Book Review: A Geology of Media (original) (raw)
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2016
A review of A Geology of Media by Jussi Parka, published in Early Popular Visual Culture 14.3
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2015
The Media Archaeologies Forum in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology presents the first meeting of archaeologists with interests in the media assemblages of the contemporary world and media scholars with interests in ‘media archaeologies’, variously enacted. It was inspired by the Archaeology as Such panel at the Archaeologies of Film and Media Conference (Bradford, UK, September 2014), a panel organized by Angela Piccini and the Committee for Audio-Visual Scholarship and Practice in Archaeology (CASPAR). Where some media archaeologists have dismissed archaeology-as-such as a practice of dirt and deep time, archaeologists have critiqued media archaeology for its lack of methodological rigour and specificity. What the contributors to this Forum demonstrate, however, is the rich diversity of scholarship within and across fields. All acknowledge a shared focus on the media networks and technologies that produce conditions for the observable and the sayable. They understand that the...
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018
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.
The promise of media archeology
SAJ - Serbian Architectural Journal, 2015
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.
Media An-archē-ology - La Deleuziana, PDF
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.
Introduction to: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life
Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse
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
Media Genealogy| Is the Earth an Optical Medium? An Interview with Chris Russill
International Journal of Communication, 2016
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
Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions
Annie van den Oever (ed.). Technē/Technology Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), pp. 272-278., 2013
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.
SPECTRA: images and data in art/science. Proceedings from the symposium SPECTRA 2012, 2014
Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. The results of this engagement are being shown not only through the way artists and designers are developing innovative visual representations but also through the way images are combined with other media or through artists challenging the status of the visual through prioritising other media, such as sound. The ways in which artists have worked with geological data is also a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures. Many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. Instead of accepting, or even creating, binary oppositions this paper will examine how virtual and material spaces are not oppositional but connected and communicated through creative practice for the earth sciences. This presentation will provide a short overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, highlighting historically significant examples. It will include a discussion of themes being explored in the work of interdisciplinary artist, Perdita Phillips whose project, The Sixth Shore is exploring the geological formations and the natural environment at Lake Clifton, in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia. Phillips works with spatial sound, presenting immersive sound environments in galleries and in situ (using GPS technology). How connections are made back to the material world and the consequences of meshing the visual and the sonic will be analysed and discussed.
The Earth Sciences and Creative Practice: Exploring Boundaries between Digital and Material Culture
In D. Harrison (Ed.), Digital Media and Technologies for Virtual Artistic Spaces (pp. 186-204). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. , 2013
Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. This is a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures as many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. After an overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, this chapter explores four themes: (1) environment and experience, (2) code and pattern, (3) co-creation and participation, and (4) mining heritage.
The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL, University of Colorado Boulder, USA) as an Archive
Intervención Revista Internacional de Conservación Restauración y Museología
discute tanto la historia de esta organización del 2008 a la fecha como su filosofía flexible de uso y acceso vivencial a los llamados "viejos medios" con la finalidad de enseñar, investigar y desarrollar prácticas artísticas. Emerson, también ofrece una SEMBLANZA de las colecciones de este laboratorio, sus proyectos de investigación y sus residencias artísticas, todas ellos componentes esenciales de la vocación del MAL.
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
Science Museum Group Journal, 2019
The digital media revolution is a revolution reliant upon a sustained legacy of colonial violence in regions such as the Congo, the locale of this study. Contemporary production is foreshadowed by the industrial genocide of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries visited upon the Congo by Belgium. In an era defined by globally distributed trade networks, colonialism is equally distributed and mercurial – its complex supply chains obfuscating responsibility toward either the environment or its human inhabitants. The paper looks at the minerals required for latter day digital devices which have become the latest iteration of conflict in the region. Minerals are traced through a number of modern technologies including matches, atomic clocks and mobile devices, all of which evoke alchemical transformation and spectacle. We trace the legacy of colonial violence through smartphones, as the contemporary epitome of technical supremacy – highlighting their qualities of immediacy, mobility and making the remote proximate, especially by bringing remotely sourced geological elements into everyday use. Moving away from our own techno-romantic affiliation with such commodities, the article highlights the fact that focus on effect often further obfuscates the causal factors and consequences of resource extraction in commodity production. Even as we summon stories of global trade with our fingertips on mobile, networked devices, we are implicated in these cycles of violence.
Environmental Media_Graduate_Syllabus_RM
Description: In this course, we will be engaging with an array of film and media texts and objects in order to understand the mutual entanglements of media and the environment. Media infrastructures like data servers and fiber optic cables are part of the environment, and elements mined from the environment find themselves in digital media devices. Throughout this course, we will preoccupy ourselves with a number of questions, including: in what ways does the environment shape media? How can we connect the aesthetics and politics of ecocinema? How are theories of viral media and microbial contagion related? Why is the discipline of media studies being asked to cultivate an " infrastructural disposition " ? In what ways does media help us in perceiving invisible/imperceptible radioactive pollutants? How do communities living in precarious environments document their struggles against resource extractivism? What is novel about the political imaginaries of interspecies belonging, and how do they help us in speculating about the future of planet Earth? How does one mediate (map/trace/visualize) capitalist accumulation, carbon footprints, and planetary crisis across varying spatio-temporal scales? What are the connections between capitalism, collaboration, communication, and contamination, and why should such relationships be part of environmental debates/mediations? Server Room – Google Data Center (Connie Zhou) Alongside ways of knowing (and unknowing) climate change through GIS / " digital earth " models, we will also learn about " epistemologies of the south " (Buen vivir and Pachamama).
Per Kirkeby, Captive of Painting: How Geology Becomes Animated in Painting and Film
University of Texas at Austin, 2023
The Danish artist Per Kirkeby was many things: geologist, painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker. Though he left his career as a geologist to pursue art, he never lost his interest in the discipline. Throughout the various media in which he worked, he incorporated geological phenomena and motifs into the artworks and explored themes such as uncertainty and entropy, among others. In recent decades, curators and critics have focused their attention on the geological influences in Kirkeby’s oil paintings and sculptures. However, there remains a deficiency in scholarly work on Kirkeby’s other projects, like site-specific murals and filmwork. This thesis seeks to address this gap in scholarly writing by looking at how Kirkeby animates geology through these other media. First, I establish Kirkeby’s foundation as a geologist and how he eventually became an artist. I also give attention to the various intellectuals whom he followed. With context as to who Kirkeby was reading and what theories he was engaging with, I turn to his site-specific murals. I focus most of the second chapter on his two-story mural at Natural History Museum in Copenhagen. Given the geological environment for which it was made, it provides an interesting analysis of how geology is animated in painted form. Two additional murals in non-scientific spaces — a library and a church — are also briefly examined to further my investigation. The third chapter considers his filmworks, beginning with an early film, Geologi — er det egentlig videnskab? This serves as an example of the documentary-style of films Kirkeby made early in his career along with the themes he was interested in throughout his life. It also contrasts to the later collaborations he made with the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier; two of the three films he worked on are analyzed here, Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Von Trier gave Kirkeby creative freedom to make the chapter headings and opening sequence for these two films. What results are painterly film images that differ in visual style but ultimately tackle the same query — how can film translate geology into painting and give it life? Kirkeby’s paintings move at a pace imperceptible to the human eye, similar to the way geology changes. For the murals, the viewer/visitor is key to animating the geology that Kirkeby paints; the specificities of architecture, scale, and particular site all influence how you interact with his compositions. Film, on the other hand, allows the progression of geology to be captured and viewed at human-scale through the very medium. This thesis demonstrates how Kirkeby animated geology within his painted work and presents new scholarship on the forgotten aspects of his œuvre.