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.
Showing posts with label garnet hertz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garnet hertz. Show all posts
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Monday, 20 December 2010
Look around the room and become a media archaeological circuit bender
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Zombie Media nominated for a theory award
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
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
Friday, 1 October 2010
What is Media Archaeology? - beta definition 0.8
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.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Arkeoloji Seni Media
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.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Zombie Media - on Art Methods and Media Archaeology with Garnet Hertz
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.
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.
Thursday, 11 February 2010
interview on media archaeology and media arts
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...
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...
Friday, 16 October 2009
Dead Media, Live Nature
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.
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.
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