Book Review: A Geology of Media (original) (raw)

A review of A Geology of Media by Jussi Parka, published in Early Popular Visual Culture 14.3

Following the filmic trajectory of collaborative duo Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón, this article seeks to expand on what could be described as a geological cinema as something that is distinct from, but not wholly other to, landscape film. Centered around the Canary Islands, Delgado and Girón’s films respond more to seismic conditions and geological formations than they do anthropocentric tendencies. Influenced by the volcanic writings of seventeenth-century Jesuit Priest Athanasius Kircher, Delgado and Girón delve deep into earth’s interiority, positioning cinema as a telluric medium. At stake is a balancing of terminological differences between land, landscape, and geology. Always in relation to the films themselves, this article attempts to parse out these differences using Walter Benjamin’s short essay “In the Sun” as a pivotal counterweight to Kircher’s subterraneous theories.

Media archeology offers a new and necessary tool in dealing with the plurality of phenomena we so indiscriminately - anachronistically or in other ways - recognize as art and classify as artworks. The paper tries to stress the difference in comparison with related viewpoints: the theories of cultural transmission, of the materiality of culture, of the logic of aesthetic regimes etc. One might call it "media before media" (and follow Kittler) or delve with Zielinski into the "Deep Time of the Media" with a good connection to the "history of the senses approach" or go straight with Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo and use "media archeology": it is always an acknowledgment of the protean nature of art and architecture.

In this article, I explore critical points of mutual concern and potential cooperation for the field of media archaeology and the deconstruction of metaphysics, as articulated in the work of Reiner Schürmann. Each of these critical modes of thought, I argue, has emerged out of a shared impulse to deconstruct our " archaeo-teleological desire " for " archaeo-teleocratic origins, " yet the productive capacity of their overlapping, interpenetrating concerns has yet to be posited, much less explored. I therefore trace the contours of two significant points at which each of these seemingly disparate critical traditions reveals itself to be already in the service of the other.

book about media archealogy

Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to material conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are extending our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core. Their works are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable and possible if humans were to take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, things, systems, and experiences. As a reading and viewing event, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move with its audiences while delivering signals from unfolding edges of the "geologic now." The Website The Making the Geologic Now website is a creative translation of the book into an interactive website. Readers can update and extend the book by uploading and illustrating their own sightings of "the geologic now." Readers can also join in discussions of articles and images in the book or on the website. - See more at: http://www.geologicnow.com/about.php#sthash.vXrEDyfW.dpuf

A discussion between Canadian media theorist Chris Russill, associate professor at Carleton University, and Kate Maddalena, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, articulates Russill’s work in terms of current conversations in media-related cultural studies. Russill uses media theory, particularly the intersecting lineages of Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, and Friedrich Kittler, to describe planetary media that record, store, and transmit light. He then discusses implications for the technical media apparatus being created, largely in earth systems sciences, to read, process, and deploy appropriate action in response to the same. The conception of earth as optical medium affords insight into the power politics of ozone holes, climate change, the photosynthetic machines of science fiction, and sunscreen

The history of media archaeology has been a history of discourse-oriented analysis. Friedrich Kittler, the intellectual father of media archaeology, inspired a focus on the materiality of the medium from the early 1980s onwards to lay bare the epistemological structures underpinning studies in the humanities. While this tradition has produced interesting studies focusing on the discursive construction and symbolic meaning of different media technologies, the materiality of media technologies and the practices of use need more attention. Media are widely acknowledged as utterly important in the formation of knowledge, cultures, and media-saturated every-day life, and urgently in need of further study. While media archaeology positively helped to constitute the field of media studies, and contributed considerably to the broader awareness of how important media are and have been in the past, we feel though that a further step is needed now in terms of studying the materiality of the medium to live up to the expectations raised. Instead of investing our energies in discursive enterprises, we opt for an investment in experimental media archaeology. Experimental media archaeology is inspired by the idea of historical re-enactment, acknowledging the historian’s (the experimenter’s) role as co-constructor of the epistemic object. Experimental media archaeology is driven by a desire to produce experimental knowledge regarding past media usages, developments, and practices. To do so, it will be practical as well as philosophical, empirical as well as theoretical, conceptual as well as experimental, drawing from psychology as well as sociology, ethnography as well as cultural anthropology, image theory as well as history. Lastly, experimental media archaeology has an archival drive; it aspires to use the immense collections of media apparatuses (l’appareil de base) waiting in film and other archives for further research.