Archaeologies of telegraphy - J.J.Fahie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.