking through media epistemologies - and hence related to media archaeologies - is however important in the way it ties into that concept material and phantasmatic dimensions of epistemological objects (instead of the slightly always more vague "episteme" of Foucault).

With a keen interest in the 19th century, Hagen is able to tap into the formative technicality of media cultures - and hence the prehistory of the contemporary "software unconscious". As such, this quote by Hermann von Helmholtz, requoted from Hagen (and his translation) is a good example of the German focus on Helmholtz as important figure as for instance Freud in thinking about the medial unconscious of our culture - and aesthetics. A lot of this you recognize from emphases of Kittler ("psychophysics" as the way to understand the emergence of the So-Called-Man of media cultures), but here in the own words of Helmholtz:

"Aesthetics seeks the essence of the artistically beautiful in its unconscious rationality. I have... sought to reveal the hidden law that determines the mellifluousness of harmonic tonal connections. Actually, this is something that happens unconsciously as far as the overtones are concerned, which are indeed perceived by the nerves but do not usually come forth into the domain of conscious ideation; nevertheless, their pleasantness or unpleasantness is felt without the listener knowing where the grounds for such feelings lie." (Helmholtz,Über die physiologischen Ursachen der musikalischen Harmonie, lecture from 1857, published in Vorträge und Reden in 1896 90).

Hagen's article - from which this quote comes from - is in the book Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists.

What's more, this quote points to the early formulations and scientific basis that relates to economies and politics of affect - such a crucial part of societies of spectacle and post-Fordism.

Intensive Space: McLuhan

2011-04-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

What is better than Alice in Wonderland --- is Alice in a media archaeological context, as in this quote from Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is able to put into one paragraph the intertwinings of new worlds that the 19th century new media and science worlds introduced, and the literary hallucinations of Lewis Carroll...the new intensive, dynamic material-spatialities... (part of my interest to extend media archaeologically "new materialist" debates as part of the 19th century birth of modern media cultures):

“There is no longer any tendency to speak of electricity as ‘contained’ in anything. Painters have long known that objects are not contained in space, but that they generate their own spaces. It was the dawning awareness of this in the mathematical world a century ago that enabled Lewis Carroll , the Oxford mathematician, to contrive Alice in Wonderland, in which times and spaces are neither uniform nor continuous, as they had seemed to be since the arrival of Renaissance perspective.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, McGraw Hill book company, New York, 1964, p.348)

An interview with Aleks Kolkowski (and a bit of EVP)

2011-04-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

In the context of my earlier short fellowship with The Science Museum, I did an interview with Aleks Kolkowski, musician, composer and specialist in obsolete media technologies of recording. The interview is now published here. I invited Aleks to talk about his artistic methods and relation to media archaeology (a term that he does not use but I find relevant of his work). It's a good read for anyone interested in creative music technologies, physicality of recording in the digital age, and media archaeological art methods!

Related to this, read here for more on a recent project where Aleks was involved - the EVP phenomena examined through the Edison wax cylinder format! He is not the only media archaeologically tuned practitioner who is interested in EVP...check out here another as exciting project by Martin Howse (Micro Research Lab) who mobilizes EVP into a wider media archaeological, cartographical method for mapping signals...

Before TV, part II

2011-03-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

The analysis, transmission, storage and modulation of light forms a firm basis for much of modern technical media. Hence, light itself - and the lighting up of public space - is an essential part of our media archaeological excavations.

This example from the London Illustrated News, 9 December 1848, "The Electric Light". Demonstrating the spectacle of light and streets illuminated at the Trafalgar Square the paper describes:

“ The light produced was of a most powerful character, but is, in our opinion, still but a costly experimental toy, whose practicability forms a whole subject for conjecture.”

Later broadcasting picks up from such dress rehearsals - the ray of light eminating from a centralized position, with the large following gazing their eyes on that spectacular attraction - which is itself, primarily, a social relationship - as Debord much later writes of the spectacle.

Winky Dink avantgarde at the Game Museum, Berlin

2011-03-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

I visited the Computerspielmuseum in Berlin Friedrichshain on Sunday for the first time. On the Karl Marx allee, in the midst of the majestic 1950s houses, it was a nice way to spend over an hour. Besides the usual stuff of hardware and games (some of them you could play as well) of recent decades, a couple of media archaeologically interesting examples:

Winky Dink - a video of the mid 1950s kids' TV show, which included a special drawing screen that was attached on the television screen -- and the show's host was offering guidance on drawing on that, offering both an early interactive TV experience as well as a certain kind of tactility with the early medium (I am not sure but I think Huhtamo has somewhere referred to this tactility).
Another interesting example from their collections was the GDR educational computer, Piko Dat, from 1969. It was to teach the basics of programming (by creating circuits), and hence also programming games even - and can be seen emblematic of the wider role cybernetics was envisioned to play for the socialist reality.

The museum was aiming to be both entertaining as well as informative, even slightly self-reflective of the difficulties in preserving the cultural heritage of software based forms such as gaming - with even some sections dedicated to this question! In addition, some interesting corners concerning the global situation of game design, and some experimental projects made the museum a bit more interesting than "your usual" game museum, I would say.

The current (working) Table of Contents for the project

2011-03-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

I am now working in Berlin, at Humboldt University Medienwissenschaft, and funded by the Humboldt Foundation until July. The institute is one of the places where to really start media archaeological excavations and theory, thanks to Wolfgang Ernst's persistent work that extends outside books: the media archaeological archive, or "fundus", is such an example of operationalizing the media archaeological concept in terms of machines that work - not just dead media, but media undead, has Ernst characterized it, and me and Hertz branded as "zombie media" (which btw. has just been accepted to be published in Leonardo-journal in 2012 with the title "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method").

In the midst of writing, here a short summary of state of play of the book in terms of its projected table of contents:

Jussi Parikka
Media Archaeology and Digital Culture (contracted with Polity Press)

Table of contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Old and New in Parallel Lines

Chapter 2 From Visual to Affective, or, Reappropriating the Past
Chapter 3 Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects
Chapter 4 Media Theory and New Materialism
Chapter 5 Mapping Noise and Accidents: Media Studies goes Bad
Chapter 6 Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage
Chapter 7 Practicing Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation and Creation

Conclusions: Media Archaeology in the Digital

Before TV, part 1 - screens

2011-02-24T09:06:00.001-08:00

Before TV, other kinds of dead things to watch through the screen:

“…the floor of the room is mostly occupied with plate-glass cases of mummies, and various emblems of the painted pageantry to which mortals have fondly clung in all ages of the world. Here are coffins, sepulchral cones, and other ornaments, scaraboei, amulets, &c. Above the cases are bronzes; casts of sculptures from temples, models of obelisks, &c.”

"The British Museum" (the Egyptian Room), Illustrated London News, 13 Feb 1847

Media Archaeology is coming out

2011-02-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

This post is a heads up for something coming out soon:

Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications is a book edited by me and Erkki Huhtamo, and after a long wait, coming out from University of California Press. It should be out in April/May, and includes a range of approaches and theorists from established to emerging ones...something we hope gives a good idea of how to execute media archaeology - and ideas for further development! I am also proud of the range of exciting and flattering endorsements we have received from theorists and artists who I regard highly in this field (see below)!

Short intro
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka

Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary
2. Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study
Erkki Huhtamo

3. On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media
Eric Kluitenberg

4. On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine
Jeffrey Sconce

5. Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock
Thomas Elsaesser

Part II: (Inter)facing Media
6. The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern
Machiko Kusahara

7. The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch
Wanda Strauven

8. The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports
Claus Pias

9. The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Part III: Between Analogue and Digital
10. Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation
Paul DeMarinis

11. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media
Wolfgang Ernst

12. Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance
Jussi Parikka

13. Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium
Casey Alt

14. Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes
Noah Wardrip-Fruin

15. Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past
Vivian Sobchack

Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index

Reviews
“Huhtamo and Parikka, from the first and second generations of media archaeology, have brought together the best writings from almost all of the best authors in the field. Whether we speak of cultural materialism, media art history, new historicism or software studies, the essays compiled here provide not only an anthology of innovative historical case studies, but also a methodology for the future of media studies as material and historical analysis. Media Archaeology is destined to be a key handbook for a new generation of media scholars.”
—Sean Cubitt, author of The Cinema Effect

"Taken together, this excellent collection of essays by a wide range of scholars and practitioners demonstrates how the emerging field of media archaeology not only excavates the ways in which newer media work to remediate earlier forms and practices but also sketches out how older media help to premediate new ones."
—Richard Grusin, author of Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11

“In Media Archaeology, a constellation of interdisciplinary writers explore society’s relationship with the technological imaginary through history, with fascinating essays on influencing machines, Freud as media theorist, interactive games from the 19th century to the present day, just to name a few. As an artist, my is mind is set on fire by discussions of the marvelous inventions that never made it to the mainstream, such as optophonic poetry, Christopher Strachey’s 1952 ‘Love letter generator’ for the Manchester Mark II computer, and the ‘Baby talkie.’”
—Zoe Beloff, artist and editor of The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle

"A long-awaited synthesis addressing media archaeology in all of its epistemological complexity. With wide-ranging intellectual breath and creative insight, Huhtamo and Parikka bring together an eminent array of international scholars in film and media studies, literary criticism, and history of science in the spirit of making the discourse of the humanities legible to artist-intellectuals. This foundational volume enables a sophisticated understanding of reproducible audiovisual media culture as apparatus, historical form, and avant-garde space of play."
—Peter J. Bloom, author of French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism

"An essential read for everyone interested in the histories of media and art."
—Oliver Grau, author of MediaArtHistories

"Media archaeology is a wonderful new shadow field. If you are willing to step outside the glow of new media, this book's approaches can shift how you experience the objects and experiences that fill the new everyday of contemporary life. No one captures the beauty of studying new media in the shadow of older media implements and practices better than Erkki Huhtamo, the Finnish writer, curator, and scholar of media technology and design famous for his creative work as a preservationist and an interpreter of pre-cinematic technologies of visual display. He has teamed up here with Jussi Parikka, the Finnish scholar who has brought us an insect theory of media, to give us this long-awaited collection of essays in media archaeology. The surprise of the book is that the essays collectively bring forward a range of approaches to considering archaeological practice, giving us new ways to think about our embodied and subjective orientations to technologies and objects through the lens of the material remnants of practice, rather than offering a narrow definition of the field. The collection moves between computational machines and influencing machines, preservation and imagination, offering a range of ways to live the new everyday of media experience through the imaginary of archaeology."
—Lisa Cartwright, co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

“Where McLuhan’s Understanding Media ends, Media Archaeology actually begins. Refusing the often futile search for the eternal laws of media, Media Archaeology does something more difficult and rare. It literally brings the history of media alive by drawing into presence the enigmatic, heterogeneous, unruly past of the media—its artifacts, machines, imaginaries, tactics, and games. What results is a fabulous cabinet of (media) memories: the imaginary moving with kinetic frenzy, histories of what happens when media collide in the electronic space of the virtual, and stories about those strange interstitial spaces between analogue and digital.”
—Arthur Kroker, author of The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism

“Rupturing the continuities and established values of traditional media history, this exciting and thought-provoking collection makes a significant contribution to our understanding of media culture, and demonstrates that the presence of the past in present-day media is central to the recognition and re-cognition that media archaeology promotes.”
—John Fullerton, editor of Screen Culture: History and Textuality

“Here, at last, is a collection of essays that are a critical step to comprehending the history of our impulse to see ourselves in the machines we have made. This could be the beginning of 'Archaeology of Intention.'"
—Bernie Lubell, artist

“Huhtamo and Parikka’s expertly curated collection is a kaleidoscopic tour of media archaeology, giving us forceful evidence of that unruly domain’s vitality while preserving its wonderful unpredictability. With this essential volume, countless new paths have been opened up for media and cultural historians."
—Charles R. Acland, author of Screen Traffic

“This brilliant collection of essays provides much needed material and historical grounding for our understanding of new media. At the same time, it animates that ground by recognizing the integral roles that imagination, embodiment, and even productive disturbance play in media historiography. Yet these essays constitute more than a collection of historical case studies; together, they transform the book’s subject into its overall method. Media Archaeology performs media archaeology. Huhtamo and Parikka excavate the intellectual traditions and map the epistemological terrain of media archaeology itself, demonstrating that the field is ripe with possibilities not only for further historical examination, but also for imagining exciting new scholarly and creative futures.”
—Shannon Mattern, The New School

Recording of Media Archaeology and New Media Studies talk (Cambridge, UK)

2011-02-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

I gave a talk in Cambridge, at Anglia Ruskin University at our Faculty research seminar -- the title was "Media Archaeology and New Media Studies". It introduces and summarizes some recent discussions in media archaeology, giving an overview. Hence, it points towards how materiality, artistic practices, and a promixity to software studies, platform studies and such new media forensics as Kirschenbaum's are some interesting new directions in the field.

The talk was streamed and you can find the recording here.

Media Archaeology of Signals (Transmediale 2011)

2011-02-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

For me, last year it was Gebhard Sengmuller’s A Parallel Image, and this year Rosa Menkman’s The Collapse of PAL: the media archaeological highlight of Transmediale. Menkman’s performance dealt with obsolescence, death of media, and what is most interesting, media archaeology of signals and signal formats. Instead of the focus on devices, even if at times lost and outside mainstream, we are seeing new perspectives that take in their focus components, processes and such “minor elements” of media history.

The performance was a two-screen installation with Menkman using various audio and video sources and the signal twisted, modulated, bent. She combined the signal with a Cracklebox, a European telephone signal, Morse code and an old Casio keyboard among other things (info from the Transmediale 2011 programme book). The screens were filled with electronic signal landscapes, of waveforms and at times recognizable Gestalts. The angel from future, a Benjaminian figure of critique of progress, was the protagonist through whose mouth the Collapse of PAL painted a history of the PAL signal as loser to for example the DVB signal. The terms such as losers of history, history excavated in midst of rubbles, storm of progress which works to hide the multiplicity in history all point directly to Benjamin’s famous On the Concept of History text.

Despite the fact that I loved the performance, I also sensed the danger of nostalgia in this strong defensive reaction of history of losers – which was framed through an idea of progress as the force that blindly abandons all that it considers inefficient. A critique of rationalism and progress, the other aspects of the media archaeological gesture of the dialectics between losers and emerging media is not grounded enough. To what extent are we in danger of celebrating past media just for the sake of our emotional attachment to them as childhood memories and part of the collective media memories that are now in danger of being lost with new signal solutions and media environments? How to differentiate the media archaeological critique from nostalgia, and hence from a crucial part of the late capitalist consumer media sphere that Fredric Jameson pointed out as one crucial affective feature of contemporary culture?

(Photo by Jonathan Groeger/David Szauder) photos by Jonathan Gröger and David Szauder photos by Jonathan Gröger and David Szauder

Media Archaeology -event in NY

2011-01-31T09:19:00.000-08:00

Someone just emailed me with this information blurb about a conference taking place in New York, in March - a very interesting one indeed, that articulates itself in relation to media archaeology, as well as flags it still as an emerging approach -- especially in the US. And great to see Jonathan Crary as the opening speaker...

Media Histories. Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality,

Columbia University / Princeton University / Bauhaus University (IKKM Weimar) New York, 24.-26. März 2011

How can we write the history of media technologies and highlight their impact on aesthetics and knowledge without relapsing into deterministic or apocalyptic modes of thinking? And how can we write the histories of media without privileging cultural semantics over the technical materialities of media? What constitutes the materiality of a medium: its technological apparatus, the epistemic conditions of its gradual emergence and evolution, or its appropriation and use in various cultural practices? How do disciplinary epistemologies shape or impede our understanding of media? To what extent do media write and conceive of their own history and evolution?

In the last two decades the history and materiality of media have become central analytic issues within the humanities and social sciences. The inextricable link between the study of media and the means and methods of writing history calls for revising the conflicting priorities of various fields that range from the philosophy of history to the history of technology. This conference aims at examining and juxtaposing the competing paradigms that delineate the field of media history. The rise of media archaeology in Germany has spawned a distinctive tradition, whose influence is only beginning to be felt in North America. But in this tradition, the study of media histories was originally pursued not for its own sake but to reconceptualize the histories of literature, science, and aesthetics through an analysis of their dependence on media. In the same period in the U.S., early cinema emerged as a new paradigm in film studies; art historians began to conceptualize material transformations of sensory perception, and historians of science set out to highlight the material agency of technologies. Disciplines as diverse as architecture, anthropology and literary studies, have also begun to stretch our conceptions of the discursive and technical origins of media technologies.

The international symposium will bring together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and from these various disciplines to assess the differences and commonalities that constitute the historical study of media. Taking place from March 24 to March 26, 2011 on the campus of Columbia University, the conference is organized by the Columbia University Seminar on the Theory and History of Media (Stefan Andriopoulos, Brian Larkin), the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy Weimar (IKKM Weimar; Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert), the Program in Media and Modernity and the Aesthetics and Media Track of the German Department at Princeton University (Thomas Levin, Nikolaus Wegmann), and the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University (Reinhold Martin).

The conference will be opened with a keynote lecture by Jonathan Crary and feature an evening lecture by Joseph Vogl. Four panels will juxtapose and contrast different approaches to an overlapping set of materials and questions.

Face-book

2011-01-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

Don’t start mapping the archaeology of Facebook from history of social media, or stories about the history of the internet.

Start with the face. Start with the contorted expression, whether of terror or joy, or pure intoxication.

When beginning with the most banal bit of social media, do not ignore the 19th century use of photographic facial expressions for scientific purposes. Charles Darwin himself was interested in the evolutionary aspects of faces and expressions, and at the centre of much interest lies a curious book by the neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne: The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, or an Electro-physiological Analysis of the Expression of the Passions Applicable to the Practice of the Fine Arts (1862)

Face as the grounding of identity and how it is used as the iconic body part of a whole social media culture is taken to be something natural, something human, whereas already in the 19th century, it was deciphered as an index of more animal features. Duchenne worked at the Salpêtrière hospital which later became known for its hysteric (female) patients, and the variety of new media based experiments and empirical methods by Charcot.

Duchenne however already in the 1860s was using photography as a method to tap into the animal forces of the face. Photography offered him a way to capture the formal features of expressions with patients used as the models. Yet, two different time scales clashed. Photographic processes demanded a lot of time and holding the face still was difficult –Duchenne was using as his models mentally and physically ill patients. Instead of making photographic process quicker, he slowed down the body. By applying electrodes in right places of the face, the subject froze and kept the expression long enough – and becoming more than a fleeting expression, and an index for more scientific purposes (indeed, Darwin was using these photographs, and as source I have used here Phillip Prodger’s Darwin’s Camera, Oxford University Press, 2009, 81-83). Darwin himself used further engravings from the photographs, where the electrodes were removed – to look the poses slightly more…natural.

The archive and heritage institutions in the digital age - an interview with Dr Robin Boast

2011-01-26T02:40:00.000-08:00

As flagged earlier, I believe that one of the key issues that Media Archaeology can address is how we are rethinking and redoing the archive - and more generally cultural memory institutions - in the age of software. Wolfgang Ernst is one of the key media archaeology scholars offering ideas towards the concept of archive -- emphasizing how storage is conflating with search algorithms, and how we need to rethink archives as dynamic time-critical entities.

I also interviewed Dr Robin Boast from the Cambridge Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology on this topic and the interview can be heard as part of our Creative Technologies Review podcast, episode 11. Dr Boast is able to flag important and fresh ideas of how our cultural institutions of memory are taking into account the new networked environments - and where there is still much work to be done.

Archaeology of Programming: the Hollerith

2011-01-15T10:06:00.001-08:00

Archaeologies of programming -- a picture from the Science Museum (London) collections of the Hollerith machine punch card punching machine. Through this you were able to make the punch cards with the statistical information for the late 19th century statistical purposes of US census. To be honest, I think this is a slightly later punching machine than from the 1890 census, but still, principle is the same and illustrates the mechanical nature of coding information on the cards.

The Archive

2011-01-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

I am starting to write a new chapter for the book -- this time on the notion of the archive, while enjoying the short term fellowship with the Science Museum, London. Here follows a short summary of where I am starting -- and hopefully discuss in this chapter how the dynamics of time-criticality of software has to be taken into account when talking about memory and archive in contemporary culture (important references being the work of Chun and Ernst among others), the personalisation of software archives with social media platforms, and the ensuing implications in the context of cognitive capitalism (without going into as thorough discussion as Stiegler does in his writings), as well as such forms of medium specific techniques as in computer forensics, and their potential relation to media archaeology (hoping to discuss Matt Kirschenbaum's work a bit). Cognizant of the discussions stemming from Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever, and other writings of recent years addressing the archive as a concept for cultural theory, I however find a lack of such writings which are able to both be theoretically fresh and rigorous and pay enough attention to medium and tech-specificity.

The notion of the archive lies at the centre of media archaeology – the implicit starting point for so much of historical research that it itself as a place, and a media form has been neglected, become invisible. At least in media archaeological writings, the archive has not been much debated – although, now, more recently, Wolfgang Ernst has been flagging the need to rigorously rethink the concept and practices of the archive in the age of technical media, and media archaeologists such as Huhtamo have been demanding that scholars meticulously do their home work – but not at home; first hand view to sources, materials and collections is demanded by Huhtamo as a crucial guideline for his emphasis on media archaeology as a historically empirical enterprise.

The centrality of the archive for any cultural and media archaeology is not least due to Foucault’s expansion of the concept from the concrete physical places of storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and expression of cultures. More concretely, we can see how the archive has been a key node in relaying and storing data of modern culture, and hence acted as a key medium in itself – very much connected to the bureaucratic mode of control alongside registering and manipulating data e.g. in offices and through office technologies (typewriters, calculators, spreadsheets, and later databases, software based applications, etc.). However, with the emergence of such new social media “archives” as Youtube, Flickr, etc., the whole notion of the bureaucratic archive has changed (Gane & Beer 2008: 71-86). Modes of accessing and storing data have changed from centrally governed to distributed and software-based, and the whole culture of digitality has been referred to as one of databases, instead of narratives (Manovich). This chapter investigates such new notions of the archive as modes of inscription of information and culture, connected to the new modes of economy and capitalism that frame the relations to more personal and easily accessible databases. What are the implications for our notions of cultural heritage from such a shift in the practices and discourses of the archive, and how does media archaeology lend itself into discourses concerning the archival and museum in software cultures?

Look around the room and become a media archaeological circuit bender

2010-12-20T01:15:00.000-08:00

Editing, and especially cutting your text to fit the word count of a journal hurts. It is not easy which of your paragraphs, sentences, words you need to take out, as you are usually in an illusion that the text is such a tight, well-composed system already that any missing piece would make it crush. This is one of the illusions of writing, more generally.

Anyhow, in order to rescue one of my favourite quotes from the article, I shall post it here. This relates to expanding the media archaeological ideas into an art methodology, and especially a media archaeology of contemporary devices, not only past media. This idea takes it seriously and to the word that media archaeology can go *behind* the screen, not just dig out old ideas from the archive. Hence, it entails a rethinking of the archive -- in a Foucauldian manner, the media is the archive, when we understand how it is a condition for perception, sensation, memory, and time more generally.

Here, we twist and bend media archaeology with Bruno Latour's help.

Consider Latour's methodological exercise for ethnography of technological objects as an art methodology for media archaeology: "Look around the room [...] Consider how many black boxes there are in the room. Open the black boxes; examine the assemblies inside. Each of the parts inside the black box is itself a black box full of parts. If any part were to break, how many humans would immediately materialize around each. How far back in time, away in space, should we retrace our steps to follow all those silent entities that contribute peacefully to your reading this chapter at your desk? Return each of these entities to step 1; imagine the time when each was disinterested and going its own way, without being bent, enrolled, enlisted, mobilized, folded in any of the others' plots. From which forest should we take our wood. In which quarry should we let the stones quietly rest."

- Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. (Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999), 185.

An Archaeology of Media Archaeology - An Excerpt

2010-12-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

Happy to see that University of California Press have given a short teaser out of our forthcoming Media Archaeology volume -- part of the introduction "An Archaeology of Media Archaeology" written by Erkki Huhtamo and me.

The introduction offers an overview of how to approach media archaeology - without wanting to give definite answers. Instead, it offers both a mapping of the field as well as insights into how to think of media archaeology as a catalyzer for certain kinds of historically tuned analyses of media culture - old and new. The book is to be out in March-April 2011, and the project I am currently writing is a sort of a follow up.

On ruins - Benjamin

2010-11-28T02:38:00.000-08:00

If media archaeology is thought and analysis that emerges from the ruins - takes left-overs, waste, rubble and ruins of media cultures as its fuel then it is quite naturally Walter Benjamin who stands as one of its grounding figures. The work of Arcades-project is emblematic in this regard with its multilayered approach that methodologically picks up on the theme of the fragment when writing about the ruins (in which we live) of modernity, mass culture, emergence of media cultures, and capitalism.

The idea of "allegory" as a driving force of Benjamin's methodology is explained in his earlier work Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) in a passage on "ruins". In short, and literally in a condensed fashion Benjamin outlines how "allegories are in the sphere of thought what ruins are among things" (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1.1, p. 354). Whereas he goes to explicate this in the context of his study - the 18th century theatrical genre - for us this has media archaeological and ecological implications in how he ties together the ruins of material culture as part of the ecologies of thought, and in a way precedes some of the ways in which media archaeological research and cultural histories of material culture have tried to engage with these themes. We live among layered historical times - concretely - of which architectures are the most common example to an extent that has afforded even grounding ontological and metaphysical insights as with Heidegger, but we can extend that to architectures and ruins of media culture, which demonstrate what Braudel would have called the various durations of history. The long duration, the intermediary, and the time of the event intermingle and mix, and our seemingly contemporary is one of old, the past as well in a way that does not fit in with either linear nor cyclical notions of time. Same applies to thought which resides in ruins as well and where the idea of "archaeology" might be more apt than "history" as a notion to carve out the layered constellation in the cognitive and the affective take place. This is also why Freud himself was fond of archaeological metaphors, but also why Freud, in a way, and in his own way as a contemporary of Benjamin is another predecessor of media archaeology as Thomas Elsaesser shows (in his article forthcoming in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications). In this sense, the allegorical as understood by Benjamin is a parallel, partly competing, partly complementing concept to those master concepts proposed by Huhtamo (cyclical topoi) and Zielinski (variantology, the minor genealogies of media culture).

Thoughts, things, surroundings emerge from ruins, but so they return as ruins. Dead media is an index of ruins of media cultures, but also a reminder of the continuing environmental significance of discarded waste - haunting zombies.

Archaeologies of telegraphy - J.J.Fahie

2010-11-25T08:56:00.000-08:00

Not that we should be fetishistically interested in the questions of firsts - the first inventor of this and that - but still this is a source worthwhile mentioning. Thanks to Doug Kahn's tip, I discovered the writings of John Joseph Fahie and especially his magnificent early history of telegraphy - even the first volume which maps this history to the year 1837 is over 500 pages, and the other part, focusing on the wireless telegraphy, continues to year 1899 with over 300 pages. Moreover, interesting is the way Fahie frames his interest of knowledge as "archaeological" - an archaeology of electricity and electric communications, of tracking "foreshadows" and working with "submerged" materials (as he points out when talking about the submarine telegraph cable histories extending the metaphor).

To quote from the Preface of the first of the two books, A History of Electric Telegraphy, to the year 1833, from 1884:

"Soon after joining the telegraph service, in 1865, our archaeological bent took another turn, and we now began to collect books and scraps on electricity, magnetism, and their applications--particularly to telegraphy, and with the same industrious ardour as before." (viii)

So is J.J.Fahie the first media archaeologist? Perhaps indeed not a relevant question, but both the use of such metaphors in terms of the objects of knowledge (and the fact that he is interested in the history of technical communication) as well as the interest in "notes, scraps, &c" (ix) is of interest in this early work of excavation. The heterogeneous nature of the source materials is to be noted - the way he explicates it as well. Similarly as with the much more famous figure interested in digging through heterogeneous materials of modernity - its rubble and ruins - Walter Benjamin, Fahie is himself a product of that modernity where the "fragment" seems to be the constituting source for knowledge creation.

Zombie Media nominated for a theory award

2010-11-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

To mention the nomination on this blog as well...roll on media archaeology!: the with Garnet Hertz co-authored piece "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method" has been nominated for the Transmediale 2011 festival Vilem Flusser Theory Award!

The text is a theoretical excavation into thinking such art methods as circuit bending as media archaeological, and hence, expanding the notion of media archaeology from a textual method into something more strongly connected to the political economy of clipped shut information technology and material digital culture art practices: tinkering with technology that is not meant to be opened, changed, modified.

Hence we mobilize such key themes as "black boxes" which have of course been well thematized in Science and Technology Studies (STS), but now in a media archaeological and hacktivist setting. Hence, the name zombie media: not dead media, even if old, passed away even; we write in the conclusions: "media never dies. Media may disappear in a popular sense, but it never dies: it decays, rots, reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. It either stays as a residue in the soil and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated through artistic, tinkering methodologies."

Of course, media archaeological art has been done - and we are not the first one's to tap into this idea. We are hence following the footsteps of such great practitioners as Paul DeMarinis, Zoe Beloff, and a range of others who use media archaeological methods, ethos or the more general idea of remediation in their practices that put old media and new media into dialogue. What is however still missing is the theoretical discussion concerning the art methods in media archaeology, and our text is a contribution in that direction.

Here the info from the Transmediale 2011-website:

Vilém Flusser Theory Award
Congratulations to the following four nominees of Vilém Flusser Theory Award 2011!
The Vilém Flusser Theory Award (VFTA) promotes innovative media theory and practice-oriented research exploring current and pending positions in digital art, media culture and networked society. The call was open to publications, positions, and projects from a broad range of theoretical, artistic, critical or design-based research that seeks to establish and define new forms of exchange, vocabularies and cultural dialogue.

Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method
Garnet Hertz & Jussi Parikka

GATHERINGS 1: EVENT, AGENCY, AND PROGRAM
Jordan Crandall

_Social Tesseracting_: Parts 1 - 3
Mez Breeze

Digital Anthropophagy and the Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez

Media Archaeology - definition, take 2

2010-10-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

To continue to find alternative definitions for media archaeology, here is another one - a more straightforward than my previous one, the so-called beta 0.8 definition.

This next one, below, comes from Erkki Huhtamo, and is taken from the The Routledge Companion to Film History, edited by William Guynn (2010, page 203):

"The term 'media archaeology' has come to refer to a particular way of studying media as a historically attuned enterprise. Media archaeologists claim they are 'excavating' forgotten media-cultural phenomena that have been left outside the canonized narratives about media culture and history. Histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media have begun to appear, ones that do not point selectively and teleologically to the present cultural situation and currently dominant media as their 'perfection', as traditional histories (including cinema history) often do. They have challenged the 'rejection of history' by modern media culture and theory alike by pointing out hitherto unnoticed continuities and ruptures. As a consequence, the area considered relevant for media studies has begun to expand both temporally and spatially. The field of research has been extended back by centuries and is also expanding beyond Western media cultures. Some prominent scholars linked to media archaeological approaches (although all of them don't necessarily define themselves as media archaeologists) are Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, and Wolfgang Ernst."

What is Media Archaeology? - beta definition 0.8

2010-10-01T03:43:00.000-07:00

One of the hardest questions I have to continuously answer is “how do you then define media archaeology”, or even worse: “can you give a short definition of what is media archaeology”. When answering “no, I cannot” is not an option, I need to try to make the point of its multiple origins and conflicting definitions by a range of scholars from Huhtamo to Zielinski, Elsaesser to Ernst; but also, try to add my own definition, which proceeds by way of synthesis. Hence, what follows is an attempt to offer one definition, or at least a useful paragraph of how we can think of media archaeology. In other words, as a definition including points of how it has been understood, and how I rephrase its possibilities, here goes (beta version for testing purposes):

Media archaeology has succeeded in establishing itself as a heterogeneous set of theories and methods that investigate media history through its alternative roots, its forgotten paths, and neglected ideas and machines that still are useful when reflecting the supposed newness of digital culture. The definitions have ranged from emphasising the recurring nature of media cultural discourses (Huhtamo) to media archaeology as an-archaeology, or variantology (Zielinski) which in its excavation of the deep time layers of the way we sense and use our media always tries to find an alternative route to dismantle the fallacy of linear development.

Furthermore, I see media archaeology as a history-theory enterprise, in which temporal excavation of media functions as a theoretical force as well; a reading of old media and new media in parallel lines. Media archaeology is decisively non-linear, and rigorously theoretical in its media historical interest of knowledge. In a Benjaminian vein, it abandons historicism when by it is meant the idea that the past is given and out there waiting for us to find it; instead, it believes in the radical assembling of history, and histories in the plural, but so that it is not only a subset of cultural historical writing. Instead, media archaeology needs to insist both on the material nature of its enterprise – that media are always articulated in material, also in non-narrative frameworks whether technical media such as phonographs, or algorithmic such as databases and software networks – and that the work of assembling temporal mediations takes place in an increasingly varied and distributed network of institutions, practices and technological platforms. Indeed, what media archaeology investigates are also the practical rewirings of time, as is done in media artistic and creative practice work, through archives digital and spatial, as well as DIY and circuit bending which recycle, and remix obsolete technology as much as they investigate how technology is the framework for temporality for us.

Media archaeology takes place in artistic labs, laboratories where hardware and software are hacked and opened, but as much in conceptual labs for experimenting with concepts and ideas.

(Acknowledgements: my thinking in terms of media archaeology is at the moment very much influenced by both a range of established scholars from Huhtamo to Zielinski and Elsaesser, but also by writings and personal exchange with a range of "newer voices", including Garnet Hertz, Wolfgang Ernst, Wendy Chun and others. Hence, my definition is not exclusive in that sense, but part of a wider network and scholarly interest in rethinking some of the temporal basis of new media theory. And there is lot more to come and digest; Matt Kirschenbaum's work and its implications for media archaeology; how to incorporate software studies into the so far very screen-based media archaeological focus, etc.)

Image: Antennaes open to the other worlds.
From Andrew Jackson Davis' The Present Age and Inner Life, expanded edition 1869, p.89.

Imaginary media -- on chapter 2 of the book

2010-09-24T02:47:00.000-07:00

I am at the moment writing chapter 2 for the new Media Archaeology book (the first one, already finished, that we co-edited with Erkki Huhtamo and that features a range of excitign articles from such top writers as Thomas Elsaesser, Wendy Chun, Wolfgang Ernst, Machiko Kusahara, Claus Pias, Jeffrey Sconce, lots of others, and afterword from Vivian Sobchak is now promised to be out in Spring 2011 -- see the University of California Press page for the book.)

Chapter 2 focuses on "imaginary media research" and its idea can be summed up here as follows:

Imaginary media research (so well summed up by Eric Kluitenberg's edited book Book of Imaginary Media in 2006) has to a large extent focused on a) media imagined, non-existent, but worthy of exploration in terms of how it can reinvigorate current media cultural design and debates or b) the dreamworlds surrounding media and tech, the way they get invested with weird desires, social constructions, articulations with human worlds of politics and meanings (Zoe Beloff's media archaeological art being one of the best examples of such) but also, and this is the insight I aim to bring in: it is c) a shorthand for what could be addressed as the non-human side of technical media; the fact that technical media non-solid (or summons non-solid worlds), non-phenomenological (electromagnetic fields, high level mathematics, speeds beyond human comprehension, etc) and because of that ephemeral nature it is often described with language of the fabulous, spectacular. Hence, imaginary media is tightly interlinked with non-human technical media especially since early 19th-century, and this materialist notion of imaginary media also detaches from e.g. Zielinski's more poetic vision. It does not mean a valorization in one direction or the other, but points towards how imaginary media research can extend to new directions, to thinking "imaginary" as less Lacanian (providing dreamworlds of unified bodies, as in reference to Lacan's tripartite functioning of the psyche as Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic) but as an affordance for the new --- to think media anew, and in weird places, in weird bodies.

Was my Insect Media already a work of imaginary media in this sense?

Nam June Paik's television - back and forth

2010-09-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

Admired today Nam June Paik's funny Robot K456 at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, and took these two pictures of his early television work --- the one front, and the one more media archaeologically the back. Diagrammatics.

Sonic Archaeology in the Creative Technologies Review

2010-09-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

The most recent episode of our Creative Technologies Review podcast with Julio D'Escrivan features among other themes the sonic archaeology work by Shintaro Miyazaki and the Berlin placed project at the Institute for Algorhythmics - an artist collective interested in sound, technology and the electromagnetic sphere...

Listen to podcast here and read more on Sonic Archaeology.

Voice analysis and visualisation circa 1900

2010-09-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

At times haunted by a spirit of curiosity ("just because it is interesting"), media archaeological work has not always succeeded in justifying its relevance to wider questions concerning the "why" question of historical inquiry. Yet, I myself will post something...interesting -- just for the sake of curiosity.
Found today, "the tonograph", a small, mobile instrument for analysis and visualisation of sound. The horn-like instrument both produces the sound and also "paints" the voice on the membrane at the end of the horn, which then can be photographed. As is described in La Science curieuse et amusante (by Faideau, published in Paris, 1902 - also the source of the images, pp. 79 and 80), not only the voice but the inscription is beautiful... naturally, there was much analysis and graphical representation of such phenomena as sounds as well as movements during that time and much earlier, but still, an interesting mobile object that links to later avant-garde fascination with sounds that can be seen.

A crowd sourcing request

2010-09-06T01:15:00.000-07:00

The current book I am writing on media archaeology is supposed to fit into MA and PhD related course curricula -- hence I am juggling between trying to give a sense of key debates and directions as well as offering new insights to how media archaeology is developing -- and should develop. I am of course myself fixed to my own thoughts, which include that media archaeology should develop a stronger, more explicit notion of the archive and the change in regimes of memory (an area Wolfgang Ernst has been active in), take into account current emphasis on software cultures as well as distributed cognition and work one's way backwards from these "not-solely-optical" regimes, write a more materialist theoretical base for media archaeology --- and inspired by Garnet Hertz and our recent exchanges, articulate a solid practice-oriented base for media archaeological art methods.

Yet, in addition I would be keen to hear your opinions --- hence this crowd sourcing request:

- what do you think media archaeology has been missing, and what should be included when mapping future directions for media archaeology?
- what do you consider as key sources, books, resources for media archaeology?

Arkeoloji Seni Media

2010-08-31T05:30:00.000-07:00

Our interview with Garnet Hertz received the honour of being translated into Indonesian! Please find here - indeed in Indonesian and now entitled "Arkeoloji Seni Media" - our discussions concerning media archaeology and media art. A big thanks to the translator.

Radical Software periodical online archives

2010-08-18T05:57:00.000-07:00

Media archaeology is changing its face with the availability of online archives and collections. Today's find is the website for Radical Software-periodical from the early 1970s which touches on video art, activism and media ecology. Stemming from the Raindance corporation activities, it represents a cool example of early media art/activism debates in the New York region. It also includes ideas on different modalities of expression (how do you think in video) as well as immanence of activism with media -- all power is embedded in media systems and forms of expressions.

Front cover of
Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla television (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

Fellowship - and reading Foucault

2010-08-17T09:19:00.001-07:00

I am happy to announce that the Alexander von Humboldt-foundation has offered me a research fellowship for Spring 2011. This exciting piece of news ensures for me the possibility to concentrate on my Media Archaeology book contracted with Polity, and the fellowship complements the already awarded short-term fellowship with the London Science Museum.

In the midst of the news, I have been engaging - again - with Foucault's archaeology of knowledge - and the book of same name. Indeed, re-reading it has made me realize the extent to which projects such as mine that aim to write archaeologies of media archaeology are themselves establishing temporary unities on otherwise widely dispersed epistemological fields. In this paradoxical sense, this method of cultural archaeology of knowledge and power formations seems to work against its own premises --- and to show the discontinuities, dispersions, ruptures, and movements which form any illusion of unity for a body of work, statements, theories, practices. This way of applying Foucault to media archaeology as a discipline produces interesting realizations that have to be taken critically, and meticulously. It produces itself a way of redistributing the lineages and relations between precedents and antecedents, of influences and follow-ups form. The existence of various layers in which media archaeology forms (at least 1) as part of Benjamin, and wider early image and media theory e.g. in Germany of early 20th century, 2) as part of new historicism and cinema studies as well as media arts fields of 1980s and early 1990s, 3) the wider use of the term to refer to imaginary media research, variantology, and excavations of hidden and forgotten media since the 1990s, including media artistic work and 4) more recent developments in media theory that develop it as a methodology for excavation into contemporary media and aim to include new fields of analysis such as circuit bending and software cultures) a crucial challenge of how to write archaologies in the multiple but preserving consistency, and how to bring in a temporal dynamics to this enterprise.

This dynamics is actually part of Foucault's insistence of "discourse" already when he defines the term in The Archaeology of Knowledge:

"Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask one-self how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point of time; it is, from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of complicities of time." (Foucault 2002, p.131).

In a very good article on media archaeology and new film history, and in other contexts as well I believe, Thomas Elsaesser has demanded that we do not only focus on e.g. the definition of cinema -- but to its temporality; not only what is cinema, but when is cinema. This media archaeological question -- which is not only media archaeological in its theme and content but also in its method of temporal dynamics -- is very Foucauldian in the sense as it insists we need to investigate the distribution over time and in time of such constellations of epistemological (as well as perceptual, affective, cognitive) value. Indeed, applied to media archaeology it is a similar institutional question; not only what is media archaeology, but when is media archaeology. The notion of it as a traveling discipline (on the move, between disciplinary boundaries and institutions) points to its "when" as a formation of knowledge in productive crisis situations where we are rethinking knowledge-production, knowledge-institutions, the pervasiveness of "media" for perception, memory, cultural heritage and such -- and hence aim through media archaeology think not only media studies and academia, but archival and other institutions involved in new regimes of mediated memory. When is media archaeology then? Its in an age of redistributed responsibilities within academia, of new forms of knowledge production enhanced and rethought with the Internet, software cultures and open source, of reinvented collaborations across academia and other bodies, of technical media as the lingua franca for advanced communications, of knowledge and practices in which understanding media is often doing media -- which however is not dismissing the need to understand the complex genealogies in which contemporary media is formed.

Zombie Media - on Art Methods and Media Archaeology with Garnet Hertz

2010-07-08T00:25:00.000-07:00

We are working on a joint text with Dr Garnet Hertz, an artist and a writer, on media archaeology and its connection to DIY art methodologies. This text is to continue our recent discussion on media archaeology published in Ctheory, and continues to elaborate some of the new directions in which media archaeology is inspiring art and theory. Below the beginning of the text that is still work-in-progress, but informs both Garnet's own project on theory of DIY as well as my own media archaeology book.

Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method
I. OBSOLESCENCE RETURNS

A more frightening prospect than a past that never can be regained is a past that never goes away. We know this lesson from horror films with the undead, zombies, and other things supernatural that haunt us, but we recognize it from everyday life as well. We recognize it from the heaps of waste and refuse that pile up in our basements, outside urban centers, and in places which are characterized by obsolescence, discarded objects, and things we hope stay forgotten. Of course, this is not the case with the return of dangerous toxins and other residue from supposedly immaterial information technologies – hundreds of millions of electronic devices discarded annually, most of which are still working. Obsolescence returns. In the United States, about 400 million units of consumer electronics are discarded every year. Electronic waste, like obsolete cellular telephones, computers, monitors, and televisions, compose the fastest growing and most toxic portion of waste in American society. As a result of rapid technological change, low initial cost and planned obsolescence, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that two-thirds of all discarded consumer electronics still work – approximately 250 million functioning computers, televisions, VCRs and cell phones are discarded each year in the (United States.Environmental Protection Agency. Fact Sheet: Management of Electronic Waste in the United States, July 2008, EPA 530-F-08-014. )

The promised discursive disembodiment is embedded in a large pile of network wires, lines, routers, switches, and other very material things that as Jonathan Sterne acutely and bluntly states, "will be trashed". (Jonathan Sterne, "Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media." In: Residual Media, edited by Charles R. Acland. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 17.) Far from being accidental, discarding and obsolescence are in fact internal to contemporary media technologies. As Sterne argues, the logic of new media does not only mean the replacement of old media by new media, but that digital culture itself is itself loaded with the assumption and expectation of a short-term forthcoming obsolescence. There is always a better camera, laptop, mobile phone on the horizon: new media always becomes old. The lifecycle of a standardized consumer object is also its Heideggerian style deathcycle – a planned part of the cycle of media-cultural objects.

This text is an investigation into planned obsolescence, media culture and the various temporalities of media objects; we approach this under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend the media archaeological interest of knowledge into an art methodology. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of the repressed, the forgotten, the past, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking, and other exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology, as well as the environment. Media embodies memory, but not only human memory; memory of things, of objects, of chemicals, and circuits that are returned to nature, so to speak, after their cycle. But these can be resurrected. This embodiment of memory in things is what relates media archaeology to an ecosophic enterprise as well.

Figure remixed by Garnet Hertz:

Phases of media positioned in reference to political economy: New Media and Media Archaeology are overlaid on Gartner Group's Hype Cycle and Adoption Curve diagrams, graphic representations of the economic maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies.(For more information on Gartner Group's Hype Cycle theory, see Jackie Fenn & Mark Raskino, Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles, 2009. Gartner Group.) While the diagram itself is a reappropriated remix, the media archaeological phase as well is characterized by methodologies of remix and reuse, which play an ecosophical function as well.

Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation at BL

2010-07-04T03:12:00.000-07:00

I will be attending this seminar at British Library, and feeling excited about the stuff I am going to learn; I think its ideal in providing input to some of the cutting edge ways in which we are thinking the notion and practices of the archive in software and network cultures. Themes seem to flag the move from spatial and narrative based archives to investigations into the microtemporal processes in which cultural heritage is being circulated; indeed, we need to think why humanities and historical knowledge needs as much "magnetic flux transitions, hexadecimal code and file system analysis" as it used to do hermeneutics, interpretation etc. Naturally, any kind of opposition of regimes of knowledge production is a mere polemical gesture, but I think this resonates strongly with the Wolfgang Ernst-direction in media archaeology and understanding of the new cultures of memory in the age of high-tech. What's more, is how these new regimes of memory and preservation are articulated together with the notion of the personal -- another key trend in terms of understanding the more microscopic (technical but also sociological) patterns in which traces are left and collected, and gathered meaningful. The mobile, individualized subject that is however increasingly collectivised in terms of traces in clouds and other services is where this new idea of "personal" takes place. On political levels, the problem of the dividual (Deleuze) has tried to articulate this doubling, or multiplication of lives in digital cultures. In addition, what appeals to me are the possible articulations of media archaeology implicitly present in the below text referring to "microscopic" and "mesoscopic" scales of analysis (the latter could be seen closer to where even earlier media archaeological research has been "digging" in terms of interfaces, media environments, etc.).

Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation
Advances in the curatorship and scholarship of personal digital archives

A DIGITAL LIVES RESEARCH SEMINAR
from the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library
Date: 5 July 2010
Time: 10:00 to 17:

Introduction

Recently there have been significant and exciting advances made in the curation of personal digital archives. Seemingly distinct aspects of computing have come together to yield a vision of future curation and research in the archival context. The use of forensic technologies has arisen from a profound concern that future digital scholarship must be based on personal digital objects that have been properly authenticated and that future historical research should be able, at a minimum, to interpret available dates, times and origins appropriately. This is digital scholarship and science taken to the microscopic scale of magnetic flux transitions, hexadecimal code and file system analysis.

At the same time there has been a desire to capture the context of creativity and historical happening in the fullest way, and this is manifesting itself within the computer environment, at the mesoscopic scale, in the evocative viewing of the personal digital objects through the original graphical user interface, complete with desktop layout, folder directories, application toolbars, and network volumes, resources and venues, and in the selection of menu items with a mouse,
trackpad or touch screen - with this research experience being made possible through the use of emulators and virtual machines and bootable disk images. Beyond the original computer environment, there is the capture of the physical environment through immersive photography, 3D graphical imagery and audiovisual interviews in the presence of archival objects. This is digital scholarship at the macroscopic scale of the virtual experience of local landscapes
of home and study, of lab and studio.

Within the British Library, the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project has recently been reinvigorated by internal funding, and it will be introduced over the course of the seminar. Its aim is to provide for enhanced curation, for the integration of digital and analogue components of personal archives, and for streamlined workflows through authenticated capture, processing and access of personal digital objects via emulation as well as migration.

Invited Speakers

Erika Farr and Naomi Nelson of Emory University will report on the pioneering use of emulation for the digital archives of Salman Rushdie. In the words of their introduction to the emulated environment: “Rushdie’s exact directory structure is available to browse, and each file can be opened in the application in which it was created, such as MacWrite Pro or ClarisWorks”.

Christine A. Finn writer, broadcaster and researcher, and Research Associate of the University of Bradford, will provide an account of her original research with the vintage computer community and of the classic computers themselves as contemporary archaeological Artifacts, the title of the book that arose from her fieldwork in the Silicon Valley.

Vincent Joguin President and CEO of Joguin SAS will provide an overview of the EU-funded project Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) including an introduction to the Olonys universal virtual machine (which he codesigned for longterm portability) and the Disk2FDI software for floppy disk imaging.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland will discuss digital materiality from the perspective of the humanities researcher, arising in part from his exploration of computer media forensics and restorative activities in capturing digital creativity, and following on from his ground-breaking book Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Michael G. Olson of Stanford University Libraries will report on his establishment of a Digital Forensics Lab for digital archives (the first of its kind in the USA) and the context of his work with personal archives including that of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Jussi Parikka of Anglia Ruskin University who conducted his doctoral thesis on a media archaeology of computer worms and viruses at the University of Turku will discuss some of his more recent research as well as a multidisciplinary initiative, the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE), of which he is Director.

Daniela Petrelli of the University of Sheffield will reflect on the findings of the EU Marie Curie project Memoir: Remembering Things Past, an examination of personal digital objects as the source of memories, most especially autobiographical. The design and impact of digital devices that are integrated in everyday life and enable ready recollection and reflection will be contemplated.

Gabriela Redwine of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas will introduce aspects of the Mellon-funded project that is producing a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, of which she is a coauthor along with Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and principal author Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland. She will briefly consider some of the ethical issues that arise in the use of forensic technologies.

Seth Shaw of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University will discuss recent collecting efforts including the ‘papers’ of ePoet Stephanie Strickland, and with a brief note on work with the emails of the economics Nobel laureate Leonid Hurwicz.

Matt Shreeve of Curtis+Cartwright Consulting will introduce the JISC project that is directed at Clarifying the Purpose and Benefits of Preserving Software, in association with the newly founded Software Sustainability Institute.

Jeff Ubois who is exploring new approaches to personal archiving for Fujitsu Labs of America will summarise the Personal Archiving 2010 conference which he organised in San Francisco and will discuss future possibilities.

Kieron Wilkinson and István Fábián of the Software Preservation Society will give a talk and a very exciting pre-release demo of the ready-built KryoFlux equipment that provides for extremely low level and accurate capture and analysis of floppy disks.

Simon Wilson, a digital archivist at Hull History Centre will provide an overview of the international project Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS) involving collaboration between University of Virginia, Hull University, Stanford University and Yale University.

Members of the British Library Helen Broderick of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will describe aspects of cataloguing and making available digital personal archives by means of the
British Library’s newly instituted eMSS Server, and the enhancement of the archive through immersive photography of the creative environment: examples will stem from the archives of Ronald Harwood, Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter.

Jude England Head of Social Sciences will chair the final session.

Kristian Jensen Head of Arts and Humanities and SRO of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will provide a brief welcome and introduction.

Jeremy Leighton John of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will highlight some of the findings of the Digital Lives Research Project (funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) including the use of forensic techniques in the archival and historical context. In particular, the concept of Virtual Archival Computing, the use of virtual machines, VM snapshots and the booting of disk images within a forensic framework and over a network will be elaborated. There will be examples from the archives of evolutionary biologists William D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith.

Demos, Overviews and Topics

Beyond the presentations themselves there will be demos of the forensic capture of digital media involving write-blockers and forensic equipment; and the KryoFlux technology.

An outline of the recent developments of the EU-funded Planets project (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services, led by the British Library) will be provided, specifically highlighting its contributions to emulation including a remote emulation service over the network, GRATE. Attendees will learn about or be able to discuss the following topics:

• Virtual archival computing and the use of bootable forensic disk images and virtual machines as a means of providing repeatable and authenticated access to original computer environments.
• Personal digital archives as a source of original software for longterm preservation and as a motivating factor in this endeavour
• Low level capturing of magnetic flux transitions on floppy disks as well as higher level bitstream capture that is accurate and measurable
• The anthropology and archaeology of the vintage computer community
• Digital materiality? What is it and why does it matter?
• Universal virtual machines and open source emulators that are compliant with digital preservation requirements
• Why use forensic technologies in the context of digital archives?
• What is enhanced curation?
• Highlights of the Digital Lives Research Project
• The eMSS Server at the British Library
• Issues of licensing and software inheritance and reuse
• Next steps: networked integration

Sublimated Attractions

2010-06-14T05:26:00.001-07:00

A new article co-written by myself and professor Jaakko Suominen has just been published in Media History-journal. It touches on media archaeological themes, and focuses on the historical context where the emergence and introduction of computing in Finland in the 1950s was framed as a multisensory event. The article is based on primary research by Professor Suominen.

A short summary of the text:

Sublimated Attractions
The Introduction of Early Computers in Finland in the Late 1950s as a Mediated Experience
Suominen, Jaakko and Parikka, Jussi
Media History, vol. 16, Issue 3, August 2010, pp. 319-340.

The article focuses on the emergence of Finnish computer culture in the late 1950s. The introduction of computers is studied by using a wide range of source material of popular media, such as commercial and company promotion films, newspapers, popular magazine articles, cartoons and comic strips. The paper argues that the introduction of the new computing technology was deeply experienced with the help of popular media, where the technological capabilities of computers as thinking and sensing 'all-purpose machines' were translated into several media-specific audio-visual forms. Computers were represented as sensing and sensible technology, a rubric that was remediated by the help of old media. In this process, the spectacularization of computers worked not only as an innocent fabulation of the computers to convince the 'general public' but to create a certain social arrangement particular to this spectacle. The idea that the end-user is cut off from the actual processes of the computer, as suggested by such media historians as Friedrich Kittler, was evident already in the earlier construction of computing culture in the mainframe era.

Keywords: history of computing; popular media; modernity; cultural appropriation of technology; introduction of technology; Finland

Residual cultural forms - Raymond Williams

2010-06-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

I have never been a huge Raymond Williams fan -- or more accurately, never just found a good niche for his work in my writings which does not mean that I am in any way hostile to him -- but I have a need to write this down, a quote from Williams' "Base and Superstructure", which has media archaeological connotations. Here quoted from a chapter in the book Residual Media (edited by Charles R. Ackland, University of Minnesota Press, 2007):

"residual cultural forms as 'experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture because they are the residue of a 'previous social formation'." (p. 134, JoAnne Stober's text on Vaudeville)

This resonates with strongly with the what I guess is usually the media archaeological core idea of the repressed in media culture. Think of for example Lev Manovich writing of digital cinema summoning the repressed of the cinematic culture (returning to such forms which seem to have disappeared, or never made it mainstream) or then the more generic idea of mapping lost paths, and minor ideas. I don't think this idea is developed enough despite its centrality for media archaeology but its worth stating out clearly.

AHRC referee reports for my Media Archaeology Fellowship application

2010-06-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

I received three referee reports for my AHRC application for an Early Career Fellowship to finish the media archaeology project. It was a good read -- all of the three reports; not to claim, that all of them were in complete agreement with my application, but in the sense that the reports were helpful in pointing out issues that need to be addressed. They were to my liking quite positive, which reassured me of the need for this project and as part of AHRC policy, I was able to write a short, 3 page response to the reports.

In short, I tried to outline in a bit more detail what the concrete research side of the project is in addition to developing theoretical insights into media archaeology. I underlined the work that would take place in some archives and collections -- including the wonderful "media archaeology collection" at the basement of Media Studies in Berlin as well as my visit to Science Museum as a short-term fellow in early 2011. In addition, the points about "creative practice" approaches to media archaeology merited a bit more words, where I tried to point towards the need to interview some practitioners in the field in order to tap into some of the methodological premises of "media archaeology as an art method." (On this note, as a fotenote: this cannot be missed, Discipline & The Moving Image-event/screening, presented by Zoe Beloff).

In addition to some queries concerning management of the project, I got a chance to briefly point towards the knowledge exchange possibilities as well as some conceptual themes. All in all, I felt pretty excited about the project -- thanks to the feedback, and the response I composed where I had to articulate some of the queries in a brief form. Oh and I did have a chance to flag this blog as one tool for project management, and distribution of interim ideas, results, offshoots, etc. as well!

Now I just have to wait for the results...fingers crossed.

Spam archaeologies - the Penny Post

2010-05-18T03:16:00.001-07:00

If you thought spam is merely a function of digitally automated mass mailing, then consider this. In terms of expanding the logic of spam from the technical to the earlier 19th century standardisation through stamps and postage, and perhaps a more protocological understanding of how circulation of such processes as "post" (digital or human-hand held) functions, the introduction of the penny postage in England seemed to flag similar issues as spam in networks nowadays. A quote from the postal reformed Rowland Hill's diary from January 10 in 1840 gives an indication of what happened when the postage was standardized and cheapened:

"January 10th.--Penny Postage extended to the whole kingdom this day! ...I have abstained from going to the Post Office to-night lest I should embarrass their proceedings. I hear of large numbers of circulars being sent, and the Globe of to-night says the Post Office has been quite besieged by people preparing their letters. I guess that the number despatched to-night will not be less than 100,000, or more than three times what it was this day twelwe-months. If less I shall be disappointed." (quoted in Siegert, Relays, p.100)

In addition, what Siegert's book on "literature as an epoch of the postal system" inspires is a further systematic take on networks and procedures of mail that is of methodological advantage -- whether for archaeologies of overburdened postal networks, or for other network histories. If with Siegert as with Kittler we realized the very historical and hence contingent nature of such processes as "interpretation" in the hermeneutic, human-oriented sense, we are simultaneously in a position to realize the non-interpretational functions of current digital oriented processes of relay, reception, and sending.

Consider Siegert:

"What this [adopting a Shannon perspective to communication systems] means is that signals transmitted by the communications system at a given time tn are not viewed as the function of a data source or receiver--not, let's say, as the expressions or intentions of people looking for the understanding of other people--but instead as a function of factors in the system of communication itself." (p. 99).

Indeed, beyond semantic meaning and the need to decipher with tools of hermeneutic literature analysis, spam does not necessarily mean much even if it has a logic of very meticulous nature. Spam does an awful lot of thing, and relies on the address spaces, mass mailing, various gaps in security too through which it spreads itself, but as a meaningful message it, naturally, fails. What this means however is not the failure of spam as a cultural practice, but a failure of such perspectives of analysis that would want to decipher it from a representational/meaningful position.

This point is made even more clear when we realize that such a huge amount of current traffic in networks happens between machines and governed always by protocols; spamming machines trying to find the gap to impose their message, and filtering machines, firewalls and such trying to catch such messages on time. Despite the 150 years in between, the parallels between early times of standardized postal systems and digital network traffic is not far-fetched, as with the on-going automatisation of procecesses of post already back then, as Siegert points out:

"Had Hill succeeded with his printing press, the only thing missing would have been some kind of reading machine, and all of England's written communication would have been completely standardized and mechanized, from production right through distribution to reception."

Doug Engelbart and HCI in the context of Simondon

2010-05-12T03:50:00.000-07:00

Such techniques of eye-hand-ear-coordination that we take more or less granted like the mouse and WYSIWYG flag an interesting area of not only HCI development and design per se, but also a wider transformation concerning the understanding of supposedly human conventions and practices such as learning. What the work of such pioneers as Doug Engelbart flags is the same area of interests that Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler in philosophy, André Leroi-Gourhan in anthropology or for example Friedrich Kittler in media theory emphasize; there is no natural human being, but the most seemingly natural and primitive tools that we engage and interact with are formative to the "human-form" which is part of our milieu. Or differently put, our milieus of being are constantly formed even to an evolutionary degree of the tools that are formative of our being (superjects instead of subjects, as Whitehead writes in another context; and the way in-formation is understood by Simondon not as a substance but as a process of formation). Indeed, this is why archaeologies of HCI benefit from the wider discussions concerning the subject and the human-being in its milieus in order to develop a full-fledged understanding of the spheres in which computer design work took place.

A short clip of Doug Engelbart talking about his earlier projects.

A Sunday morning at the Gallica Bibliotheque numérique

2010-05-02T05:31:00.001-07:00

A bit out of context, and more out of sheer fascination than as part of any systematic message; felt compelled to post these images after stumbling on the virtual pages of Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris (1894) on Gallica. Always such a fantastic resource for a media archaeologist!

The issue happened to have Albert Londe's article on his work on chronophotography, and participation at the Salpetriere-institute. This is indeed, to refer to Thomas Elsaesser's ideas, one crucial part of the S/M (this time science/medicine) contexts of cinematic technologies, and visual media history where the need for increasingly precise inscription mechanisms of the body was articulated together with hysteria, epilepsy and such maladies of the (female) corpse -- a topic that does not seize to interest me. (Also, btw. the topic of a wonderful recent book by a friend of mine; Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Logos Circa 1900).
- Image from the Bulletin; a special 12-lens mechanism part of the Salpetriere-institute laboratory for temporal-visual analysis and inscription of such illnesses.

- Another image from the same 1894 issue of the Bulletin, also Albert Londe and his series on chronophotography. A body in movement, a body in balance -- a fascination with the gestures of what the body can do -- and body on film, body inscribed as part of such time based technologies with span the too often assumed gap between entertainment (watching nude woman) and science/medicine (inscribing for analytical purposes women bodies as ill, hysteric bodies).

Bells of Atlantis - electronic music for a film

2010-04-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a heads up from my colleague Julio D'Escrivan, possibly the first film to have electronic music specifically composed for it: Bells of Atlantis from 1952, directed by Ian Hugo/Hugh Parker Guiler, and featuring also his partner, Anais Nin... I am sure this set the tone for later 1950s science fiction soundscapes of beeps and buzzes of computers, robots, spacecrafts, etc that signalled "high tech", as Jaakko Suominen has argued in his cultural historical studies of computing...

CTheory Interview Archaeologies of Media Art

2010-04-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

Its out, the discussion on media archaeology and a bit on media art as well that we conducted with Garnet Hertz. Still waiting to hear more feedback on it, but for me, the key bits are;

- articulation of media archaeology not only as a textual method; a theme that for example Garnet is a specialist on. In other words, the need to develop methodological ideas (and articulate them) of media archaeology in artistic spheres.
- flag the existence of competing and contradictory paradigms within media archaeology. This is only the first step, and something that I will do more thoroughly in the book I am writing for Polity Press next academic year (hopefully out in 2012).
- articulate briefly and tentatively the idea of media archaeology as a travelling discipline - to borrow Mieke Bal's notions concerning travelling concepts.

The beginning of the interview with Garnet...just a teaser, full text on Ctheory-website...

Also: at the end of this post, the referential bibliographic list that was taken out from the final published version of the Ctheory text. Might be useful (but do not its not an exhaustive list!). We compiled it originally with Erkki Huhtamo (a longer list actually) so a big thanks to him.

CTheory Interview Archaeologies of Media Art

Jussi Parikka in conversation with Garnet Hertz

Introduction

Media archaeology is an approach to media studies that has emerged over the last two decades. It borrows from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler, but also diverges from all of these theorists to form a unique set of tools and practices. Media archaeology is not a school of thought or a specific technique, but is as an emerging attitude and cluster of tactics in contemporary media theory that is characterized by a desire to uncover and circulate repressed or neglected media approaches and technologies. Its handful of proponents -- including Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Elsaesser, and Erkki Huhtamo -- are primarily interested in mobilizing histories and devices that have been sidelined during the construction of totalizing histories of popular forms of communication, including the histories of film, television, and new media. The lost traces of media technologies are deemed important topics to be excavated and studied; "dead" media technologies and idiosyncratic developments reveal important themes, structures, and links in the history of communication that would normally be occluded by more obvious narratives. This includes tracing irregular developments and unconventional genealogies of present-day communication technologies, believing that the most interesting developments often happen in the neglected margins of histories or artifacts.

In 2007, Jussi Parikka published Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang Publishing, New York). In Digital Contagions, Parikka provides an insightful articulation of media archaeology as a research methodology, which he implements to construct a clear cultural history of computer viruses. Parikka inverts the assumption that computer viruses -- which are semi-autonomous and self-replicating pieces of computer code -- are contrary to contemporary digital culture, instead arguing that computer viruses define the social and material landscape of computer mediated communication. [1] Although computer viruses are often considered as a disease and breakdown within the ecology of media, Parikka argues that these marginal computer programs provide key clues to the material and incorporeal conditions of the network age. They are not accidents of media culture, but increasingly the natural mode of digital media. In other words, the ontology of network culture is viral-like. [2]

In this conversation with Garnet Hertz -- who graduated with a PhD in Visual Studies on the topic of media archaeology and media arts from University of California, Irvine -- Parikka discusses media archaeology as a methodology of academic research in media studies and the media arts. In the process of constructing a theoretical foundation for media archaeology, they discuss and explore the topics of interdisciplinarity, historiography, art, new media, and academia.

-----
Garnet Hertz: I see Digital Contagions as bringing clarity to the ambiguous concept of media archaeology, and would like to continue to clarify the term here. To begin, how do you define media archaeology, and how do you envision it as a project, movement or an approach?

Jussi Parikka: Media archaeology... ambiguous? Indeed. I was just reminded by an archaeologist at Cambridge that there is a sub-discipline in archaeology called "media archaeology." Such contexts do not always spring to mind when we consider media archaeology from a more theoretical perspective. For us in media studies and media arts it is quite often the footnotes of Foucault, Kittler, and the dead media of Bruce Sterling that provides the context for the media archaeological way of doing analysis. Media archaeology exists somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s. I see media archaeology as a theoretically refined analysis of the historical layers of media in their singularity -- a conceptual and practical exercise in carving out the aesthetic, cultural, and political singularities of media. And it's much more than paying theoretical attention to the intensive relations between new and old media mediated through concrete and conceptual archives; increasingly, media archaeology is a method for doing media design and art. After the initial period of tackling the concept of media archaeology in the early 1990s, it is now crucial to take the idea forward and make it more theoretically rigorous. I am not saying it was not rigorous, but there was never a thorough discussion among the "practitioners" of media archaeology.

A Bibliographic Selection

-Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006)
-Bolter, Jay David & Grusin, Richard, Remediation. Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
-Crary, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
-Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989).
-Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cabel, eds. Thomas Elsaesser & Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).
-The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.)
-Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: a Freudian impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 
-Ernst, Wolfgang, M.edium F.oucault, (Weimar: Verlag & Datenbank Für  Geisteswissenschaften, 2000)
-Ernst, Wolfgang, Das Rumoren der Archive, (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2002).
-Ernst, Wolfgang, Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007).
-Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
-Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).
-Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
-Gitelman, Lisa, Always Already New. Media, History, and the Data of Culture. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).
-Gunning, Tom, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Cinema and the (in)Credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (1989).
- Hagen, Wolfgang, Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks (Fink, 2005).
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen," ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, Vol. 7 (2004), pp. 31-82 (Tokyo: The Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences).
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd. Towards an Archeology of the Media", in Electronic Culture, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture 1996), pp. 296-303, 425-427.
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "Time Machines in the Gallery. An Archeological Approach in Media Art," in Immersed in Technology. Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Anne Moser with Douglas McLeod (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 232-268.
-Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi (eds), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications. Forthcoming from University of California Press 2010.
-Kahn, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999)
- Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. orig. German 1985).
-Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
-Kittler, Friedrich, Optical Media. Trans Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
-Kockelkoren, Petran, Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre, ( Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003;
-Mannoni, Laurent, Le Grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1994).
-Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001).
-Marvin, Carolyn, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
-McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
-MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
-Memory Bytes. History, Technology, and Digital Culture, eds Lauren Rabinovitz & Abraham Geil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
-Multimedia Histories. From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007).
- New German Media Theory, ed. Eva Horn, Grey Room-special issue Winter 2008.
- New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Thomas Keenan, Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2005).
-New Media, 1740-1914, ed. Lisa Gitelman & Geoffrey Pingree (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).
-Parikka, Jussi, Digital Contagions. A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
- Parikka, Jussi, Insect Media: An Archaelogy of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2010).
- Sconce, Jeffrey Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.).
- Siegert, Bernhardt, Relays. Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford: Stanford UP 1999).
-Spieker, Sven, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).
-The Variantology-book series edited by Siegfried Zielinski et al.
-Vissman, Cornelia, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2008).
-Volmar, Axel (ed) Zeitkritische Medien (Berlin: Kadmos, 2009).
-Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions. Cinema and Television as Entr’ actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999, orig. German 1989).
- Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media. Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, orig. German 2002).

Sonic Archaeology

2010-03-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

A quick heads up on the work of Shintaro Miyazaki, and the Institute for Algorhytmics on sonic archaeology. The work consists of an approach to the operational nature of media technologies especially in terms of their sonification -- how their sonic qualities can be used to understand that specific temporal materiality of digital culture from hard drives to ethernet traffic (hence related to packet sniffing).

Wendy Chun (in her Control and Freedom, p. 17) has briefly defined media archaeology in how it makes a difference to visual culture studies that is more focused on the screen - its interfaces, representations and even content at times. Media archaeology is in its Berlin vein however focused on "the machine" which means all the technical layers that govern and allow for the existence of the screen as a sensual experience for the human. However, what sonic archaeology does is move further away from the visual onwards to the sonic and especially the sonic as a rhythmic and temporal regime.

See (or actually listen) for algoRHYTHMIC noise of our everyday gadgets .

And for an elaboration of their methodology, see here on Sonic Archaeology.

"Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society "

2010-03-11T10:05:00.001-08:00

Here is the blurb that University of Minnesota Press are going to use for the catalog for their Fall 2010 books...mine is coming out in the Posthumanities-series edited by Cary Wolfe.

Insect Media
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Jussi Parikka

Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society

Since the early nineteenth-century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed the use of insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an “insect theory of media,” one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien life-worlds of insects.

Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for understanding the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media Theory and History at Anglia Ruskin University and the Director of CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute. He is the author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses.

Theory/Media

Media Archaeology and New Media Studies

2010-02-23T08:40:00.000-08:00

I am giving a talk in Leicester soon, Wednesday March 3.
The talk is at De Montfort University, 4 pm, room: Clephan 3.02

Here is a short abstract:

Media Archaeology and New Media Studies

This talk introduces key points about the emerging theoretical and methodological framework of "media archaeology". It discusses its roots in theories of visual culture and birth as part of the new media boom of the 1980s and especially 1990s. What the talk argues is that media archaeology needs to redevelop itself not only as a textual method, but also as a practical engagement with contemporary technical media cultures. It needs to develop its relations with such new fields of media studies as software studies, and hence update its agenda from the primarily reliance on visual media to a variety of other modalities of media sensation and logic.

Archaeologies of media archaeology

2010-02-19T08:37:00.000-08:00

In terms of the archaeology of media archaeology, the roots of many of the media theoretical debates in the early 20th century writers and artists are important. The references to Walter Benjamin are already part of the tool box of the theories of media archaeology, similarly as they recognize for example Dolf Sternberger's Panorama of the 19th-century as one of the forerunners of thinking old media. Indeed, the social and technological changes that branded the first decades of the century left their mark in a close rethinking of memory, history and media technology as intimately connected.

This is where it would be interesting to ask questions such as how Erkki Huhtamo's ideas of recurring topoi, topics, related to Aby Warburg's dynamograms that Buchloch describes as "the recurring motifs of gesture and bodily expression that he had identified in his notorious term 'pathos formulas." (See Buchloch's article in the 2006 book The Archive.) And its not only that, but as I wrote above, the wider term changes in terms of understanding ruins, remnants, media technologies - in addition to a polarized social political atmosphere. Here we already find a great articulation of a new form of subjectivity and historical consciousness emerging that is less universalising, less narrative and more open to media technological (i.e. not only literary) articulations. I find Buchloch's summary intriguing:

"Thus one could argue that by the mid 1920s a variety of homologous new models of writing and imaging historical accounts emerged simultaneously, ranging from the montage techniques of artistic practices to Warburg's Atlas or those of the Annales historians. In all of these projects (literary, artistic, filmic, historical) a post-humanist and post-bourgeois subjectivity is constituted. The telling of history as a sequence of events and accounts of its individual agents is displaced by a focus on the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity of participating agents, while the process of history is reconceived as a structural system of perpetually changing interactions and permutations between economic and ecological givens, class formations and their ideologies, and the resulting types of social and cultural interactions specific to each particular moment."

What the text could emphasize more, or directly, is that memory becomes immanently modulated in media technological constellations. That is the value of Warburg's Atlas as a work of juxtaposed imagery (memory as images), as well as the reconfiguration of everyday sensations, perceptions, and structures of memory in the midst of mass-produced media. Furthermore, interesting in terms of archaeology of media archaeology is the connection established with the Annales in the above quote. Whereas the link between media archaeology emerging in the 1980s and new historicism (and new cultural histories) is clear, we can find yet another link already in this pre WW-II school of historical thought. In terms of intellectual content, excavating this link to Foucault and hence channeled further to later media archaeological theories might be one way to establish interesting connections; in terms of a media technological history, its the links to Warburg, Benjamin, the Surrealists, montage-thinking and other different ways of conceiving memory, perception and temporality that could provide alternative ideas.

Of course, when talking of 1920s, a connection between Mnemosyne-atlas as a mode of clustering and the current project driven by Lev Manovich concerning cultural analytics in the age of computing power has clear parallels.

Critique of Archival Reason exhibition in Dublin

2010-02-16T05:41:00.000-08:00

An event/exhibition in Dublin which makes me feel I was some hundreds of miles up from where I am now.

Critique of Archival Reason.

To quote from the introductory text:
"The concept of archive naturally seems to evoke an image of control and survey. For example, in The Order of Things, Foucault has described the archive as a system introducing order, meaning, boundaries, coherence and reason into what is disparate, confused, and contingent. The archive is a product of the will to represent, the desire for surveyability and transparency while emerging in modernity as a rigid scopic regime where multiformity and diversity have been reduced to levels of equivalence.

Starting with Duchamp, visual artists have engaged in the epistemology of the archival order. Artists appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured and interrogated archival structures and archival materials aiming at deconstructing them as compulsive, taxonomic knowledge systems. Para-archives were developed as a demonstration of the impossibility of categorizing the contingent for the sake of representation and to demand attention for a non-hierarchic heterogeneity and an anomic form of knowledge production. Hal Foster argues that by focusing on unacknowledged and repressed qualities, artistic archives show the essence of the archive as 'found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private'.

This fold-like nature also appears characteristic for the manner in which currently, topical, research-based art practice relates to the concept of archive. In line with Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text, one could speak of transforming a noun into a verb, i.e. of a processual pleasure of archiving. Such an archiving is a rhizomatic activity and a 'becoming archive' where ultimately the will to connect what cannot be connected is decisive. New forms of display will emerge in connective mutations of entirely diverse registers. No longer is an archiving consciousness placed in the supportive narrative of a contextualizing infolab developed parallel to the exhibition. Rather a research-based practice knows how to present both constitutive segments in a fluent and integral manner. Such integral practices are the departure points for the exhibition Critique of Archival Reason.This is also a critique in the Kantian sense of an activity not determining apriori its criteria, but apostiori in a form of experimental and immanent research into decisive and separate faculties.

Exhibiting a book - inherently connotative of organization and order - appears to be one of the possible forms of presenting a critique of archival reason. A book functions as a montage table of imagination, and as a thinking machine, Cecilia Gronberg claims. Her telephone directory type work (in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson) Reconnections: Transcription, Lists, Documents, Archives investigates the archive of the first Swedish telephone factory and interconnects conceptual art, Perec, archival aesthetics, French Maoism, record photography and Midsommarkransen's local history. Irene Kopelman's work Drawing Archive adopts a sculptural approach. The work shows that drawing - guaranteeing categorical, scientific knowledge in 19th-century archives - functions as an important method for artistic thinking in an artistic archive through a process of drawing differences. Installation work could engineer an exchange between the semiotic structure of the traditional archive and the imaginary connotation of the artistic archive, says Shoji Kato. Kato deploys literally the arthistorical opposition horizontal versus vertical. On the floor there is a scale-model-type representation of the economic infrastructure of a city; on the wall there is its painted, cartographic representation called Tie: Place and Symbols. Kato describes the emerging artistic process of thought fluctuating between the two pieces as an 'embodied potentiality of plurality'.

A critical focus on mass media's archival reason is demonstrated in various works. Mass media develop authentic forms of narrativity and fiction sometimes even based on an absolutely empty archive as Jeremiah Day's work Fred Hampton's Apartment shows. The singularity of the artist is absent in much documentary work. Therefore, in the form of narrative performances, Day pushes the artist back into the center. How should an artist relate to the role that ubiquitous digitization plays in producing a documentary practice? Sean Snyder's work Index addresses that question through various formats of storage-media-images from his physical archive. The images have been destroyed and digitized, thus outlining a selective topology of the materials of artistic research. Herman Asselberghs delves into the question of what would happen with archiving the first decade of the 21st century if the mass media would omit 9/11 as icon for that period. His i-pod presentation Black Box shows 2/15 - the day when 30 million people demonstrated against starting a preventive war in Iraq - as an iconomic reassessment of 9/11.

This exhibition accompanies the conference Arts Research: Publics and Purposes. GradCAM-Dublin, 15.2-19.2. Keynote Speakers: Anton Vidokle (17/2/10) and Ute Meta Bauer (19/2/10).

This project is co-organised by the European Arts Research Network and GradCAM-Dublin with Centrifugal. This project is in part funded by the EC-EACEA Culture 2000–2007: 'Artist as Citizen' project. The project has been generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation."

interview on media archaeology and media arts

2010-02-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

I have spent the day editing an interview we did with Dr Garnet Hertz on the methods, contexts and relations to media arts of media archaeology. The process has been long but enjoyable (and we hope to find a place to publish this extensive interview) as it has really helped me to articulate several things that might form some core statements in my forthcoming book as well. Garnet himself is a specialist in media archaeology as an artistic methods and I am grateful for his collaboration on this. This has really made it clear how media archaeology has to move from being a "mere" textual practice to a fully fledged artistic method - and that methodology needs to be articulated clearly. I think there are two ways to progress here to take it forward (and how it has been taken forward); media archaeology as a method for concrete machinics of media (whether in the fashion of Paul DeMarinis, or then e.g. the hardware hacking, circuit bending way proposed by the Berlin school promoted by Ernst). On the other hand, there is the ontological argument, as I would label it; that stems already from Kittler, continued by Ernst, but also lots of other recent developments which insist on the specificity of the material in technological excavations; the materiality of the contemporary, scientifically informed, media culture.

In addition, the interview helped me to kick-start the idea of media archaeology as a traveling discipline. It has not found a stable home yet, but in the manner that Mieke Bal writes about traveling concepts, media archaeology is a toolbox traveling between and across discplines and institutions from film to media and art schools; concrete archives and theory institutions. There lies its promise as well in terms of trying to advance an understanding of such traveling sets of theories as a crucial component of the 21st century arts and humanities agenda -- traveling not least between arts and sciences, humanities and technology.

More soon, if we found a journal or some other venue to publish the interview...

Media Archaeological Art/methods; Transmediale 2010

2010-02-08T07:04:00.000-08:00

A theme such as "Futurity" is begging for media-archaeological approaches. No wonder then that at the 2010 Transmediale Future Obscura-exhibition several art works employed media-archaeological methods, and even the term was explicitly mentioned several times.

Of these, Gebhard Sengmüller's A Parallel Image was the strongest in terms of its affiliation with this strand of thinking/doing old media, new media. It also investigated imaginary media but in much more interesting fashion that mere discursive excavations. Sengmüller constructed a transmission device for visual data that does not break visual elements into discrete elements then sent over to the receiving end, but employs a very messy (one has to say) way of parallel image transmission; Instead, every pixel element is sent in parallel "directly" to the receiver via some 2,500 cables. Hence, it detaches from the universally adopted ideas that were early on formulated by the Frenchman Maurice Leblanc in 1880 that images are to be broken into lines before transmission and that light is after that to be translated into electric signals; and at the receiving end, the receiver's function is the further translation of electric currents into an image (as the catalogue text to A Parallel Image introduces).

Instead, Sengmüller describes his idea of practical uselessness but of media-archaeological interest:

"... an apparatus that links every pixel on the 'camera side' with every pixel on the 'monitor' side in the technically simplest way possible. Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, this leads to an absurd system that connects a grid of 2,500 photoconductors on the sender side with 2,500 small light bulbs on the receiver side, pixel by pixel, using a total of 2,500 copper wires. In addition, there are wires that supply each of these 'image transmission - micro units' with electricity."

For Sengmüller, complexification becomes an artistic method, in conjunction to its historically tuned nature.

Similar promise of media archaeological methodology was present in both Julius von Bismarck's the Space beyond me through the use of its 16mm projection-cum-immersive installation (alas, the piece was not operational when I was around!) and Julien Maire's The Inverted Cone. Addressing directly the nature of temporality, Maire's piece was tuned with Henri Bergson's cone-like structure of memory that stretches between actuality and the bubbling under intensive virtuality full of potentialities. The result was, I have to say, impressive in its subtlety that was suggestive of the continous de- and recomposition processes of memory. Memory become in that installation room a machinic process of composition reminding of the unconscious less as a theater than a machine to borrow Deleuze and Guattari. Again, the short text was using the trope of the media archaeologist - and why not. It was again embedded in this idea of time-traveling, but this time as machinology of sorts.

In general, what we did not see was a strong articulation of what is the media archaeological method in media arts. Without going into details here, so far the developments have been mostly pointing towards at least four directions (apologies in advance as such a classification needs a much more careful eye);
1) use of historical themes in representational terms as part of a piece
2) invoking alternative histories, that offer critical insights through the piece (perhaps some of Zoe Beloff's women's histories coupled together with technogical themes of mediation)
3) imaginary media constructed; devices that are dead, or never built being reconstructed and re-employed whether out of curiosity value that investigates the nature of obsolescence, progress and technological culture as one of novelty; or then to bring out also directly political themes such as new technologies as direct threats to the living world, the ecology (as Garnet Hertz argues through his dead media works)
4) media archaeological art methods as excavating the machine; past and/or present. Opening up the machine to investigate its microtemporal fluxes, machinics, operational principles is something again very "Berlin-style" and represents a powerful way of incorporating media archaeology as a method of opening up contemporary technologies (hardware hacking, circuit bending) and hence connecting to themes of political economy.

Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Diagrammatics

2010-01-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

I am thinking - and well hopefully soon doing - of an article to be written. It should focus mostly on the German media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst who I find interesting a) as an alternative approach to the "what is media archaeology" question and b) a key contemporary German media theorist who has interesting links to Friedrich Kittler but is significantly taking such materialist media theory into new directions. Such new directions articulate media through the notion of the archive (and vice versa archive and cultural memory as well as historiography through the notion of technical media). Will also try to give some talks this Spring based on this topic.

A short abstract

Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Diagrammatics

Media archaeological ways of extending the lifetime of new media into what is often a bit loosely called “old media” has experienced a revival during the past years. In recent new media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology seems to be emerging. Its partly a result from a reaction against the narrative as well as often cinematic emphases from which media archaeology emerged e.g. as part of new cinema histories, although to use a word such as “reaction” connotes a much more clear-cut distancing from “old” ways of media archaeology than what is happening. Is there an “old” way of doing media archaeology in contrast to some of the recent debates concerning for example “operative diagrammatics” of media archaeology as Wolfgang Ernst claims, or the new theoretical contexts from which e.g. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s and others’ inspiration for a revitalisation of histories of media stems from?

So far attached to such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent even Friedrich Kittler, the debates surrounding media archaeology as a method seem to be taking it forward not only as a subdiscipline of (media) history, but increasingly into what will be introduced below as materialist media diagrammatics. This talk will in this context map some recent trends in German media theory and tie them together with some more Anglo-American trends, such as software studies. I will address Wolfgang Ernst’s mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts of how to rethink media archaeology represent both a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seem to not only replicate Kittler’s huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but continue that into novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst’s provocative take that hopes to distance German media theory in its hardware materiality resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies. Such thinkers writers include Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Noah Wardrip-Fruin as well as Nick Montfort & Ian Bogost.

Life Writer

2010-01-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

(source: http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/WORKS/IMAGES/)

Is media archaeological art only about media of the past resurrected? An increasing amount of answers state "no".

I saw this piece of artificial life art by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer as part of the ATACD December 2009 Conference in Barcelona. Life Writer (2006) consists of an old typewriter on which a screen is attached; the screen is filled with these insectoid-arachnoid kind of "animals" that are governed algorithmic rules for movement and reproduction. The letters written are "eaten up" by the animals. As a piece, its amazingly beautiful, dramatic in its Burroughsian insect-typewriter technology. It is also a nice interface of the non-human worlds of algorithmic creatures and the input of the human user; although, already the typewriter can be seen as such a machine of translation of continuity into discreet material which in a Kittlerian fashion prepared us for the post-human. New media of algorithms eats up the input of the old media of typewriters. Everything becomes code, but everything becomes as much eaten up, consumed byt the algorithmic creatures. Its also about translations of the human actions into "fuel" for the algorithmic insects. A metaphorical transposition concerning the biopolitics of software cultures and immaterial labour?

Professor Ernst's take on media archaeology

2009-11-22T05:51:00.001-08:00

We (as in Anglia Ruskin University, and ArcDigital) had the pleasure of hosting a talk (November 18, 2009) by professor Wolfgang Ernst from Humboldt University Berlin, who is not only continuing the spirit of the almost legendary Sophienstrasse 23 address (where Kittler worked as well) but as much is the representative of the new wave of German media theory that still remains to a large extent to be translated. It is rare to hear these German scholars in Anglo-American contexts so our ArcDigital talk was even more significant in this sense of really tapping into what is new and fresh in international media studies.

Ernst’s talk on media archaeology as a method and a theory really introduced the various radical implications that his brand of doing media archaeology has. I have already before pointed towards the points about “operative diagrammatics” or media history that his take on the past and present media encompasses, and the talk outlined well the positions --- even provocative – where he wants to place media studies. What the audience was left with was a number of positions and claims/challenges to tackle. To me, these indclude:

1) media studies is not only cultural studies, or even cultural technics, but something Ernst wants to brand as cultural engineering. Media studies should be an exact science, not (only?) about semantics and semiotics as he provoked but leaning towards the mathematical conditions of our techno-condition. I.e. media studies curricula should include mathematics. The only way to understand digital media, or technical media more generally, is to understand how it puts mathematics into operation, makes formulas into commands, and how engineering routes and automates so many functions that we mistake as human.

2) Media archaeology is processual, it focuses on the time-critical processes which engineer our lives. This means that media archaeology does not tap only to the past but can dedicate itself to opening up technologies in an artistic vein. Ernst’s examples of media archaeological arts were actually less about artists working with historical material than about hardware hacking, open software and circuit bending. Media archaeology is hence also about microtemporal processes. For an example on such media artistic practices, see the Microresearch lab in Berlin.

3) Arche is not only the beginning but in the Derridean sense a command as well. Archaeology as the beginning of our techno-condition is an active command, perhaps execution in the software sense, of orders, procedures and patterns/routines. Ritualistic but not in the human-religious sense, perhaps?

4) Media archaeology does not narrate, it counts. Because machines do not narrate, they count. Counting, algorithmics etc. precede narration.

5) So why not just relegate media archaeology as part of sciences faculties? Because it is still interested in the epistemological conditions in which the commands, executions and operations take place. This seems to point towards the political contexts of media archaeology, but gets rarely articulated in this brand of German media theory. Still, I would argue, it is radically political and taps into the political economic condition of closed systems, opening them up, and teaching that institutionalised conditioning as contingent. Universities then have according to Ernst a special situation, and a responsibility, to open up systems.

6) Media archaeology is a-historical, even unhistorical perhaps. It is not necessarily about contextual information about past media, but creating such situations where you get into contact with media in its radical operability and temporality. Archives in this sense are time-machines; Ernst told us about going to King’s college library to see Turing’s unpublished papers earlier that day, and that situation was branded not by a historian’s interpretative touch but by sharing the mathematical situation in its non-historical presentness. This applies again to machines as well; their functioning operations are the media archaeological moment that is at its core un-historical.

7) Machines are agents of history as well. They record, transmit, and do not always ask for permission from the human being.

8) Media archaeology has some connection with software studies. Ernst pointed the connections to Manovich’s point about the double-nature of software studies between the cultural interface and the computational heart. I would add, both share an appreciation of processuality.

9) Provocation is almost methodological to Ernst and certain brands of German media theory.

Questions that I did not have the chance to ask:

What are the implications of this approach to the cultural heritage, display and archiving of culture in the age of technical machines – or culture of technical machines? I am guessing it has to do with processuality, with such methods of curating and archiving that are able to articulate the lived (machine-lived) temporality of such technological assemblages. How do you curate or archive software is a related question, but it also touches on earlier technical media such as radios and televisions. Furthermore, it has to do with the generalisation of the notion of the archive with new modes of distributed archiving, digital objects, and such.

What is time-criticality? I still cannot get my head around it completely, i.e. the question of how it differs from time-based processes? Video artists etc. are doing a splendid job as articulators of temporality and materiality, but where does the dividing line between time-based and time-criticality lie?

Wouldn’t it be possible to develop more positive and affirmative relations with some emerging cultural analytical approaches that come from e.g. the Anglo-American world? This point I flagged already in my short post on the Zeitkritische medien-book, and I keep on insisting that perhaps we can find the common areas of interest and shared agendas with such approaches as media ecology (á la Fuller), radical empiricism and Whitehead (Massumi) and e.g. feminist studies of science and technology (for example Barad).

A short review of Zeitkritische Medien (Volmar)

2009-11-13T08:58:00.001-08:00

I have flagged in many contexts my interest for new materialist cultural analysis, and how it should be articulated together with a new sense of temporality. When I say "a new sense" it's a bit misleading, but I mean the rigorous rethinking of temporality that we find across the board from Delanda to Whitehead-inspired accounts and so forth. Whereas Grossberg already pointed towards a non-signifying accounts as a mode of spatial materialism, we need to develop similar approaches that stem from radical temporality; that the world outside the human being is too dynamic, unfolding, temporal; that temporality is itself folded together with the various material assemblages of the world; that temporality is a crucial non-human force we need to articulate to understand the molecular, as well as the long durations of nature (not least in the midst of our eco crisis).

One key context for my interests comes again from Germany, and has been recently been "summed up" as a book. Axel Volmar as the editor of Zeitkritische Medien (Time-Critical Media, Kadmos Verlag, Berlin, 2009 ) has done a good job in collating together recent trends in German media theory, and approaches to the very peculiar, but even more so exciting version of media archaeology that they have been developing in the Media Studies department at Humboldt University, Berlin. Under the guidance of Professor Wolfgang Ernst, the notion of "time-criticality" and an eye towards temporal processes as a key to understand modern technical media we find a brand of media archaeology that extends not so much historically into past media but towards the microscopic workings of media machines; and how they modulate time, and the structuring temporal processes of societies.

By digging into the "microtemporalities" of media machines the introduction and the chapters try to excavate how such micro-layers are articulating the perception of reality. This means extending the media studies agenda (not surprisingly as we are in the territory of German, Kittlerian inspired media theory after all) to non-human agents and processes that however structure the phenomenological worlds of our perception and reality-effects as well. This leads furthermore to the realisation of the new realms of relations between machines themselves -- no link to the human is always needed in the age of automated processes and machines communicating between themselves before they talk to the human (Guattari -- who however is missing as theorist from this volume).

Paul Virilio who is well used in this book has argued for the importance of time and speed for war (and hence a link to media as well), but this book extends this to a very meticulous technical excavation into the dispositifs of how actually time gets articulated and articulates media. Technophobes beware! This brand of German media theory is not afraid of getting its hands greasy, whether we are talking of analogue media or digital algorithms (or algorythmics as Shintaro Miyazaki extends the concept in his chapter). This is where Virilio's ideas gain real strength, or a new context when by systematic and rigorous steps machines and technologies are opened up from the logic of bitmapping (Peter Berz) to the problems of noise and signal-transmission (Hirt and Volmar).

It would be crucial to see more work of this kind in English in order to really start rethinking fundamentals of media studies. This is happening already, partly due to a Kittlerian influence, and other new waves coming e.g. from Italy (post-Fordist thought), France (e.g. Latour, Guattari, Deleuze of course) and onwards to e.g. games (Pias) with an amount of chapters that with ease move between visual media, the sonic and computational platforms. But definitely new German media studies and archaeology has a lot to say to the problems of materiality of technical media. It would benefit itself from a more elaborated discussion and joining of forces of some other similar approaches that come from different directions. Ideas of temporality have been developed e.g. in materialist feminism (Barad) and e.g. Whitehead inspired radical empiricism (Massumi, Mackenzie,etc.) and through creations of new circuits for circulation of ideas, we could have soon something really exciting on our hands. Well, the previous sentence was not to mean that all this stuff is not already that -- exciting. Just that developing such creative clashes might be seen as a good method for movement of thought. Of course, its not the Germans who are the only ones doing this work; recently I have been following the stuff coming out from Utrecht direction as well whether in terms of some of the feminist work in the wake of Braidotti but also the great ideas from the New Media and Digital culture programme who also address materiality with historical, temporal methods.

Anyhow, media studies is developing into a great articulation of the interlinks between science, art and cultural analysis/philosophy, and we need to keep this movement alive with more translations and engagements. Such are the directions where UK media studies field should turn its attention to.

Guest talk on media archaeology by Wolfgang Ernst

2009-11-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

ArcDigital guest talk:
November 18, Wednesday at 5 pm
Professor Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University, Berlin)

will give a talk on "Media Archaeology - Method and Machine"

At Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, East Road, Room: Helmore 302.

Media archaeology is both a research method in media studies, and an aesthetics in media arts. Furthermore it is a non-human procedure as well. Media archaeology does not look at media on the level of their surface effect on humans (interfaces), but rather (in a vaguely Heideggerian sense) tries to uncover the hidden agenda of technomathematical artefacts, or better: artefactuality. Media archaeology is concerned with media not only on their structural but on their operative level.

The talk intends to deal with this neologism in several perspectives:

a) Media archaeology as method (referring, among other aspects, to Foucault's archaeology of discourse)
b) Media archaeology in its metaphorical sense ("the archaeological dig")
c) Media archaeology as a critique of narrative media history
d) Media archaeology of sound and vision with media themselves as agencies of knowledge (therefore the subtitle "method and machine").

Wolfgang Ernst is professor of media theories at Humboldt-University, Berlin. Studied history, classics, and archaeology; Ph.D. thesis 1989 on historicism and museology. Teaching experience and guest professorships in culture and media studies at several universities (Leipzig, Cologne, Weimar, Bochum, Paderborn, Berlin). Publications include: M.edium F.oucault, Weimar 2000; Das Rumoren der Archive, Berlin 2002; Im Namen von Geschichte, Munich 2003; Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses, Berlin 2007. Current research fields: time-based and time-critical media; the "sonic" dimension of techno-mathematics.

The talk is part of ArcDigital guest lectures with leading international media theorists and practitioners sharing their ideas of recent waves in media and cultural studies, creative practice and innovative perspectives to digital culture.

The event is sponsored by the Cultures of Digital Economy institute at Anglia Ruskin University.

More info on ArcDigital: http://www.anglia.ac.uk/arcdigital

Contact: jussi.parikka@anglia.ac.uk

Dead Media, Live Nature

2009-10-16T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am giving some media ecology and dead media related talks in the near future. The first one is going to be in a couple of weeks in Amsterdam as part of the matinees of the Imaginary Futures research group. I was kindly invited there by Wanda Strauven. Its on Friday the 30th of October, I think starting around 10.30 or 11, and located at Bungehuis, Spuistraat 210, room 101.

Here is the abstract:

The talk Dead Media/Live Nature focuses on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood-Wright-Yokokoji's Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz's Dead Media. The Eco Media project developed new modes of thinking and doing media (ecology) through a tracking of the intensities of nature. However, in this case the medium was understood in a very broad sense to cover the ecosystem as a communication network of atmospheric flows, tides, reproductive hormones, scent markers, migrations or geological distributions. The project does not focus solely on the ecological crisis that has been a topic of media representations for years, but also engages with a more immanent level of media ecology in a manner that resembles Matthew Fuller's call for Art for Animals. Media is approached from the viewpoint of animal perceptions, motilities and energies (such as wind) that escape the frameworks of "human media." In this context the rhetorical question of the Eco Media project concerning non-human media is intriguing: "Can 'natural media' with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?" In addition the talk will expand the notion of "dead media" as articulated recently by Garnet Hertz, and discuss its relevance for establishing a connection between media ecology and media archaeology.

Project start!

2009-10-14T13:44:00.001-07:00

This is the blog for my new research project on Media Archaeology -- and the Cartographical Mapping of some new trends in media studies and history. It supports the research project that investigates media archaeology as media studies method and theory, and maps both its trends and emerging directions. Polity Press have just confirmed that they will offer a contract for the book that is coming out of the project -- book hopefully finished in August 2011. Excited to be doing this for Polity and fingers crossed; submitting an application to the AHRC for an early career fellowship where this book would be the key output.

The project and the book support the work we did already with Erkki Huhtamo -- an edited volume on media archaeology and its new directions. That book is coming out from University of California Press hopefully in 2011, and was an exciting even if a long project. Working with Erkki was wonderful in terms of his huge experience of the field and media history, but also because of our diverging but hopefully complementing ideas of media archaeological research.

The proposed project (and this blog which will be used for updates on progress, ideas, interim results, as well as wider discussions of what is going on in terms of media archaeology and related approaches) addresses how to develop media archaeology as an exemplary "21st century arts and humanities theory and method" that tackles key themes in software cultures, creative practice, digital archives and lends innovatively from feminist theory, critical methodologies and such emerging trends in media theory as new materialist cultural analysis.

Well, the gets into full swing only next year, so this blog will also kick-off more forcefully then. But stay tuned. Its all about dead media, obsolescence, losers of media history and other freaks in media theory!