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

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

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

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

Imaginary media -- on chapter 2 of the book

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?

AHRC referee reports for my Media Archaeology Fellowship application

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.