Spam archaeologies - the Penny Post

If you thought spam is merely a function of digitally automated mass mailing, then consider this. In terms of expanding the logic of spam from the technical to the earlier 19th century standardisation through stamps and postage, and perhaps a more protocological understanding of how circulation of such processes as "post" (digital or human-hand held) functions, the introduction of the penny postage in England seemed to flag similar issues as spam in networks nowadays. A quote from the postal reformed Rowland Hill's diary from January 10 in 1840 gives an indication of what happened when the postage was standardized and cheapened:

"January 10th.--Penny Postage extended to the whole kingdom this day! ...I have abstained from going to the Post Office to-night lest I should embarrass their proceedings. I hear of large numbers of circulars being sent, and the Globe of to-night says the Post Office has been quite besieged by people preparing their letters. I guess that the number despatched to-night will not be less than 100,000, or more than three times what it was this day twelwe-months. If less I shall be disappointed." (quoted in Siegert, Relays, p.100)

In addition, what Siegert's book on "literature as an epoch of the postal system" inspires is a further systematic take on networks and procedures of mail that is of methodological advantage -- whether for archaeologies of overburdened postal networks, or for other network histories. If with Siegert as with Kittler we realized the very historical and hence contingent nature of such processes as "interpretation" in the hermeneutic, human-oriented sense, we are simultaneously in a position to realize the non-interpretational functions of current digital oriented processes of relay, reception, and sending.

Consider Siegert:

"What this [adopting a Shannon perspective to communication systems] means is that signals transmitted by the communications system at a given time tn are not viewed as the function of a data source or receiver--not, let's say, as the expressions or intentions of people looking for the understanding of other people--but instead as a function of factors in the system of communication itself." (p. 99).

Indeed, beyond semantic meaning and the need to decipher with tools of hermeneutic literature analysis, spam does not necessarily mean much even if it has a logic of very meticulous nature. Spam does an awful lot of thing, and relies on the address spaces, mass mailing, various gaps in security too through which it spreads itself, but as a meaningful message it, naturally, fails. What this means however is not the failure of spam as a cultural practice, but a failure of such perspectives of analysis that would want to decipher it from a representational/meaningful position.

This point is made even more clear when we realize that such a huge amount of current traffic in networks happens between machines and governed always by protocols; spamming machines trying to find the gap to impose their message, and filtering machines, firewalls and such trying to catch such messages on time. Despite the 150 years in between, the parallels between early times of standardized postal systems and digital network traffic is not far-fetched, as with the on-going automatisation of procecesses of post already back then, as Siegert points out:

"Had Hill succeeded with his printing press, the only thing missing would have been some kind of reading machine, and all of England's written communication would have been completely standardized and mechanized, from production right through distribution to reception."

Doug Engelbart and HCI in the context of Simondon

Such techniques of eye-hand-ear-coordination that we take more or less granted like the mouse and WYSIWYG flag an interesting area of not only HCI development and design per se, but also a wider transformation concerning the understanding of supposedly human conventions and practices such as learning. What the work of such pioneers as Doug Engelbart flags is the same area of interests that Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler in philosophy, André Leroi-Gourhan in anthropology or for example Friedrich Kittler in media theory emphasize; there is no natural human being, but the most seemingly natural and primitive tools that we engage and interact with are formative to the "human-form" which is part of our milieu. Or differently put, our milieus of being are constantly formed even to an evolutionary degree of the tools that are formative of our being (superjects instead of subjects, as Whitehead writes in another context; and the way in-formation is understood by Simondon not as a substance but as a process of formation). Indeed, this is why archaeologies of HCI benefit from the wider discussions concerning the subject and the human-being in its milieus in order to develop a full-fledged understanding of the spheres in which computer design work took place.

A short clip of Doug Engelbart talking about his earlier projects.

A Sunday morning at the Gallica Bibliotheque numérique

A bit out of context, and more out of sheer fascination than as part of any systematic message; felt compelled to post these images after stumbling on the virtual pages of Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris (1894) on Gallica. Always such a fantastic resource for a media archaeologist!

The issue happened to have Albert Londe's article on his work on chronophotography, and participation at the Salpetriere-institute. This is indeed, to refer to Thomas Elsaesser's ideas, one crucial part of the S/M (this time science/medicine) contexts of cinematic technologies, and visual media history where the need for increasingly precise inscription mechanisms of the body was articulated together with hysteria, epilepsy and such maladies of the (female) corpse -- a topic that does not seize to interest me. (Also, btw. the topic of a wonderful recent book by a friend of mine; Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Logos Circa 1900).
- Image from the Bulletin; a special 12-lens mechanism part of the Salpetriere-institute laboratory for temporal-visual analysis and inscription of such illnesses.

- Another image from the same 1894 issue of the Bulletin, also Albert Londe and his series on chronophotography. A body in movement, a body in balance -- a fascination with the gestures of what the body can do -- and body on film, body inscribed as part of such time based technologies with span the too often assumed gap between entertainment (watching nude woman) and science/medicine (inscribing for analytical purposes women bodies as ill, hysteric bodies).

Bells of Atlantis - electronic music for a film

Thanks to a heads up from my colleague Julio D'Escrivan, possibly the first film to have electronic music specifically composed for it: Bells of Atlantis from 1952, directed by Ian Hugo/Hugh Parker Guiler, and featuring also his partner, Anais Nin... I am sure this set the tone for later 1950s science fiction soundscapes of beeps and buzzes of computers, robots, spacecrafts, etc that signalled "high tech", as Jaakko Suominen has argued in his cultural historical studies of computing...

CTheory Interview Archaeologies of Media Art

Its out, the discussion on media archaeology and a bit on media art as well that we conducted with Garnet Hertz. Still waiting to hear more feedback on it, but for me, the key bits are;

- articulation of media archaeology not only as a textual method; a theme that for example Garnet is a specialist on. In other words, the need to develop methodological ideas (and articulate them) of media archaeology in artistic spheres.
- flag the existence of competing and contradictory paradigms within media archaeology. This is only the first step, and something that I will do more thoroughly in the book I am writing for Polity Press next academic year (hopefully out in 2012).
- articulate briefly and tentatively the idea of media archaeology as a travelling discipline - to borrow Mieke Bal's notions concerning travelling concepts.

The beginning of the interview with Garnet...just a teaser, full text on Ctheory-website...

Also: at the end of this post, the referential bibliographic list that was taken out from the final published version of the Ctheory text. Might be useful (but do not its not an exhaustive list!). We compiled it originally with Erkki Huhtamo (a longer list actually) so a big thanks to him.

CTheory Interview Archaeologies of Media Art

Jussi Parikka in conversation with Garnet Hertz

Introduction

Media archaeology is an approach to media studies that has emerged over the last two decades. It borrows from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler, but also diverges from all of these theorists to form a unique set of tools and practices. Media archaeology is not a school of thought or a specific technique, but is as an emerging attitude and cluster of tactics in contemporary media theory that is characterized by a desire to uncover and circulate repressed or neglected media approaches and technologies. Its handful of proponents -- including Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Elsaesser, and Erkki Huhtamo -- are primarily interested in mobilizing histories and devices that have been sidelined during the construction of totalizing histories of popular forms of communication, including the histories of film, television, and new media. The lost traces of media technologies are deemed important topics to be excavated and studied; "dead" media technologies and idiosyncratic developments reveal important themes, structures, and links in the history of communication that would normally be occluded by more obvious narratives. This includes tracing irregular developments and unconventional genealogies of present-day communication technologies, believing that the most interesting developments often happen in the neglected margins of histories or artifacts.

In 2007, Jussi Parikka published Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang Publishing, New York). In Digital Contagions, Parikka provides an insightful articulation of media archaeology as a research methodology, which he implements to construct a clear cultural history of computer viruses. Parikka inverts the assumption that computer viruses -- which are semi-autonomous and self-replicating pieces of computer code -- are contrary to contemporary digital culture, instead arguing that computer viruses define the social and material landscape of computer mediated communication. [1] Although computer viruses are often considered as a disease and breakdown within the ecology of media, Parikka argues that these marginal computer programs provide key clues to the material and incorporeal conditions of the network age. They are not accidents of media culture, but increasingly the natural mode of digital media. In other words, the ontology of network culture is viral-like. [2]

In this conversation with Garnet Hertz -- who graduated with a PhD in Visual Studies on the topic of media archaeology and media arts from University of California, Irvine -- Parikka discusses media archaeology as a methodology of academic research in media studies and the media arts. In the process of constructing a theoretical foundation for media archaeology, they discuss and explore the topics of interdisciplinarity, historiography, art, new media, and academia.

-----
Garnet Hertz: I see Digital Contagions as bringing clarity to the ambiguous concept of media archaeology, and would like to continue to clarify the term here. To begin, how do you define media archaeology, and how do you envision it as a project, movement or an approach?

Jussi Parikka: Media archaeology... ambiguous? Indeed. I was just reminded by an archaeologist at Cambridge that there is a sub-discipline in archaeology called "media archaeology." Such contexts do not always spring to mind when we consider media archaeology from a more theoretical perspective. For us in media studies and media arts it is quite often the footnotes of Foucault, Kittler, and the dead media of Bruce Sterling that provides the context for the media archaeological way of doing analysis. Media archaeology exists somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s. I see media archaeology as a theoretically refined analysis of the historical layers of media in their singularity -- a conceptual and practical exercise in carving out the aesthetic, cultural, and political singularities of media. And it's much more than paying theoretical attention to the intensive relations between new and old media mediated through concrete and conceptual archives; increasingly, media archaeology is a method for doing media design and art. After the initial period of tackling the concept of media archaeology in the early 1990s, it is now crucial to take the idea forward and make it more theoretically rigorous. I am not saying it was not rigorous, but there was never a thorough discussion among the "practitioners" of media archaeology.

A Bibliographic Selection

-Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006)
-Bolter, Jay David & Grusin, Richard, Remediation. Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
-Crary, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
-Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989).
-Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cabel, eds. Thomas Elsaesser & Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).
-The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.)
-Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: a Freudian impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).

-Ernst, Wolfgang, M.edium F.oucault, (Weimar: Verlag & Datenbank Für
 Geisteswissenschaften, 2000)
-Ernst, Wolfgang, Das Rumoren der Archive, (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2002).
-Ernst, Wolfgang, Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007).
-Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
-Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).
-Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
-Gitelman, Lisa, Always Already New. Media, History, and the Data of Culture. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).
-Gunning, Tom, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Cinema and the (in)Credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (1989).
- Hagen, Wolfgang, Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks (Fink, 2005).
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen," ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, Vol. 7 (2004), pp. 31-82 (Tokyo: The Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences).
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd. Towards an Archeology of the Media", in Electronic Culture, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture 1996), pp. 296-303, 425-427.
-Huhtamo, Erkki, "Time Machines in the Gallery. An Archeological Approach in Media Art," in Immersed in Technology. Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Anne Moser with Douglas McLeod (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 232-268.
-Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi (eds), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications. Forthcoming from University of California Press 2010.
-Kahn, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999)
-
Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. orig. German 1985).
-Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
-Kittler, Friedrich, Optical Media. Trans Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
-Kockelkoren, Petran, Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre, (
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003;
-Mannoni, Laurent, Le Grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1994).
-Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001).
-Marvin, Carolyn, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
-McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
-MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
-Memory Bytes. History, Technology, and Digital Culture, eds Lauren Rabinovitz & Abraham Geil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
-Multimedia Histories. From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007).
- New German Media Theory, ed. Eva Horn, Grey Room-special issue Winter 2008.
- New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Thomas Keenan, Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2005).
-New Media, 1740-1914, ed. Lisa Gitelman & Geoffrey Pingree (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).
-Parikka, Jussi, Digital Contagions. A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
- Parikka, Jussi, Insect Media: An Archaelogy of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2010).
- Sconce, Jeffrey Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.).
- Siegert, Bernhardt, Relays. Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford: Stanford UP 1999).
-Spieker, Sven, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).
-The Variantology-book series edited by Siegfried Zielinski et al.
-Vissman, Cornelia, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2008).
-Volmar, Axel (ed) Zeitkritische Medien (Berlin: Kadmos, 2009).
-Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions. Cinema and Television as Entr’ actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999, orig. German 1989).
-
Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media. Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, orig. German 2002).

Sonic Archaeology

A quick heads up on the work of Shintaro Miyazaki, and the Institute for Algorhytmics on sonic archaeology. The work consists of an approach to the operational nature of media technologies especially in terms of their sonification -- how their sonic qualities can be used to understand that specific temporal materiality of digital culture from hard drives to ethernet traffic (hence related to packet sniffing).

Wendy Chun (in her Control and Freedom, p. 17) has briefly defined media archaeology in how it makes a difference to visual culture studies that is more focused on the screen - its interfaces, representations and even content at times. Media archaeology is in its Berlin vein however focused on "the machine" which means all the technical layers that govern and allow for the existence of the screen as a sensual experience for the human. However, what sonic archaeology does is move further away from the visual onwards to the sonic and especially the sonic as a rhythmic and temporal regime.

See (or actually listen) for algoRHYTHMIC noise of our everyday gadgets .

And for an elaboration of their methodology, see here on Sonic Archaeology.

"Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society "

Here is the blurb that University of Minnesota Press are going to use for the catalog for their Fall 2010 books...mine is coming out in the Posthumanities-series edited by Cary Wolfe.

Insect Media
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Jussi Parikka

Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society

Since the early nineteenth-century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed the use of insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an “insect theory of media,” one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien life-worlds of insects.

Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for understanding the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media Theory and History at Anglia Ruskin University and the Director of CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute. He is the author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses.

Theory/Media