An Alternative Deep Time of the Media: A Geologically Tuned Media Ecology

Next week I am participating in this very exciting symposium at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany. Convened by prof. Erich Hörl, it focuses on the General Ecology of Media and Technology -- as a direction discussing media ecology and the ecological paradigm in critical theory and humanities.

You can find the programme and more info here.

My talk focuses on some new ideas I am having concerning "a geology of media"(yes, a nod towards Deleuze and Guattari's Geology of Morals.)

In short, it is a way to tap into the mineral and material constitution of media technologies -- a media history of matter, so to speak that takes into account the long duree of mineralisation (some 500 million years ago) as constituting a layer of hardware and hardwork that characterises our current idealisation of "cognitive" capitalism too. Hence, we are not dealing only with psychopower/-technologies of contemporary capitalist media culture but also with psychogeophysicalpowers. I like the phrase hardware and hardwork, coined in this nice game project i-mines, and that double articulation after so much talk of software, softpower, etc. reminds of the very material logistics/labour that are a necessary support, an affordance, for digital economy.

My abstract:
An Alternative Deep Time of the Media: A Geologically Tuned Media Ecology

This talk picks up on Siegfried Zielinski's notion of a deep time of the media -- not straightforwardly media archaeological, but an anarchaeological call for methodology of deep time research into technical means of hearing and seeing. In Zielinski's vision, which poetically borrows from Jay Gould's paleontological epistemology at least in its vision, the superficiality of media cultural temporality is exposed with antecedents, hidden ideas, false but inspiring paths of earlier experimenters from Empedocles to Athanius Kircher, Johann Wilhelm Ritter to Cesare Lombroso.


As an alternative deep time, I suggest that instead of male heroes, we approach a more geologically tuned deep time - deep in various senses, down to mineral excavation, and picking up some themes of media ecological sort. The talk aims to introduce a more geologically oriented notion of depth of media that is interested in the mineral and raw material basis of technological development, as well as presents some media historical points of how one might adapt to a material perspective in terms of ecological temporality.

Mareorama Resurrected

Erkki Huhtamo's Audiovisual Performance Production "Mareorama Resurrected" now available for viewing online

An edited version of UCLA Design Media Arts Professor Erkki Huhtamo's acclaimed illustrated lecture performance "Mareorama Resurrected" is now available online. The Performance took place during the Art && Code 3D Conference at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in October 2011.

http://artandcode.com/3d/otherevents/the-moving-panorama

Program notes:

"Performed throughout the 1800s, moving panoramas were among the most popular entertainment of the 19th century. In this poetic lecture-demonstration, scholar and media archeologist Erkki Huhtamo draws on his research into moving panoramas and dioramas to discuss various historical apparata that laid the groundwork for 20th and 21st century immersive applications—including those created now by game designers and media artists. The particular focus of this presentation will be on the Maréorama, a huge multi-sensory spectacle created by Hugo d’Alesi and his team for the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris. Drawing from high-resolution scans and the original piano music composed for the Maréorama by Henri Kowalski, Huhtamo reconstructs several sequences from this simulated sea voyage on the Mediterranean. The performance features live piano accompaniment by Stephen L. I. Murphy."

Hit & Run: On Finnish Baseball and War

It’s war on the school playing ground. Pitch and duck, run and take cover. The just barely disguised educational aims of Finnish sports are more cruel when you scratch the surface. Obviously, it applies to all sports, especially in school, with the cruelty that only kids are capable of.  But there is something curious about some of the Finnish sports that kids like me had to – and still do – play on a regular basis, for years during their school career.

In terms of Finnish baseball, pesäpallo, what intrigues me are its military roots. Invented by Lauri “Tahko” Pihkala, a far right leaning cultural spokeman and sportsman, pesäpallo took form as a Finnish variation of the American and already existing European versions. However, what the rather militaristic Pihkala planned, just in the after wake of Finnish independence, and the bloody civil war, was a form of education of the body. I would like to think of him as the Finnish equivalent of Ernst Jünger, of sorts. War is the mobilisation of the body, and drilling of the national body to the specific requirements of war. Of course, there was a sense of antiquated aspiration in this. In the coming militarised war, the blitz, a different sort of management of speed was needed, although one has to say that for such specific war fronts like the wintery Finland of 1930s and 1940s, men on skis had their use. Indeed, for Pihkala, preparation for military manoeuvres starts from the sports field.

With roots in late 19^th century, the idea for this particular game grew in his head for twenty years, with the first test match in 1920 in Helsinki between a military battalion (Pioneeripataljoona 1) and a quasi-military right wing group (Suojeluskunta). Even the rules of the games were officialised as an appendix to a military brief in 1921 (Armeijan päiväkäsky).

Reading Pihkala’s thoughts is fascinating in the jungeresque way. It is a form of cultivation – a cultural technique one can say – of the physical body in relation to a wider set of social goals for survival.

”What else than training for hunting and fighting was the basis of sport in those times: running and jumping, throw-ing, clubbing, shooting, wrestling and boxing. In those times every man who wished to stay alive had to be an able huntsman and a soldier, that is a good athlete – thus became sport both an everyday task and a national service.”  

This is an important part in the cultural history of 1920s and 1930s – both in terms of a prelude to WWII as well as the anthropological theories of play articulated at that time. Indeed, in Pihkala’s ideas, plans and writings, the two streams coalesce.

”Only man is capable of training, an activity requiring systematic, far-sighted deliberation and patience that are essential for sport.”

Play/sports are a second-order cultural technique of cultivation: training of the bodily senses which as an activity attaches to such widely discussed modern themes like patience and attention. So much of the anthropology of the urban, modern life was of course geared towards this specific theme that is not solely about observation, but that more specific nature of attention (indeed, psychopower of sorts, that with theorists like Stiegler has been the recent years been picked up as part of analyses of attention economy, but has these long roots in media and social theory).

Sports is war, and war is less about killing than about the drilling, training of the body. In Pihkala’s words:

”Sport is more or less methodical training for martial tasks that appeal to our instincts either because of their ancient origins or because of the speed they implicate in order to gain the maximum performance.”

Aim and throw, duck and run -- the mobile warfare. Hit and run: the game is a modulation of speed. Apparently Pihkala had considered that whereas the American version is more like trench warfare, his version would be equipped for a more speed-oriented mobile war that according to some sources was planned to support the specific requirements of the milieu of Finland: forest warfare. Shoot and move. It’s a sort of a simulation of warfare in this sense.

Much later, in the 1960s, Pihkala was introducing another new sport, “flash ball” (salamapallo). Worried about the increasing sitting down that is crippling our culture (remember, Finland was too on its way from primarily agricultural mode of production to a more service based urban culture), Pihkala was keen to pitch running as a key to healthy cultural state. Here too, in a radio column by him, Pihkala is talking about how running/agility/movement are essential to ability to defend oneself, which I am sure he allegorically meant as part of a national task as well. In general, the column is an interesting listen from the perspective of cultural techniques of running.

A further chapter to this invention of Finnish national sport as a military mode of training is when one would discuss that through Friedrich Kittler. Kittler’s enthusiasm for war and media technologies is known, as is his fondness, of sort, of Jünger. There would be curious narratives to be written from the Finnish perspective too, as a way to understand cultural techniques of drill and distraction.

Some sources:

http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/artikkelit/pesapallon_isa_keksi_toisenkin_lajin_78306.html#media=78860

http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/artikkelit/pesapallo_markkinoitiin_suojeluskunnille_sotakunnon_kehittajana_78757.html

http://www.indianpesapallo.com/history.html

http://www.pesis.fi/2012/?x2169147=2169160

Also, here as PDF the Finnish art group Iconoclast (Söderlund & Suonpää) publication “Hit and Run” that acted as key inspiration for this little text. Some of the Pihkala quotes are from that art publication.

Moil

The amount of discarded electronics, like broken or almost-broken televisions, computers nearly spewing their guts on the sides of streets - you do know where it all goes? Well, some of it goes to UnLunDun.

China Miéville's writings are quite inspirational, and some of his books with a clear steampunkish edge to them as well. However, Un Lun Dun (2007) -- UnLondon - is one weird mix of the other side of London; ever so slightly alternative universe into which the two girl protagonists Zanna and Deeba are transported.

Of interest to the fans of the obsolete are the constructions of moil: Mildly Obsolete in London, but completely useful in the tinkering Un Lun Dun:

"[..] a building made from typewriters and dead televisions", that they pass from an itself obsolete abandoned London double-decker bus. The "Em Oh Aye Ell"s are pieces of discarded stuff, like old computers and radios, abandoned on the streets:

"Sometimes rubbish collectors have taken it, but often as not it ends up here, where people find other uses for it. It seeps into UnLondon. You might see residue: maybe a dried-up puddle on a wall. That's where the moil dripped through. And here, it sprouts like mushrooms on the streets."

And it's the whole system of media/transport; old buses, diesel trains but more importantly not just obsolescence but even the play with existence/non-existence where they are going: the other "abcities", such as Parisn't, No York, Helsunki, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco, Hong Gone, Romeless - a network of existing non-places.

As for moil, it's not really just "old manky rubbish", like Zanna's judgment goes. It too organises (although, one has to say the smog that escaped London while developing a brain of its own is a thingy in its own class!). Moil is organised to tribes, with their own leaders, pointing to the organisation of rubbish - rubbish just is not rubbish. It has histories, pasts, futures, modes of organisation. Indeed, "Certain substances in UnLondon exist in prologue form in London, and enter a second life-cycle here with new purposes, even as sentient denizens of the abcity", this logic is later explained in slightly more detail.

Hence, you have princesses of discarded typewriters, and jacks of cracked glass, the pope of empty mousetraps -- a whole royalty of obsolescence.

Miéville's moil points to the fact that when things break down, they become something else. Losing purpose does not mean disappearance, like broken media just does not disappear. Umbrellas become unbrellas.

Miéville is so good on this point: the persistent duration of materiality that insists on its transformational quality. Something persists, and yet changes; the other worlds are those transformations, topological, or to account for the spatial qualities, grosstopical too - to use a term he uses in The City & The City, another weird materialist story of space/unspace.

New reviews

Some new reviews -- Insect Media and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications were reviewed in Information, Communication & Society.

And What is Media Archaeology? has received it's first reviews. A new one came out in Literary & Linguistic Computing, an Oxford University Press journal.

An interview with Wolfgang Ernst

The countdown to the Wolfgang Ernst volume, Digital Memory and the Archive, is on...only a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, listen to this new audio interview with Ernst - in English!

A Review of What is Media Archaeology?

An interesting take on What is Media Archaeology? in Reviews in History. Not sure if I agree with all of the notes made by the reviewer, for instance:

"Alongside the sophisticated middle-class consumer preferences and jaundiced post-Cold War politics sit references to all the popular cultural theories imbibed by the part of that generation that stayed on at university to get PhDs."

Indeed, I go through the consumer culture fascinated by "Retro", but to me it is better to take that aboard, instead of neglecting it. The reviewer writes earlier that I spend a bit too time on quirky things, instead of docile normality, but then also writes that I focus on "middle-class consumer preferences...". I would just say that indeed, I do both. Both the consumerised retro and vintage, and fascination with the past -- and the more interesting alternative insights into how to think technology and time. The slightly twisted, alternative, parallel and just off the radar approaches in artistic projects and historical examples are ways to actually approach the "normal".

Also, in terms of "popular cultural theories" I thought actually that the likes of Zielinski, Ernst, Siegert recent platform studies, software studies, and even Kittler are not really that well known (, especially in the Anglo-American world (Kittler is definitely not well known in UK academia) -- hence instead of exactly focusing on the canon (except for instance Foucault), I decide to do focus on slightly less debated theorists, and emerging directions, to illustrate new ways of understanding the theoretical force of media studies. Even the likes of Aby Warburg, or more generally German tradition of Bildwissenschaften are not always well known in current discussions in art and cultural theory/academia! This is why at times the "rediscovery" of writers such as Flusser makes exciting things happen. They open new paths in the brain, even in academia.