How Many Media Archaeologies?

I gave recently some talks in Canada -- a talk and a seminar at Western University in London, Ontario, and then the keynote at the Canadian Communication Association-conference.

Here is the first talk, How Many Media Archaeologies? as an audio recording.

Cultural Technique?

If you are wondering what the term Cultural Technique(s), or in its native language, Kulturtechniken, refers to - this is the quote you need. In most articles on the topic, Thomas Macho's words are recounted, and used so why not recirculate them once more:

"Cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and still today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations, but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number."

- Thomas Macho, “Zeit und Zahl: Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken,” in
Bild-Schrift-Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2003), 179. (The passage translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young).

Quoting this also hints at what I am occupied with now - together with Winthrop-Young and Ilinca Iuraşcu; a special issue on Cultural Techniques for Theory, Culture & Society.

Search For a Method-panel - TM12

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

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

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

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

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!