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

Operative Media Archaeology - on Ernst

Happy to announce that my article on the German - and Berlin - media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst is out. Ernst is one of the important German media theorists less well known in the English speaking world. Often he is seen as a "student of Kittler's", but this is not 100% accurate -- also for the reason that he never was a student of Kittler...

Another reason is that Kittler himself denounced his affiliation with Media Archaeology (despite so many attaching the term especially to his name, and of course, Bernhard Siegert talking of 1980s and 1990s German media theory as media archaeology as Nietzschean gay science.)

Anyhow, have a look at the article in the most recent Theory, Culture & Society - such a great journal, which constantly features especially Friedrich Kittler's work. Now a bit of Ernst too.

And next year, or so, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press a whole book of Wolfgang Ernst writings...

Chemical Media Archaeology: Recrystallization

Here are some pictures from the recent Recrystallization workshop by Jonathan Kemp, Martin Howse and Ryan Jordan that took place in Berlin July 18-20, 2011.

The workshop consisted of dismantling with various means computer hardware down to its material bits, including gold, so as to excavate some of the components of "digital life." This is less metaphoric than experimental approach to look at the continuum between the material and the political economic.

"recrystallization was convened around the premise that while life itself starts from aperiodic crystals that encode infinite futures within a small number of atoms, the digital crystallization of the flesh by capital limits these futures to the point of exhaustion."

In more detail, recrystallization (following from an earlier workshop by Kemp and Jordan in London) consisted of:

Three sets of concurrent, feedbacking play and activities across three days:

1] Attempting to recover minerals and metals (including copper, gold and silver) from abandoned computers through execution of various volatile and chemical processes

2] The re-crystallisation of these minerals in novel arrays using raw/renditioned mineral assemblies including piezoelectrics, positive feedback, colloidal dispersions

3] The re-purposing and embedding of components and structures within wider geological and geophysical systems

Microresearch lab's performances and projects touch a new side in media archaeology that opens up our constituent machines, with various means including the chemical, in order to excavate what kind of modulations of light and energy sustain our contemporary hallucinations.

Related was the recent live (on Berlin Reboot FM) "data carvery":

"Data carving treats the user’s hard drive (and memory chips) as a surface for constant excavation. Reverse engineering daily data sediments promotes new forms of digital archaeology, with hard disk trouvee as rich seams to be opened and mined for mineral and personal gems."

Digital archaeology is mobilized into new, artistic-experimental operations.

At times, media archaeology might come with a Health and Safety warning.

The image(s) by: Martin Howse and Kathrin Günter.

Excavating the microchip

I remember a meeting with a professor of Art History in Toronto in 2007 - part of a job interview related situation, I was challenged by him concerning media archaeology, claimed that it was "all metaphorical", this use of "archaeology" in that brand of research.

Indeed, this has perhaps plagued some of the media archaeological research that is more discursive in its nature. And yet, there are various contexts in which the term is used far from metaphorically. On the one hand, the variety of media archaeology often associated with Sophienstrasse 22 address in Berlin has insisted on the technological agency of objects/signals and materiality of the networks in which our methodologies of media research of the past have to function. On the other hand, now in other context "digital archaeologists" are taking up the challenge and focusing for instance on microchips as excavation sites for digging down, unpacking and taking apart. The link contains a fascinating take on 6502 microchip that stems from mid-1970s; it points towards the important realization that to understand the media archaeology of technical media, we need to focus on the components - such as chips - and not just the "end results", the media-objects that we usually recognize as media.

Crystallize

I have been for a while big fan of the projects of Microresearch Lab and Martin Howse. I had yesterday the pleasure of interviewing him about his work and the forthcoming workshop Recrystallization. Martin's work is to me inspiring in its aesthetico-technical regime, but I have to say, I am often lost in terms of what on earth is going on. So was rewarding to be able to chat to Martin directly and get his elaboration on his artistic methods. The interview is forthcoming in the Creative Technologies Review.

For me, even if not explicitly and only media archaeology, these projects have again an edge that lends itself to media archaeological inquiry - concerning obsoleteness, the intertwining of the imaginary and the material, of "under-the-hood" methodologies, Pynchon, Ballard and more.

Decrystallization.

Recrystallization.

Workshops in collaboration between Ryan Jordan, Jonathan Kemp and Martin Howse.

Media - input/output

Communication museum, Berlin.

Transmit, Process, Store: Launching Media Archaeology

It is indeed out! Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and myself, published by University of California Press sums up years of work on this project and also sums up a range of approaches that we have grown accustomed to call "media archaeology": from various traditions such as new film history, media arts as well as digital culture research, it has emerged as one synthetic approach to think old media and new media intertwined. Hence, we are celebrating its launch in Berlin (and further events are planned, hopefully one in the UK too).


Welcome to our July 15 event at Institute of Media Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin - where we are both celebrating the launch of Media Archaeology and even more importantly, processing (excuse the pun) the closing of a certain era of German media theory. The by now legendary address of Sophienstrasse 22 is closing down and the institutes are moving premises. This is the address where Friedrich Kittler worked, and a whole generation of German media theorists can consider their alma mater...

TRANSMIT, PROCESS, STORE
Goodbye Sophienstrasse - Book presentation Media Archaeology

On the 15th of July 2011, the time of the Institute for Media Studies at Sophienstraße 22a is coming to an end and together with the other institutes, we will relocate to the Pergamon Palais on Kupfergraben, on the site of Hegel's house. This transmission marks an occasion to bring together teachers, researchers, students and friends of Sophienstraße to process and store the times and ideas which emerged in this spot, in order to duly celebrate our farewell. Furthermore, we will present the new volume Media Archaeology, edited by our current research fellow Jussi Parikka together with Erkki Huhtamo.

We cordially invite you to join us in talks, discussion and celebration on Friday, July 15th 2011, starting 4 p.m. Berlin's best book store Pro qm will be present with a book table.

Program:

Location: Medientheater (ground floor of Sophienstrasse 22a):

4 p.m.
Welcome: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, Paul Feigelfeld und Dr. Jussi Parikka
4.15 - 5.45
Contributions by: Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kittler, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst, Prof. Dr. Claus Pias, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hagen

5.45
Book presentation "Media Archaeology" (University of California Press), edited by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo. Talks and discussion with Jussi Parikka, Paul Demarinis, Claus Pias and Wolfgang Ernst.

Followed by drinks and music, until security shuts us down.

Winky Dink avantgarde at the Game Museum, Berlin

I visited the Computerspielmuseum in Berlin Friedrichshain on Sunday for the first time. On the Karl Marx allee, in the midst of the majestic 1950s houses, it was a nice way to spend over an hour. Besides the usual stuff of hardware and games (some of them you could play as well) of recent decades, a couple of media archaeologically interesting examples:

Winky Dink - a video of the mid 1950s kids' TV show, which included a special drawing screen that was attached on the television screen -- and the show's host was offering guidance on drawing on that, offering both an early interactive TV experience as well as a certain kind of tactility with the early medium (I am not sure but I think Huhtamo has somewhere referred to this tactility).
Another interesting example from their collections was the GDR educational computer, Piko Dat, from 1969. It was to teach the basics of programming (by creating circuits), and hence also programming games even - and can be seen emblematic of the wider role cybernetics was envisioned to play for the socialist reality.


The museum was aiming to be both entertaining as well as informative, even slightly self-reflective of the difficulties in preserving the cultural heritage of software based forms such as gaming - with even some sections dedicated to this question! In addition, some interesting corners concerning the global situation of game design, and some experimental projects made the museum a bit more interesting than "your usual" game museum, I would say.

The current (working) Table of Contents for the project

I am now working in Berlin, at Humboldt University Medienwissenschaft, and funded by the Humboldt Foundation until July. The institute is one of the places where to really start media archaeological excavations and theory, thanks to Wolfgang Ernst's persistent work that extends outside books: the media archaeological archive, or "fundus", is such an example of operationalizing the media archaeological concept in terms of machines that work - not just dead media, but media undead, has Ernst characterized it, and me and Hertz branded as "zombie media" (which btw. has just been accepted to be published in Leonardo-journal in 2012 with the title "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method").

In the midst of writing, here a short summary of state of play of the book in terms of its projected table of contents:

Jussi Parikka
Media Archaeology and Digital Culture (contracted with Polity Press)

Table of contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Old and New in Parallel Lines

Chapter 2 From Visual to Affective, or, Reappropriating the Past
Chapter 3 Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects
Chapter 4 Media Theory and New Materialism
Chapter 5 Mapping Noise and Accidents: Media Studies goes Bad
Chapter 6 Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage
Chapter 7 Practicing Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation and Creation

Conclusions: Media Archaeology in the Digital

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

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

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.

Fellowship - and reading Foucault

I am happy to announce that the Alexander von Humboldt-foundation has offered me a research fellowship for Spring 2011. This exciting piece of news ensures for me the possibility to concentrate on my Media Archaeology book contracted with Polity, and the fellowship complements the already awarded short-term fellowship with the London Science Museum.


In the midst of the news, I have been engaging - again - with Foucault's archaeology of knowledge - and the book of same name. Indeed, re-reading it has made me realize the extent to which projects such as mine that aim to write archaeologies of media archaeology are themselves establishing temporary unities on otherwise widely dispersed epistemological fields. In this paradoxical sense, this method of cultural archaeology of knowledge and power formations seems to work against its own premises --- and to show the discontinuities, dispersions, ruptures, and movements which form any illusion of unity for a body of work, statements, theories, practices. This way of applying Foucault to media archaeology as a discipline produces interesting realizations that have to be taken critically, and meticulously. It produces itself a way of redistributing the lineages and relations between precedents and antecedents, of influences and follow-ups form. The existence of various layers in which media archaeology forms (at least 1) as part of Benjamin, and wider early image and media theory e.g. in Germany of early 20th century, 2) as part of new historicism and cinema studies as well as media arts fields of 1980s and early 1990s, 3) the wider use of the term to refer to imaginary media research, variantology, and excavations of hidden and forgotten media since the 1990s, including media artistic work and 4) more recent developments in media theory that develop it as a methodology for excavation into contemporary media and aim to include new fields of analysis such as circuit bending and software cultures) a crucial challenge of how to write archaologies in the multiple but preserving consistency, and how to bring in a temporal dynamics to this enterprise.

This dynamics is actually part of Foucault's insistence of "discourse" already when he defines the term in The Archaeology of Knowledge:

"Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask one-self how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point of time; it is, from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of complicities of time." (Foucault 2002, p.131).

In a very good article on media archaeology and new film history, and in other contexts as well I believe, Thomas Elsaesser has demanded that we do not only focus on e.g. the definition of cinema -- but to its temporality; not only what is cinema, but when is cinema. This media archaeological question -- which is not only media archaeological in its theme and content but also in its method of temporal dynamics -- is very Foucauldian in the sense as it insists we need to investigate the distribution over time and in time of such constellations of epistemological (as well as perceptual, affective, cognitive) value. Indeed, applied to media archaeology it is a similar institutional question; not only what is media archaeology, but when is media archaeology. The notion of it as a traveling discipline (on the move, between disciplinary boundaries and institutions) points to its "when" as a formation of knowledge in productive crisis situations where we are rethinking knowledge-production, knowledge-institutions, the pervasiveness of "media" for perception, memory, cultural heritage and such -- and hence aim through media archaeology think not only media studies and academia, but archival and other institutions involved in new regimes of mediated memory. When is media archaeology then? Its in an age of redistributed responsibilities within academia, of new forms of knowledge production enhanced and rethought with the Internet, software cultures and open source, of reinvented collaborations across academia and other bodies, of technical media as the lingua franca for advanced communications, of knowledge and practices in which understanding media is often doing media -- which however is not dismissing the need to understand the complex genealogies in which contemporary media is formed.

AHRC referee reports for my Media Archaeology Fellowship application

I received three referee reports for my AHRC application for an Early Career Fellowship to finish the media archaeology project. It was a good read -- all of the three reports; not to claim, that all of them were in complete agreement with my application, but in the sense that the reports were helpful in pointing out issues that need to be addressed. They were to my liking quite positive, which reassured me of the need for this project and as part of AHRC policy, I was able to write a short, 3 page response to the reports.

In short, I tried to outline in a bit more detail what the concrete research side of the project is in addition to developing theoretical insights into media archaeology. I underlined the work that would take place in some archives and collections -- including the wonderful "media archaeology collection" at the basement of Media Studies in Berlin as well as my visit to Science Museum as a short-term fellow in early 2011. In addition, the points about "creative practice" approaches to media archaeology merited a bit more words, where I tried to point towards the need to interview some practitioners in the field in order to tap into some of the methodological premises of "media archaeology as an art method." (On this note, as a fotenote: this cannot be missed, Discipline & The Moving Image-event/screening, presented by Zoe Beloff).

In addition to some queries concerning management of the project, I got a chance to briefly point towards the knowledge exchange possibilities as well as some conceptual themes. All in all, I felt pretty excited about the project -- thanks to the feedback, and the response I composed where I had to articulate some of the queries in a brief form. Oh and I did have a chance to flag this blog as one tool for project management, and distribution of interim ideas, results, offshoots, etc. as well!

Now I just have to wait for the results...fingers crossed.

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."

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.

interview on media archaeology and media arts

I have spent the day editing an interview we did with Dr Garnet Hertz on the methods, contexts and relations to media arts of media archaeology. The process has been long but enjoyable (and we hope to find a place to publish this extensive interview) as it has really helped me to articulate several things that might form some core statements in my forthcoming book as well. Garnet himself is a specialist in media archaeology as an artistic methods and I am grateful for his collaboration on this. This has really made it clear how media archaeology has to move from being a "mere" textual practice to a fully fledged artistic method - and that methodology needs to be articulated clearly. I think there are two ways to progress here to take it forward (and how it has been taken forward); media archaeology as a method for concrete machinics of media (whether in the fashion of Paul DeMarinis, or then e.g. the hardware hacking, circuit bending way proposed by the Berlin school promoted by Ernst). On the other hand, there is the ontological argument, as I would label it; that stems already from Kittler, continued by Ernst, but also lots of other recent developments which insist on the specificity of the material in technological excavations; the materiality of the contemporary, scientifically informed, media culture.

In addition, the interview helped me to kick-start the idea of media archaeology as a traveling discipline. It has not found a stable home yet, but in the manner that Mieke Bal writes about traveling concepts, media archaeology is a toolbox traveling between and across discplines and institutions from film to media and art schools; concrete archives and theory institutions. There lies its promise as well in terms of trying to advance an understanding of such traveling sets of theories as a crucial component of the 21st century arts and humanities agenda -- traveling not least between arts and sciences, humanities and technology.

More soon, if we found a journal or some other venue to publish the interview...

Media Archaeological Art/methods; Transmediale 2010

A theme such as "Futurity" is begging for media-archaeological approaches. No wonder then that at the 2010 Transmediale Future Obscura-exhibition several art works employed media-archaeological methods, and even the term was explicitly mentioned several times.

Of these, Gebhard Sengmüller's A Parallel Image was the strongest in terms of its affiliation with this strand of thinking/doing old media, new media. It also investigated imaginary media but in much more interesting fashion that mere discursive excavations. Sengmüller constructed a transmission device for visual data that does not break visual elements into discrete elements then sent over to the receiving end, but employs a very messy (one has to say) way of parallel image transmission; Instead, every pixel element is sent in parallel "directly" to the receiver via some 2,500 cables. Hence, it detaches from the universally adopted ideas that were early on formulated by the Frenchman Maurice Leblanc in 1880 that images are to be broken into lines before transmission and that light is after that to be translated into electric signals; and at the receiving end, the receiver's function is the further translation of electric currents into an image (as the catalogue text to A Parallel Image introduces).

Instead, Sengmüller describes his idea of practical uselessness but of media-archaeological interest:

"... an apparatus that links every pixel on the 'camera side' with every pixel on the 'monitor' side in the technically simplest way possible. Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, this leads to an absurd system that connects a grid of 2,500 photoconductors on the sender side with 2,500 small light bulbs on the receiver side, pixel by pixel, using a total of 2,500 copper wires. In addition, there are wires that supply each of these 'image transmission - micro units' with electricity."

For Sengmüller, complexification becomes an artistic method, in conjunction to its historically tuned nature.

Similar promise of media archaeological methodology was present in both Julius von Bismarck's the Space beyond me through the use of its 16mm projection-cum-immersive installation (alas, the piece was not operational when I was around!) and Julien Maire's The Inverted Cone. Addressing directly the nature of temporality, Maire's piece was tuned with Henri Bergson's cone-like structure of memory that stretches between actuality and the bubbling under intensive virtuality full of potentialities. The result was, I have to say, impressive in its subtlety that was suggestive of the continous de- and recomposition processes of memory. Memory become in that installation room a machinic process of composition reminding of the unconscious less as a theater than a machine to borrow Deleuze and Guattari. Again, the short text was using the trope of the media archaeologist - and why not. It was again embedded in this idea of time-traveling, but this time as machinology of sorts.

In general, what we did not see was a strong articulation of what is the media archaeological method in media arts. Without going into details here, so far the developments have been mostly pointing towards at least four directions (apologies in advance as such a classification needs a much more careful eye);
1) use of historical themes in representational terms as part of a piece
2) invoking alternative histories, that offer critical insights through the piece (perhaps some of Zoe Beloff's women's histories coupled together with technogical themes of mediation)
3) imaginary media constructed; devices that are dead, or never built being reconstructed and re-employed whether out of curiosity value that investigates the nature of obsolescence, progress and technological culture as one of novelty; or then to bring out also directly political themes such as new technologies as direct threats to the living world, the ecology (as Garnet Hertz argues through his dead media works)
4) media archaeological art methods as excavating the machine; past and/or present. Opening up the machine to investigate its microtemporal fluxes, machinics, operational principles is something again very "Berlin-style" and represents a powerful way of incorporating media archaeology as a method of opening up contemporary technologies (hardware hacking, circuit bending) and hence connecting to themes of political economy.

Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Diagrammatics

I am thinking - and well hopefully soon doing - of an article to be written. It should focus mostly on the German media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst who I find interesting a) as an alternative approach to the "what is media archaeology" question and b) a key contemporary German media theorist who has interesting links to Friedrich Kittler but is significantly taking such materialist media theory into new directions. Such new directions articulate media through the notion of the archive (and vice versa archive and cultural memory as well as historiography through the notion of technical media). Will also try to give some talks this Spring based on this topic.

A short abstract

Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Diagrammatics

Media archaeological ways of extending the lifetime of new media into what is often a bit loosely called “old media” has experienced a revival during the past years. In recent new media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology seems to be emerging. Its partly a result from a reaction against the narrative as well as often cinematic emphases from which media archaeology emerged e.g. as part of new cinema histories, although to use a word such as “reaction” connotes a much more clear-cut distancing from “old” ways of media archaeology than what is happening. Is there an “old” way of doing media archaeology in contrast to some of the recent debates concerning for example “operative diagrammatics” of media archaeology as Wolfgang Ernst claims, or the new theoretical contexts from which e.g. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s and others’ inspiration for a revitalisation of histories of media stems from?

So far attached to such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent even Friedrich Kittler, the debates surrounding media archaeology as a method seem to be taking it forward not only as a subdiscipline of (media) history, but increasingly into what will be introduced below as materialist media diagrammatics. This talk will in this context map some recent trends in German media theory and tie them together with some more Anglo-American trends, such as software studies. I will address Wolfgang Ernst’s mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts of how to rethink media archaeology represent both a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seem to not only replicate Kittler’s huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but continue that into novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst’s provocative take that hopes to distance German media theory in its hardware materiality resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies. Such thinkers writers include Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Noah Wardrip-Fruin as well as Nick Montfort & Ian Bogost.