Book review of Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press) (original) (raw)
Related papers
FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
2011
And why not? Introduced as a non-human actant by John Law in 1992 (3), Latour further employs this standardised piece of presentation equipment as an example of a generic black-box technology whose operation is hidden from the user. Most likely drawing on his own immediate experience as a lecturer, Latour described a situation where the technological complexity of the overhead projector only reveals itself in breaking down, when technicians come to the rescue and open up the machine, revealing components in a seemingly never-ending network. Today, one may assume that Law and Latour have long since abandoned the overhead projector. However, as I will explore in detail in the second part of this article, the act of opening up an overhead projector (discursively as well as materially) has curiously returned, and at the same time migrated outside the exclusive domain of select AV experts. This migration can be tied to the increasingly generic archaeological impulse that Simon Reynolds (2011) has recently described in his theorisation of the different regimes of cultural production in the analogue vis a vis the digital era. 'It's as though the space-time of culture has been flipped on its axis: the place once occupied by the future is now taken by the pasts' as Reynolds (2011b: 34) writes on the transformation of music culture in which artists are no longer 'astronauts but archaeologists, excavating through layers of debris (the detritus of the analogue, pre-internet era)' (Ibid.
A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING THE MEDIUM IN MEDIA STUDIES : MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY
Global Media Journal , 2020
Through many ages people have felt the urge to communicate with each other. In this evolving context, driven by industrial development and technological advancements, individuals have discovered novel devices and software technologies to enhance their communication methods. The investigation into the tools shaping media and their impact on human experiences has become a prominent research area across diverse domains. While media history traditionally involves the chronological examination of communication devices utilized by people, it primarily focuses on what objects were used and how people communicated throughout history. However, it has often neglected the initial strides and ideas related to media technologies, which, since ancient times, have been evolving towards influencing the masses. A novel methodology, Media Archaeology, emerges as a comprehensive approach that integrates various fields, offering a fresh perspective on the mass utilization of media and the media itself. This study aims to exemplify the application of Media Archaeology within the context of Turkish communication research.
Towards an Archaeology of Television
2015
Over the last few years, 'media archaeology' has evolved from a marginal topic to an academic approach en vogue. Under its banner, conferences and publications bring together scholars from different disciplines who, revisiting the canon of media history and theory, emphasize the necessity for renewed historiographical narratives. Despite, or maybe because of profuse debates, media archaeology remains a loosely defined playground for researchers working at the intersection of history and theory. Far from offering uniform principles or constituting a homogeneous field, its prominent authors-Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinksi, Jussi Parrika and Erkki Huhtamo, to name just a fewdistinguish themselves by their heterogeneity regarding methodology and theoretical focus. Friedrich Kittler, often called the 'father' of media archaeology, has himself confessed that "as an approach to the social history of technical media it took me a long time to understand what the term media archaeology means." 1 A general summary of the definition and objectives of media archaeology is thus an ingrate enterprise and bears the risk of reductionism since it seems impossible to reflect the totality of such a heterogeneous field. As Simone Natale recently observed in a review of media archaeological publications, "given the varied approaches taken by scholars who worked under this label and the different ways it has been defined, providing a clear and definite account of media archaeology is a rather difficult task." 2 The tension emerging from the creative openness of such a 'traveling discipline' 3 is reflected in Jussi Parikka's and Erkki Huhtamo's 2011 volume Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, and appears even more strongly in Parikka's 2012 publication What is Media Archaeology? 4 Both volumes aim at offering a historiographical overview of media archaeological scholarship while introducing new research, thus simultaneously delimiting and widening the field. As the authors show, the authoritative question What is Media Archaeology? cannot be answered with a single phrase but finds its response in a 'cartography' 5 tracing multiple influences and directions. Accordingly, the studies brought together in Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications discuss (almost) everything from Sigmund Freud's Wunderblock to Japanese 'Baby Talkies,' from pre-cinematic toys to video games.
Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Media Diagrammatics
Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into 'old media' have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, 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 as materialist media diagrammatics. This article maps some recent media archaeological waves in German media theory. The text addresses Wolfgang Ernst's mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts on how to rethink media archaeology as a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and as a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seems to not only replicate Kittler's huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but develop that in novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst's provocative take that hopes to distinguish itself as a Berlin brand of media theory in its hardware materiality and time-critical focus resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies.
Cultural Biographies and Excavations of Media: Context and Process
2013
This article reviews and compares historical approaches to the study of digital media. Its focus is an examination of how biographical methods for the study of media and the research tradition known as media archaeology can be usefully combined as part of a research methodology for the study of media software. After introducing Igor Kopytoff's concept of the cultural biography of things, I assess how some scholars have applied this concept to the study of the domestication of media technologies in everyday life. I argue that such research deploys a particular type of historical construction of the media and its contexts in order to frame its cultural biographies. The following section details how this approach encounters a number of challenges when applied to digital media. In order to address this problem, the latter sections of the article detail how some media archaeological research methods may function as a helpful complement to the initial approach.
Opening up the Black Boxes: Media Archaeology, 'Anarchaeology', and Material Media
This article examines the emergent field of media archaeology as offering a materialist approach to new media and specifically the Internet, constituting a ‘travelling discipline’ or ‘indiscipline’ rather than a new disciplinary paradigm. Following the lead of Siegfried Zielinski (2006) it provides less an archaeology than an ‘anarachaeology’ of media archaeology, understanding this term in political as well as methodological terms. To do so it charts a trajectory through some of the sources of media archaeology, and its key theoretical articulations in the work of Zielinski and Friedrich Kittler up to its more recent articulations in the work of Jussi Parikka and Wolfgang Ernst. It uses this theoretical trajectory to illuminate some of the key problematics of media archaeology, in terms of both its practical application as a form of ‘theoretical circuit breaking’ (Hertz and Parikka 2010), and its most imaginative speculations as not only a material but even a geological approach to media as evident in Parikka’s most recent work, by way of such phenomena as the ‘vernacular Web’ (Lialina, 2005) and the problematics of e-waste. Throughout it pays close attention to the value of media archaeology as a set of methods for new media research in relation to more established methodologies in media studies ranging from medium histories to cultural studies. In particular, it argues for articulating media archaeological approaches with media ecological ones, in order to bring out more clearly both the political stakes of the field and its potential contribution to studies of digital media
Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities, 2015
In this article, we will contribute to a methodological discussion in the Digital Humanities by uncovering the digital tool AVResearcherXL as a form of Digital Media Archaeology. AVResearcherXL enables to search across, compare and visualise the metadata of Dutch television and radio programmes and a selection of newspaper articles of the Dutch Royal Library. Media archaeology provides a fruitful framework to reflect on the tool as method for Television History Research. First, the tool in itself functions as a new way of media archaeology. The tool, as it is, is double-sided and enables comparison, shedding an unusual, data-driven light on the television, radio and newspaper archives by providing different 'slices of' and 'search lights on' the metadata, thus contributing to a 'variantology of the media.' At the same time, we approach our own reflection on the tool as a form of media archaeology: we will uncover the tool, digging in its architecture and its ...
On the road toward a cultural history of digital interconnectivity, there are many potholes. It is not easy to define the digital culture itself and what a cultural history of the digital means. It is unclear what we have in mind with the digital (often used in an oversimplified sense to simply mean the Internet): The geographical horizon of this culture is unclear, and lastly the main trends are unclear. What is more, too many aspects of the contemporary digital landscape are taken for granted, as if “natural”, while they are historically determined. This is the reason why history is so helpful in reconstructing the origins, the changes, the main trends of digital media, simply because it shows how they came into being and they were metabolized by the cultures. This discussion aims to clarify these elements or at least discuss them critically, whereby“critically” is meant first of all in the etymological sense of differentiating, second in the sense of not accepting prima facie what is generally considered to be obvious. This will be only a preliminary contribution that, far from being exhaustive, will aim to start a reflection on the role and benefits of cultural history in analyzing the digital.
Becoming of Media Archaeology: paths, knowledge and methodologies
2018
This monograph is dedicated to an area of knowledge that in the English-speaking and Central European, and increasingly in the Spanish-speaking world, has long been attracting great interest. We are referring to what is known as Media Archaeology, an area in which the clear and fertile resonance of the term with Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is evident, but which exceeds and extends the scope of the latter along other unprecedented paths, to explore its own becoming creation. Our interest, a priori, is not to defend a firm academic position, in a sense of pure praxis and conceptual comfort, but rather to collect a series of theoretical (and to a certain extent epistemological and methodological) approaches in a set of discourses and practices linked to the media deployed over time. Media Archaeology brings together common interests that have been developing for decades from various foci and authors, ranging from visual studies, cultural history and film studies, to medi...
A Material Descent Into Digital Media
2015
Utilising technical manuals and archives this paper historically and materially situates the Hard Disk drive as a material foundation for contemporary digital media. Using Foucault's concept of 'descent' as a historical but also material unpicking of the present, the paper descends into the Hard Disk Drive, the Gramophone and Phonograph, Magnetic Tape and Optical Media. This descent is used to provide a historical perspective on the way in which fundamental material factors constrain, influence and encourage particular uses of digital media. Specifically the descent demonstrates how the Hard Disk drive's operation plays a role in the affordances of digital media and how these affordances are prefigured in older media technologies. The paper hopes to demonstrate that, given the right conceptual frameworks, we can historically and materially ground our understanding of digital media, understand its uses and consequences from a material foundation, and make sense of our...