Kill the darling part 11: forget the non-conscious

In Chapter 2, I try to make a path from new film history research into the multiple media histories of sensation in cinematic cultures. Moving onwards to affect and software culture, I try to expand this articulation and rethinking of the sensation as a Benjaminian, layered, historical mode of being. In that context, I was thinking of mobilizing some ideas from Katherine Hayles and Thrift, but now only in reduced form which means that I need to cut this nice quote, that to me is somehow crystallising great ideas concerning ubiquitous media cultures :

...
These kinds of challenges to cinema and human sensation-based media theories relate perhaps to what in part have been accelerated by software embedded media cultures, and what Katherine Hayles has (following Nigel Thrift’s lead) formulated as the technological non-conscious --- the fact that

"[h]uman cognition increasingly takes place within environments where human behaviour is entrained by intelligent machines through such everyday activities as cursor movement and scrolling, interacting with computerized voice trees, talking and text messaging on cell phones, and searching the Web to find whatever information is needed at the moment. As computation moves out of the desktop into the environment with embedded sensors, smart coatings on walls, fabrics, and appliances, and radio frequency ID (RFID) tags, the cognitive systems entraining human behaviour become even more pervasive, flexible and powerful in their effects on human conscious and non-conscious cognition." (Hayles 2008:27-28).
...

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.”

Kill the darling part 4, Dijkstra's last words

One more - this time it's time to say goodbyes to a reference to Edsger Dijkstra's classic text mentioned in the context of Kittler's media theory. I am not sure if this passage would have worked anyway, but the idea was to elaborate Kittler's media ontology and some of its post-structuralist underpinnings with the help of programming languages. In addition to language speaking in us, it's technical media languages etc. that speak (in) us. I would still like to do something with his text, but perhaps in another context - and for those wanting to find out a bit more, check out Wendy Chun's new book on Programmed Visions where she tackles software histories, including structured programming.

In this classic of software history and structured programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra’s (1968: 147. Cf. Chun 2004) “Go To Statements” considered harmful he writes:

[…] although the programmer’s activity ends when he has constructed a correct program, the process taking place under control of his program is the true subject matter of his activity, for it is this process that has to accomplish the desired effect; it is this process that in its dynamic behavior has to satisfy the desired specifications. Yet, once the program has been made, the ‘making’ of the corresponding process is delegated to the machine.”

If read through the media theoretical lenses of Kittler and materialist media theory, such an idea is not only part of the emergence of structured programming in the 1960s, but a good crystallization of the bootstrapped autonomy of process of language – also software.

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.

Recording of Media Archaeology and New Media Studies talk (Cambridge, UK)

I gave a talk in Cambridge, at Anglia Ruskin University at our Faculty research seminar -- the title was "Media Archaeology and New Media Studies". It introduces and summarizes some recent discussions in media archaeology, giving an overview. Hence, it points towards how materiality, artistic practices, and a promixity to software studies, platform studies and such new media forensics as Kirschenbaum's are some interesting new directions in the field.

The talk was streamed and you can find the recording here.

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.

Archaeology of Programming: the Hollerith

Archaeologies of programming -- a picture from the Science Museum (London) collections of the Hollerith machine punch card punching machine. Through this you were able to make the punch cards with the statistical information for the late 19th century statistical purposes of US census. To be honest, I think this is a slightly later punching machine than from the 1890 census, but still, principle is the same and illustrates the mechanical nature of coding information on the cards.

Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation at BL

I will be attending this seminar at British Library, and feeling excited about the stuff I am going to learn; I think its ideal in providing input to some of the cutting edge ways in which we are thinking the notion and practices of the archive in software and network cultures. Themes seem to flag the move from spatial and narrative based archives to investigations into the microtemporal processes in which cultural heritage is being circulated; indeed, we need to think why humanities and historical knowledge needs as much "magnetic flux transitions, hexadecimal code and file system analysis" as it used to do hermeneutics, interpretation etc. Naturally, any kind of opposition of regimes of knowledge production is a mere polemical gesture, but I think this resonates strongly with the Wolfgang Ernst-direction in media archaeology and understanding of the new cultures of memory in the age of high-tech. What's more, is how these new regimes of memory and preservation are articulated together with the notion of the personal -- another key trend in terms of understanding the more microscopic (technical but also sociological) patterns in which traces are left and collected, and gathered meaningful. The mobile, individualized subject that is however increasingly collectivised in terms of traces in clouds and other services is where this new idea of "personal" takes place. On political levels, the problem of the dividual (Deleuze) has tried to articulate this doubling, or multiplication of lives in digital cultures. In addition, what appeals to me are the possible articulations of media archaeology implicitly present in the below text referring to "microscopic" and "mesoscopic" scales of analysis (the latter could be seen closer to where even earlier media archaeological research has been "digging" in terms of interfaces, media environments, etc.).

Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation
Advances in the curatorship and scholarship of personal digital archives

A DIGITAL LIVES RESEARCH SEMINAR
from the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library
Date: 5 July 2010
Time: 10:00 to 17:

Introduction

Recently there have been significant and exciting advances made in the curation of personal digital archives. Seemingly distinct aspects of computing have come together to yield a vision of future curation and research in the archival context. The use of forensic technologies has arisen from a profound concern that future digital scholarship must be based on personal digital objects that have been properly authenticated and that future historical research should be able, at a minimum, to interpret available dates, times and origins appropriately. This is digital scholarship and science taken to the microscopic scale of magnetic flux transitions, hexadecimal code and file system analysis.

At the same time there has been a desire to capture the context of creativity and historical happening in the fullest way, and this is manifesting itself within the computer environment, at the mesoscopic scale, in the evocative viewing of the personal digital objects through the original graphical user interface, complete with desktop layout, folder directories, application toolbars, and network volumes, resources and venues, and in the selection of menu items with a mouse,
trackpad or touch screen - with this research experience being made possible through the use of emulators and virtual machines and bootable disk images. Beyond the original computer environment, there is the capture of the physical environment through immersive photography, 3D graphical imagery and audiovisual interviews in the presence of archival objects. This is digital scholarship at the macroscopic scale of the virtual experience of local landscapes
of home and study, of lab and studio.

Within the British Library, the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project has recently been reinvigorated by internal funding, and it will be introduced over the course of the seminar. Its aim is to provide for enhanced curation, for the integration of digital and analogue components of personal archives, and for streamlined workflows through authenticated capture, processing and access of personal digital objects via emulation as well as migration.

Invited Speakers

Erika Farr and Naomi Nelson of Emory University will report on the pioneering use of emulation for the digital archives of Salman Rushdie. In the words of their introduction to the emulated environment: “Rushdie’s exact directory structure is available to browse, and each file can be opened in the application in which it was created, such as MacWrite Pro or ClarisWorks”.

Christine A. Finn writer, broadcaster and researcher, and Research Associate of the University of Bradford, will provide an account of her original research with the vintage computer community and of the classic computers themselves as contemporary archaeological Artifacts, the title of the book that arose from her fieldwork in the Silicon Valley.

Vincent Joguin President and CEO of Joguin SAS will provide an overview of the EU-funded project Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) including an introduction to the Olonys universal virtual machine (which he codesigned for longterm portability) and the Disk2FDI software for floppy disk imaging.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland will discuss digital materiality from the perspective of the humanities researcher, arising in part from his exploration of computer media forensics and restorative activities in capturing digital creativity, and following on from his ground-breaking book Mechanisms. New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Michael G. Olson of Stanford University Libraries will report on his establishment of a Digital Forensics Lab for digital archives (the first of its kind in the USA) and the context of his work with personal archives including that of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Jussi Parikka of Anglia Ruskin University who conducted his doctoral thesis on a media archaeology of computer worms and viruses at the University of Turku will discuss some of his more recent research as well as a multidisciplinary initiative, the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE), of which he is Director.

Daniela Petrelli of the University of Sheffield will reflect on the findings of the EU Marie Curie project Memoir: Remembering Things Past, an examination of personal digital objects as the source of memories, most especially autobiographical. The design and impact of digital devices that are integrated in everyday life and enable ready recollection and reflection will be contemplated.

Gabriela Redwine of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas will introduce aspects of the Mellon-funded project that is producing a report entitled Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, of which she is a coauthor along with Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and principal author Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland. She will briefly consider some of the ethical issues that arise in the use of forensic technologies.

Seth Shaw of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University will discuss recent collecting efforts including the ‘papers’ of ePoet Stephanie Strickland, and with a brief note on work with the emails of the economics Nobel laureate Leonid Hurwicz.

Matt Shreeve of Curtis+Cartwright Consulting will introduce the JISC project that is directed at Clarifying the Purpose and Benefits of Preserving Software, in association with the newly founded Software Sustainability Institute.

Jeff Ubois who is exploring new approaches to personal archiving for Fujitsu Labs of America will summarise the Personal Archiving 2010 conference which he organised in San Francisco and will discuss future possibilities.

Kieron Wilkinson and István Fábián of the Software Preservation Society will give a talk and a very exciting pre-release demo of the ready-built KryoFlux equipment that provides for extremely low level and accurate capture and analysis of floppy disks.

Simon Wilson, a digital archivist at Hull History Centre will provide an overview of the international project Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS) involving collaboration between University of Virginia, Hull University, Stanford University and Yale University.

Members of the British Library Helen Broderick of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will describe aspects of cataloguing and making available digital personal archives by means of the
British Library’s newly instituted eMSS Server, and the enhancement of the archive through immersive photography of the creative environment: examples will stem from the archives of Ronald Harwood, Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter.

Jude England Head of Social Sciences will chair the final session.

Kristian Jensen Head of Arts and Humanities and SRO of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will provide a brief welcome and introduction.

Jeremy Leighton John of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project will highlight some of the findings of the Digital Lives Research Project (funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) including the use of forensic techniques in the archival and historical context. In particular, the concept of Virtual Archival Computing, the use of virtual machines, VM snapshots and the booting of disk images within a forensic framework and over a network will be elaborated. There will be examples from the archives of evolutionary biologists William D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith.

Demos, Overviews and Topics

Beyond the presentations themselves there will be demos of the forensic capture of digital media involving write-blockers and forensic equipment; and the KryoFlux technology.

An outline of the recent developments of the EU-funded Planets project (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services, led by the British Library) will be provided, specifically highlighting its contributions to emulation including a remote emulation service over the network, GRATE. Attendees will learn about or be able to discuss the following topics:

• Virtual archival computing and the use of bootable forensic disk images and virtual machines as a means of providing repeatable and authenticated access to original computer environments.
• Personal digital archives as a source of original software for longterm preservation and as a motivating factor in this endeavour
• Low level capturing of magnetic flux transitions on floppy disks as well as higher level bitstream capture that is accurate and measurable
• The anthropology and archaeology of the vintage computer community
• Digital materiality? What is it and why does it matter?
• Universal virtual machines and open source emulators that are compliant with digital preservation requirements
• Why use forensic technologies in the context of digital archives?
• What is enhanced curation?
• Highlights of the Digital Lives Research Project
• The eMSS Server at the British Library
• Issues of licensing and software inheritance and reuse
• Next steps: networked integration

Sublimated Attractions

A new article co-written by myself and professor Jaakko Suominen has just been published in Media History-journal. It touches on media archaeological themes, and focuses on the historical context where the emergence and introduction of computing in Finland in the 1950s was framed as a multisensory event. The article is based on primary research by Professor Suominen.

A short summary of the text:

Sublimated Attractions
The Introduction of Early Computers in Finland in the Late 1950s as a Mediated Experience
Suominen, Jaakko and Parikka, Jussi
Media History, vol. 16, Issue 3, August 2010, pp. 319-340.

The article focuses on the emergence of Finnish computer culture in the late 1950s. The introduction of computers is studied by using a wide range of source material of popular media, such as commercial and company promotion films, newspapers, popular magazine articles, cartoons and comic strips. The paper argues that the introduction of the new computing technology was deeply experienced with the help of popular media, where the technological capabilities of computers as thinking and sensing 'all-purpose machines' were translated into several media-specific audio-visual forms. Computers were represented as sensing and sensible technology, a rubric that was remediated by the help of old media. In this process, the spectacularization of computers worked not only as an innocent fabulation of the computers to convince the 'general public' but to create a certain social arrangement particular to this spectacle. The idea that the end-user is cut off from the actual processes of the computer, as suggested by such media historians as Friedrich Kittler, was evident already in the earlier construction of computing culture in the mainframe era.

Keywords: history of computing; popular media; modernity; cultural appropriation of technology; introduction of technology; Finland

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."

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.