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...
Showing posts with label archive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label archive. Show all posts
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Kill the darling part 6: bury the archaeology
It's time to say goodbyes to "information archaeologies" - Timothy Lenoir's concept, or at least the longer version of the footnote. I love Lenoir's work, but there is no way to keep this in the long form so it is time to bury it. This was in the context of Chapter VI on the concepts of the archive and archival practices for understanding media culture.
In addition to arts contexts, the question of archiving and excavating digital material is one that is crucial for post World War II scientific cultures, and hence histories of science and technology. For such cultures of innovation, where for the first time scientific research was inherently articulated through computational media, the materials left for “future archaeologists” present practical problems. As flagged by Tim Lenoir, such “information archaeologies” point towards how a mapping of science is a mapping of the software and hardware platforms instrumental to the research. Of course, also the development of so many aesthetic innovation in terms of HCI and screen technologies rose from similar science-tech labs too. In Lenoir’s (2007: 365-366) words: “Historians will need to add new tools of information archaeology to their tool-kit in order to write the history of recent science and technology born digitally. Among the types of tools we need are, for instance, emulators of older systems, such as the IBM 360, and other machines, such as Burrough’s machines, Osborn’s, and others that do not have legacy systems maintained by large companies or successor firms. Even early-generation Silicon Graphics machines that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s are becoming scarce today. In order to research the programs that ranon these machines, we need to construct emulators that run on current generation machines. Beyond this we need to render the original programs in forms readable by current disk drives and other data-reading technologies. While genealogies of software and software languages are being constructed, more attention will have to be devoted to the history of software languages, and their implementations.”
In addition to arts contexts, the question of archiving and excavating digital material is one that is crucial for post World War II scientific cultures, and hence histories of science and technology. For such cultures of innovation, where for the first time scientific research was inherently articulated through computational media, the materials left for “future archaeologists” present practical problems. As flagged by Tim Lenoir, such “information archaeologies” point towards how a mapping of science is a mapping of the software and hardware platforms instrumental to the research. Of course, also the development of so many aesthetic innovation in terms of HCI and screen technologies rose from similar science-tech labs too. In Lenoir’s (2007: 365-366) words: “Historians will need to add new tools of information archaeology to their tool-kit in order to write the history of recent science and technology born digitally. Among the types of tools we need are, for instance, emulators of older systems, such as the IBM 360, and other machines, such as Burrough’s machines, Osborn’s, and others that do not have legacy systems maintained by large companies or successor firms. Even early-generation Silicon Graphics machines that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s are becoming scarce today. In order to research the programs that ranon these machines, we need to construct emulators that run on current generation machines. Beyond this we need to render the original programs in forms readable by current disk drives and other data-reading technologies. While genealogies of software and software languages are being constructed, more attention will have to be devoted to the history of software languages, and their implementations.”
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
The archive and heritage institutions in the digital age - an interview with Dr Robin Boast
As flagged earlier, I believe that one of the key issues that Media Archaeology can address is how we are rethinking and redoing the archive - and more generally cultural memory institutions - in the age of software. Wolfgang Ernst is one of the key media archaeology scholars offering ideas towards the concept of archive -- emphasizing how storage is conflating with search algorithms, and how we need to rethink archives as dynamic time-critical entities.
I also interviewed Dr Robin Boast from the Cambridge Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology on this topic and the interview can be heard as part of our Creative Technologies Review podcast, episode 11. Dr Boast is able to flag important and fresh ideas of how our cultural institutions of memory are taking into account the new networked environments - and where there is still much work to be done.
I also interviewed Dr Robin Boast from the Cambridge Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology on this topic and the interview can be heard as part of our Creative Technologies Review podcast, episode 11. Dr Boast is able to flag important and fresh ideas of how our cultural institutions of memory are taking into account the new networked environments - and where there is still much work to be done.
Monday, 10 January 2011
The Archive
I am starting to write a new chapter for the book -- this time on the notion of the archive, while enjoying the short term fellowship with the Science Museum, London. Here follows a short summary of where I am starting -- and hopefully discuss in this chapter how the dynamics of time-criticality of software has to be taken into account when talking about memory and archive in contemporary culture (important references being the work of Chun and Ernst among others), the personalisation of software archives with social media platforms, and the ensuing implications in the context of cognitive capitalism (without going into as thorough discussion as Stiegler does in his writings), as well as such forms of medium specific techniques as in computer forensics, and their potential relation to media archaeology (hoping to discuss Matt Kirschenbaum's work a bit). Cognizant of the discussions stemming from Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever, and other writings of recent years addressing the archive as a concept for cultural theory, I however find a lack of such writings which are able to both be theoretically fresh and rigorous and pay enough attention to medium and tech-specificity.
The notion of the archive lies at the centre of media archaeology – the implicit starting point for so much of historical research that it itself as a place, and a media form has been neglected, become invisible. At least in media archaeological writings, the archive has not been much debated – although, now, more recently, Wolfgang Ernst has been flagging the need to rigorously rethink the concept and practices of the archive in the age of technical media, and media archaeologists such as Huhtamo have been demanding that scholars meticulously do their home work – but not at home; first hand view to sources, materials and collections is demanded by Huhtamo as a crucial guideline for his emphasis on media archaeology as a historically empirical enterprise.
The centrality of the archive for any cultural and media archaeology is not least due to Foucault’s expansion of the concept from the concrete physical places of storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and expression of cultures. More concretely, we can see how the archive has been a key node in relaying and storing data of modern culture, and hence acted as a key medium in itself – very much connected to the bureaucratic mode of control alongside registering and manipulating data e.g. in offices and through office technologies (typewriters, calculators, spreadsheets, and later databases, software based applications, etc.). However, with the emergence of such new social media “archives” as Youtube, Flickr, etc., the whole notion of the bureaucratic archive has changed (Gane & Beer 2008: 71-86). Modes of accessing and storing data have changed from centrally governed to distributed and software-based, and the whole culture of digitality has been referred to as one of databases, instead of narratives (Manovich). This chapter investigates such new notions of the archive as modes of inscription of information and culture, connected to the new modes of economy and capitalism that frame the relations to more personal and easily accessible databases. What are the implications for our notions of cultural heritage from such a shift in the practices and discourses of the archive, and how does media archaeology lend itself into discourses concerning the archival and museum in software cultures?
The notion of the archive lies at the centre of media archaeology – the implicit starting point for so much of historical research that it itself as a place, and a media form has been neglected, become invisible. At least in media archaeological writings, the archive has not been much debated – although, now, more recently, Wolfgang Ernst has been flagging the need to rigorously rethink the concept and practices of the archive in the age of technical media, and media archaeologists such as Huhtamo have been demanding that scholars meticulously do their home work – but not at home; first hand view to sources, materials and collections is demanded by Huhtamo as a crucial guideline for his emphasis on media archaeology as a historically empirical enterprise.
The centrality of the archive for any cultural and media archaeology is not least due to Foucault’s expansion of the concept from the concrete physical places of storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and expression of cultures. More concretely, we can see how the archive has been a key node in relaying and storing data of modern culture, and hence acted as a key medium in itself – very much connected to the bureaucratic mode of control alongside registering and manipulating data e.g. in offices and through office technologies (typewriters, calculators, spreadsheets, and later databases, software based applications, etc.). However, with the emergence of such new social media “archives” as Youtube, Flickr, etc., the whole notion of the bureaucratic archive has changed (Gane & Beer 2008: 71-86). Modes of accessing and storing data have changed from centrally governed to distributed and software-based, and the whole culture of digitality has been referred to as one of databases, instead of narratives (Manovich). This chapter investigates such new notions of the archive as modes of inscription of information and culture, connected to the new modes of economy and capitalism that frame the relations to more personal and easily accessible databases. What are the implications for our notions of cultural heritage from such a shift in the practices and discourses of the archive, and how does media archaeology lend itself into discourses concerning the archival and museum in software cultures?
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