Media Archaeology of Signals (Transmediale 2011)

For me, last year it was Gebhard Sengmuller’s A Parallel Image, and this year Rosa Menkman’s The Collapse of PAL: the media archaeological highlight of Transmediale. Menkman’s performance dealt with obsolescence, death of media, and what is most interesting, media archaeology of signals and signal formats. Instead of the focus on devices, even if at times lost and outside mainstream, we are seeing new perspectives that take in their focus components, processes and such “minor elements” of media history.

The performance was a two-screen installation with Menkman using various audio and video sources and the signal twisted, modulated, bent. She combined the signal with a Cracklebox, a European telephone signal, Morse code and an old Casio keyboard among other things (info from the Transmediale 2011 programme book). The screens were filled with electronic signal landscapes, of waveforms and at times recognizable Gestalts. The angel from future, a Benjaminian figure of critique of progress, was the protagonist through whose mouth the Collapse of PAL painted a history of the PAL signal as loser to for example the DVB signal. The terms such as losers of history, history excavated in midst of rubbles, storm of progress which works to hide the multiplicity in history all point directly to Benjamin’s famous On the Concept of History text.

Despite the fact that I loved the performance, I also sensed the danger of nostalgia in this strong defensive reaction of history of losers – which was framed through an idea of progress as the force that blindly abandons all that it considers inefficient. A critique of rationalism and progress, the other aspects of the media archaeological gesture of the dialectics between losers and emerging media is not grounded enough. To what extent are we in danger of celebrating past media just for the sake of our emotional attachment to them as childhood memories and part of the collective media memories that are now in danger of being lost with new signal solutions and media environments? How to differentiate the media archaeological critique from nostalgia, and hence from a crucial part of the late capitalist consumer media sphere that Fredric Jameson pointed out as one crucial affective feature of contemporary culture?

(Photo by Jonathan Groeger/David Szauder) photos by Jonathan Gröger and David Szauder photos by Jonathan Gröger and David Szauder

On ruins - Benjamin

If media archaeology is thought and analysis that emerges from the ruins - takes left-overs, waste, rubble and ruins of media cultures as its fuel then it is quite naturally Walter Benjamin who stands as one of its grounding figures. The work of Arcades-project is emblematic in this regard with its multilayered approach that methodologically picks up on the theme of the fragment when writing about the ruins (in which we live) of modernity, mass culture, emergence of media cultures, and capitalism.

The idea of "allegory" as a driving force of Benjamin's methodology is explained in his earlier work Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) in a passage on "ruins". In short, and literally in a condensed fashion Benjamin outlines how "allegories are in the sphere of thought what ruins are among things" (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1.1, p. 354). Whereas he goes to explicate this in the context of his study - the 18th century theatrical genre - for us this has media archaeological and ecological implications in how he ties together the ruins of material culture as part of the ecologies of thought, and in a way precedes some of the ways in which media archaeological research and cultural histories of material culture have tried to engage with these themes. We live among layered historical times - concretely - of which architectures are the most common example to an extent that has afforded even grounding ontological and metaphysical insights as with Heidegger, but we can extend that to architectures and ruins of media culture, which demonstrate what Braudel would have called the various durations of history. The long duration, the intermediary, and the time of the event intermingle and mix, and our seemingly contemporary is one of old, the past as well in a way that does not fit in with either linear nor cyclical notions of time. Same applies to thought which resides in ruins as well and where the idea of "archaeology" might be more apt than "history" as a notion to carve out the layered constellation in the cognitive and the affective take place. This is also why Freud himself was fond of archaeological metaphors, but also why Freud, in a way, and in his own way as a contemporary of Benjamin is another predecessor of media archaeology as Thomas Elsaesser shows (in his article forthcoming in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications). In this sense, the allegorical as understood by Benjamin is a parallel, partly competing, partly complementing concept to those master concepts proposed by Huhtamo (cyclical topoi) and Zielinski (variantology, the minor genealogies of media culture).

Thoughts, things, surroundings emerge from ruins, but so they return as ruins. Dead media is an index of ruins of media cultures, but also a reminder of the continuing environmental significance of discarded waste - haunting zombies.

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.

Archaeologies of media archaeology

In terms of the archaeology of media archaeology, the roots of many of the media theoretical debates in the early 20th century writers and artists are important. The references to Walter Benjamin are already part of the tool box of the theories of media archaeology, similarly as they recognize for example Dolf Sternberger's Panorama of the 19th-century as one of the forerunners of thinking old media. Indeed, the social and technological changes that branded the first decades of the century left their mark in a close rethinking of memory, history and media technology as intimately connected.

This is where it would be interesting to ask questions such as how Erkki Huhtamo's ideas of recurring topoi, topics, related to Aby Warburg's dynamograms that Buchloch describes as "the recurring motifs of gesture and bodily expression that he had identified in his notorious term 'pathos formulas." (See Buchloch's article in the 2006 book The Archive.) And its not only that, but as I wrote above, the wider term changes in terms of understanding ruins, remnants, media technologies - in addition to a polarized social political atmosphere. Here we already find a great articulation of a new form of subjectivity and historical consciousness emerging that is less universalising, less narrative and more open to media technological (i.e. not only literary) articulations. I find Buchloch's summary intriguing:

"Thus one could argue that by the mid 1920s a variety of homologous new models of writing and imaging historical accounts emerged simultaneously, ranging from the montage techniques of artistic practices to Warburg's Atlas or those of the Annales historians. In all of these projects (literary, artistic, filmic, historical) a post-humanist and post-bourgeois subjectivity is constituted. The telling of history as a sequence of events and accounts of its individual agents is displaced by a focus on the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity of participating agents, while the process of history is reconceived as a structural system of perpetually changing interactions and permutations between economic and ecological givens, class formations and their ideologies, and the resulting types of social and cultural interactions specific to each particular moment."

What the text could emphasize more, or directly, is that memory becomes immanently modulated in media technological constellations. That is the value of Warburg's Atlas as a work of juxtaposed imagery (memory as images), as well as the reconfiguration of everyday sensations, perceptions, and structures of memory in the midst of mass-produced media. Furthermore, interesting in terms of archaeology of media archaeology is the connection established with the Annales in the above quote. Whereas the link between media archaeology emerging in the 1980s and new historicism (and new cultural histories) is clear, we can find yet another link already in this pre WW-II school of historical thought. In terms of intellectual content, excavating this link to Foucault and hence channeled further to later media archaeological theories might be one way to establish interesting connections; in terms of a media technological history, its the links to Warburg, Benjamin, the Surrealists, montage-thinking and other different ways of conceiving memory, perception and temporality that could provide alternative ideas.

Of course, when talking of 1920s, a connection between Mnemosyne-atlas as a mode of clustering and the current project driven by Lev Manovich concerning cultural analytics in the age of computing power has clear parallels.