Digital Memory and the Archive  --  Wolfgang Ernst (Jussi Parikka ed.)

Full Citation and Summary Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive.
Edited by Jussi Parikka, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

This book, edited by Jussi Parikka (see also What is Media Archaeology),
collects a series of thematic texts by Wolfgang Ernst which present various
aspects of his archive-oriented Media Archaeology. This book leans towards
methodological and conceptual elucidation, providing texts which build-out
Ernst's operative terminology directly and through examples. Ernst, though
trained as a Classical historian and archaeologist, is now the Chair of Media
Theories at Humboldt University in Berlin and founder of the "Media
Archaeological Fundus," a collection of interesting media machines.

Chapter Notes

Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst's Media Archaeology
--  Jussi Parikka
- This section provides an intro to Ernst's "archive oriented media theory," a
 kind of media archaeology (pp. 2)
- Also connects his positions to larger discourses around time-criticality,
 archive (Foucault as we will see later), and diagrams (pp. 2)
- Connection to "German media theory" [though this term isn't great] (hardware
 orientation through Kittler) (pp. 3)
- Short section up front on archival misreading in contemporary digital culture
 (conflation of digital storage/transmission with institutional big A
 archiving) (pp. 1-2)
- Section on the development of Ernst's thought; how his historical training
 archives (pp. 3-6)
- Early work in museology; German institutions, narration expanding to counting
 maths as components of narrativity (pp. 4)
- Movement to Foucauldian methods investigating concrete conditions (archive)
 of knowledge; influenced by other media theorists in Germany working with
 Foucault, Derrida, Lacan (Kittler for example) (pp. 4)
- Archival approach to media which grows out of Kittler's work rather than
 continuing it, within the broader discussion of media materiality; recent
 moves closer to techno-mathematical (pp. 5)
- Turn toward "time-criticality" as a means of distancing from
 History/Historians for machine-times/processes which do not fit into that
 discipline (pp. 5)
- Thinking history from media in a non-historical way; "Temporalities are
 conditioned by mediatic frameworks." (pp. 6)
- SUM UP/IN GENERAL: Ernst develops an archaeology [F] of knowledge in media,
 the mediatic world as the conditions of knowledge (pp. 6)
- Section w/ what differentiates Ernst's position from other forms of media
 archaeology (eg: Huhtamo, Zielinski) (pp. 7-12)
- Media archaeology for Ernst is different from cultural history since it looks
 at conditions of knowledge
- Media archaeology is less about narration (even counter-histories) and more
 about how narration is recorded and in what ways (it's physical media, its
 processes, durations, its apparatus); not an ontological/philosophical
 object-centring but a methodological one
- Description as the operative form of investigation ("happy positivism") which
 sets up a division of labour between media archaeology and other disciplines
 (cultural history, politics, etc.)
- Interest in the physicality of technical media; hence object-oriented in a
 "material culture" way or a "science & engineering" way
- Archaeology of ruptures [F], discontinuities [F], recursion, variation;
 technical temporality which is non-semantic & non-emotional (as per the
 machine)
- Cultural memory articulated through media as underpinned by their inherent
 calculation/number-logic based ontology; alternative to historical
 narrativization
- Technical recording of the past beyond what can be narrativized at all,
 technical media transmission through time is non-hermeneutic in what it
 contains
- "cold gaze" of technical media as a means of stepping out of the human
 position
- Criticism: distancing as objectification & detachment that refuses to deal
 with messiness, focus too much on the machine as seemingly autonomous (which
 it isn't), mythologizing the machine as completely opposed to all other
 temporalities; disregard from the processes of technical emergence (design,
 patenting, etc.), focus too much on the object/apparatus
- Section on the "operational" aspect of Ernst's media archaeology (pp. 12-19)
- Comparison of Ernst to other media theorists/archaeologists who engage with
 actual media apparatuses (collectors, curators, archivists); Ernst engages
 with apparatus through reverse-engineering
- Media theories tested against hardware; "experimental" or "empirical"
 research approach; media artefacts are "epistemological playthings"; Media
Archaeological Fundus [see Parikka 2016 for more] (pp. 13)
- Complexification of history as not human-reducible, but simplifies the fact
 that technologies are embedded within and engaged with human life/temporality
- IMPORTANT critique: Ernst's tinkering w/ the past approach lacks political
 emphasis/analysis that can deal w'/ political-economy and gets too stuck with
 its own fascination with the apparatus (pp. 14)
- Ernst eschews politics for more general explorations of epistemology, for him
 temporality
- Media archaeology as "post-human" insofar as it takes machine time seriously;
 importance of machine time (iteration, recursion, short-circuit) for our
 general understanding of temporality
- Need to see media tech as dynamic, related to rhythmics and sound and in that
 way registerable to us
- SO "time-criticality" = "there is a logic in chronos that is not reducible to
 history" (pp.15)
- Micro-temporality of digital/technical memory which much continually refresh
 itself faster than human perceptibility
- Micro-temporality as archives [F] in motion
- Disregards structural issues (capitalism et al, ownership, labour, etc.) for
 link between technical and aesthetic frameworks [see the continual connection
 of American media theorists to artistic practices over "infraordinary"
 technologies; Parikka does this as well]
- Signal as basic unity of analysis since it is what moves; is simultaneously
 physical and symbolic
- "Modern technical media are media of mathematical codes, and in their
 execution they become processes defined y patters of signals unfolding in
 time. They also become frequencies instead of beings, quantities instead of
 qualities, and functions instead if attributes..." [from Siegert] (pp. 18)
- Understanding media from the viewpoint of their channels
- Ernst's definition of media (P's paraphrase): "the physical passage, or
 place, that mediates something codified and gets decodified at the other
 end." (emphasises the channel) (pp. 19)
- Section on the Germanness of German Media Theory (pp. 19-22)
- The name hides a multiplicity of approaches, the name does more harm than
 good in flattening the methods
- Parikka argues that "German Media Theory" needs to re-engage with historical
 contexts, specifically political-economic changes (pp. 20)
- Weight placed on labelling of works with a more loaded name due to a
 methodological preference and not an explicitly articulated position (pp. 22)

Media Archaeology as a Transatlantic Bridge
- Introduction by Ernst[?] which covers three main points which the following
 chapters will deal with
- Taking a position in relation to media theory's epistemological orientations
 (pp. 23-26)
- Identification of two currents: nondiscursive practices of technical media
 (media archaeology) & media phenomena's appearance to human senses (media
 phenomenology) (pp. 23)
- Taking the direction of media archaeology and identifying two major currents
 within it: remediation of old theories & Foucauldian (pp. 24)
- Taking the direction of Foucault-inflected media archaeology and stressing
 the needed distance from cultural studies/hermeneutic methods in favour of a
 "cold gaze" which focuses on hardware which is not primarily meaningful (pp.
 25)
- Temporary bracketing off of discourses and their continuities in favour of
 ruptures and discontinuity of the technological settings (pp. 25)
- Ernst's method of media "archivology" (pp. 27-29)
- Foucault's archaeology + Foucault's archive against the background of
 normative Archaeology (discipline w/ its methods) and Archiving (in the sense
 of storing material)
- Against the traditional archival interest in artefacts stored, media
 archaeology is interested in "the unrevealing of symbols, signals, and
 information." (pp. 27)
- Focus on processual nature of contemporary media, diagrams (as with Pierce)
 produced by the informatized organization of knowledge
-  Approaching knowledge which is stored and transmitted through the media
  "endodata" which is non-hermeneutic
- Which means that often, the media archaeological gaze is better executed by
 machines themselves that already operate in that world
- Cross-referencing historicization/cultural variance of human senses
 (Benjamin, Marx) with the "senses" of the machine to provide a more complete
 understanding of digital-technical media
- Focus on "infrastructure of media-historical knowledge"; how media themselves
 reformat our understanding of the historical & narration
- Archivology is generative of new kinds of archival action (new ways of
 searching, cross-referencing, remixing, etc.); archival action on the terms
 of media (signal)
- Media "tempor(e)alities" (pp. 29-31)
- Derives from Ernst's obsession with rewriting the past in non-historical ways
 (Metahistory is an influence)
- Resisting Foucauldian text-focus (and spatialization which underpins it) with
 dynamics in which writing doesn't communicate meaning but produces processes
- Sonic mode of exploring relation between human senses and machinic processes
 in a time-based manner


Part I. The Media-Archaeological Method
- This section focuses on Ernst's specific version of the media archaeological
 method; Parikka stresses that "there is no one media archaeological method"
 (pp. 35)
- Stresses anti-narrativism of Ernst against Anglo-American narrativism

Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines
- Main argument: cultural history and media archaeology operate in parallel to
 each other, each filling in the blanks of the other, BUT one cannot do both
 at the same time
- First section compares cultural historical view to media archaeological
 through light as a function of historical thinking (pp. 37-39)
- Main thrust of this is cultural history = "evolutionary continuities and soft
 transformations" through discursive continuity & media archaeology =
 ruptures, but on the level of technologies, non-discursive (pp. 38)
- These two things can both be true at the same time, just in different places
- Identifies a major contemporary rupture: signal processing replacing
 discourse and semiotics (pp. 39)
- Second section on the interplay between culture and technology in which one
 may drive the emergence of the other (40-43)
- Three views on the technological media displacement of visual representation:
- Stephen Bann  -  "poetics of the museum" (pp. 40)
- Rhetorical tropes prefigure historical imagination
- Close parallel movement of a period's representation media which share codes
 despite their media difference
- Lessing  -  Laocoon (pp. 40)
- Medium specificity to how history is constituted based on the difference of
 how they happen (space or time)
- Walter Benjamin  -  TWAAMR (pp.41)
- Mentioned in passing to demonstrate technological media as a rupture in the
 operation of images
- "Media archaeology, which is concerned with such technocultural processes, is
 both a self-reflexive method and an archival {F} object of research." (pp.
 41)
- Sets up the main question for media archaeology in light of this: did the new
 historical imagination that emerged with the interplay of culture and
 technology emerge from new media or were the media invented to fit a new
 epistemological setting? (pp. 42)
- Is the move from cultural technologies to technological media a rupture or an
 evolution?
- "It is worth remembering that the archive as the condition for our knowledge
 of history becomes dependent on the media of its transmission... The
 mechanisms that regulate entry into the discourse of history or exclusion from
 cultural memory are therefore part of the media-archaeological investigation."
 (pp. 42)
- The upshot: Ernst takes the side of medium specificity against Bann's
 art-historical aesthetics which comes too close to the "virtues and
 virtuosos" of art and not close enough to the media (pp. 43)
- Third section outlines media archaeology as a "media critical antiquarianism"
 methodologically (pp. 43-51)
- In antiquarianism:
- the issue of distance and empathy, material closeness of the past but
 discursive distance (pp. 43)
- History is not just text, but artefact which is always more than what text
 can reveal; text as software which operates upon artefactual hardware (pp.
 43)
- Characterized as "data oriented" (pp. 44)
- Methodological preference for precise case studies ("embedded theory") over
 general theories projected onto examples (pp. 44)
- "monumental" relation to the past, no search for binding historical narrative
 (pp. 44)
- "Media archaeology is on the side of the indexical and the archival mode of
 writing..." as opposed to speculative narrativization, on the non-discursive
 elements of the past which are already not narrative (pp. 45)
- Shows how the media drives the epistemic change through indexicality using
 photography as an example
- In history writing, the reality of the past is simulated rhetorically; in
 photography, a specific "moment of light" is stored indexically (pp. 48)
- The ability to access the "source data" and examine it directly changes the
 way the past is known (pp. 48)
- The change is between incomplete forms of access to the past since both
 simulate unmediated access in different ways: they are both historiography
 but of different types (pp. 48-49)
- Also differences within media types
- "...technological media haver to make their recipient forget their technical
 operation at the machine-to-human interface in order to create the illusion
 of pure content: only at the moment of technological breakdown will the medium
 become visible." [see also Perec, L'Infraordinnaire] (pp. 48)
- Further, into digital photography, a new temporal layer through
 time-stamping; micro-temporality of images changes the way the past is
 thought
- Upshot is that media technologies can reveal what is inaccessible to humans,
 operating at completely different scales which changes underlying epistemic
 conditions (pp. 51)
- Final section on reflexive irony in the media archaeological method (pp.
 51-54)
- Starts by using the museum as an example, how they present the past through
 the predominant media of their context (pp. 51)
- Eg: period rooms
- John Soane museum as media critical through its irony
- "It becomes a media critical museum because it consciously exposes its own
 technique of display. Whereas the secret of technological media is precisely
 that they usually hide their mechanisms in order to let their message appear in
 pure form." "...any ironical medium -- displays its own artificiality,
 technical fictionality, and artifactuality." (pp. 52)
- In media archaeology, media irony = "the awareness of the media as
 coproducers of cultural content, with the medium evidently part of the
 message" (pp. 52)
- "A truly archaeological awareness of the past goes so far as to exclude any
 human presence from the representation of the material of the past." (pp. 53)
- Evidence and authenticity are provided by the apparatus which eliminates
 subjectivity of a narrator for media specificity [which may be analysed
 reflexively]
- Finishes off with the fact that cultural history and media archaeology are
 supplementary since both voices (human and medial) are just as present and
 important, speaking in parallel with each other

Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History of Narrative Media
- This chapter argues for a media archaeology in which machines themselves act
 as archaeologists providing insights that narrativity & history cannot
- Begins with a setting the record straight about what media archaeology is for
 Ernst:
- IS NOT the discipline of archaeology (digging up the past historically) (pp.
 55)
- IS based on Foucault's archaeological method of epistemological excavation
 (pp. 55)
- IS NOT historically narrative but IS an alternative (pp. 55)
- IS hardware and code (as in governing protocols) oriented, an epistemological
 reverse engineering (pp. 55)
- IS NOT about temporal antecedence (pre-histories of media) but
 technoepistempological underpinnings (pp. 55)
- IS aware of moments when media themselves become "archaeologists" of
 knowledge
- IS NOT about telling media stories (even counter-histories a la Foucault)
 (pp. 56)
- IS NOT a nostalgic collection of "dead media" (pp. 56)
- IS a method of analysis which focuses on media operations and sources of
 operativity in codes, not content (pp. 56-57)
-  research subjects and researchers
- As research subjects:
- They exist within a different kind of temporality which can short circuit
 historically separated periods (pp. 57)
- "...undo historical distance by simply being present." [das Ding] But
 different from object artefacts since they operate, they are processual (pp.
 57)
- Register what remains of the past in the present by containing an "inner
 world" leftover of their context which may interface with the outside world
 (pp. 57)
- As researchers/authors
- "media archaeography" = "modes of writing that are not human products but
 rather expressions of machines themselves" (pp. 58)
- Media speak for themselves, processing signals which humans cannot sense (pp.
 58)
- Important for revealing non-discursivity since the machinic scales of
 technical media must be accessed via other machines (pp. 59)
- A section where Ernst uses the music ethnological gramophone archives in
 Berlin and Vienna as an example of media acting archaeologists of themselves
 (pp. 59-65)
- These archives contain signal which is non-semantic stored alongside their
 cultural content
- Ernst demonstrates how other technical media work with human researchers to
 extract non-semantic information and reveal it for human readability; "Media
 theories work only when being tested against hard(ware) evidence" (pp. 60)
- The state of writing changes from signs that are meaningful to signal which
 is registered (pp. 61)
- The change is from translation to measurement: "The measuring device, for a
 moment, suspends human perception from the limitations of its own
 subjectivity and culturality, though we take into account that any measuring
 configuration is itself marked by the historic index of its own epoch." (pp.
 61)
- Cultural analysis becomes calculation, which is then retranslated for human
 reading; media materiality is engaged on its own terms (mathematic
 informatics) which reveals and explains that which escapes cultural analysis
 (pp. 62)
- The machine working with signal makes no distinction between senders (pp. 63)
- Semantics = poetic regulation; Signal = physiological regulation (pp. 65)
- Change to our understanding of "tradition" in digital epistemology: data
 migration becomes a form of tradition as content is repackaged in new
 formats/media
- A section where Ernst uses digital restoration of sonic artefacts to examine
 how the media archaeological gaze works (pp. 65-68)
- Sound recording flattens the binaries of presence/absence, past/present into
 the operativity of the machine (pp. 66)
- Media storage as a kind of "freezing" of the content which awaits a media
 which can "redeem" the content (pp. 66)
- Digital "unfreezing" which involves rereading sonic media visually, then
 converting back into sound reveals the main thrust of digital memory: ALL
 DATA IS INTERCHANGABLE, aesthetic differences can be disregarded by the digital
 machine as differences of format [ie. these are only differences on the
 interface side] (pp. 66)
- This stresses the previous point that media archaeology can be practiced by
 media themselves (pp. 67)
- Media aesthesis (immediate signal perception) operates in direct contact with
 its objects (transitively) as opposed to aesthetics which must pass through a
 layer of interpretation first (pp. 67)
- Section which explores the "cultural sonosphere" as a further example of
 media operating on a different epistemological territory
- Stressing that sonic media contain, first and foremost, the noise of the
 transmission system itself (pp. 68)
- They store a direct index of the real which is filtered out by human
 perception an memory (human memory/perception filters out all noise deemed
 un-meaningful) (pp. 69)
- "The media-archaeological desire to be freed by machines from one's own
 subjectivity (and desire for storytelling) is Foucauldian..." (pp. 69)
- "Human beings have created logical machines, have created a discontinuity
 with their own cultural regime."
- A section which focuses on digital temporality and the change which happens
 as analog media are subsumed to "cybernetic epistemology" (pp. 70-71)
- Cybernetic epistemology = feedback loop between analog past and digital
 present
- The loop is effected by translating the analog world into the digital: taking
 media out of traditional historical archive (governed by the time of
 discourse) to digital archives (governed by digital microtemporality)
- [Time of discourse as human time of reading and responding, digital time as
 refresh rates; note also how this changes the speed of
 production/reproduction, speeding it up to be interoperable with digital times.
 We have a situation where the a digital-capital time modifies the speed and
 turn-over of discourse (publishing, sociality, political discourse) to make it
 interoperable with its own changed rhythms] (pp. 70)
- These media must be analysed differently: ".., enumerative rather than
 narrative, descriptive rather than discursive, infrastructure rather than
 sociological, taking numbers into account rather than just letters and images."
 (pp. 70)
- Final section sums up what media archaeological analysis does (pp. 71-73)
- "Media archaeological analysis, on the contrary, does not operate on the
 phenomenological multimedia level; instead it sees all so-called multimedia
 as radically digital..." (pp. 71)
- Looking from the side of the machine allows for "...reconstructing the
 generative matrix created by mediatic dispositifs."
- Change happens in the move from tools to machines (pp. 72)
- [The question of where interpretation goes when it is methodologically
 rejected. Is there a sub-methodological level of interpretation which allows
 technical-mathematical methods to be moved from one place and applied
 elsewhere?]
- Goal of media archaeology is to get closer to culture by methodologically
 moving away from it (pp. 72)


Part II. Temporality and the Multimedia Archive
- Archive as dynamic (pp. 77)
- Centrality of temporality (pp. 77)
- "Dynamics" is not a feature of human archives and meaning making but is its
 technological basis (pp. 78)
- Movement from archival order whose strictures are static to archival dynamics
 that institute processual control structures (pp. 78)
- Looking at dynamics in necessary for Ernst in understanding power (pp. 79)

Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory
- General thrust is that digital archiving and archives of digital material is
 very different from analogue textual/artefactual archiving and operates by a
 very different system of regulation
- First section covers main features of digital archiving (in relation to
 analogue archiving), digital archive is "use-oriented ("to be completed")
 "dynarchive"." (pp. 82)
- Digital archives not "read-only" but are continuously generated in relation
 to present needs (pp. 81)
- Digital archives collect/connect local archives to each other via the digital
 component [eg: archive.org hosting a bunch of geographically disparate
 archives] (pp. 81)
- Information aesthetics (formats) over classification criteria (pp. 81)
- Generative forms of archiving through non-semantic search methods, new kinds
 of agents and filters (pp. 81-82)
- Closer to the computer's memory aesthetic than traditional archives: dynamic
 constant access over static storage of material, regroupable and updatable
 through forms of internal feedback (pp. 82)
- Digital archival objects (ie. digital art) come into being anew every time
 they are accessed, their source code is stored so that they may be
 remade/refreshed (pp, 82)
- A section which argues that relationality is the main operativity of the
 digital archive
- The most salient feature of digital archiving is its use of binary encoding
 (pp. 82)
- Binary encoding subsumes the digital archive to operative mathematics
 (computation) which is about relations over things (pp. 83)
- The digital archive has one register in which content and organizational
 model are both the same thing, finding is in the content [not like in the
 19th cen. archive where there are documents stored and a card-index finding aid
 which exists in a different register) (pp. 83) "...a finding aid in the
 documents themselves, a self-referent archive." (pp. 84)
- The digital archive is therefore about "meaningfully linking up different
 information nodes..." "Here it is no longer a question of reactivating
 objects, but relations." (pp. 83)
- Section which takes on the question of what the internet is within the new
 formulation of digital archiving
- Main argument (which elucidates digital archiving in general) is that the
 internet is not an archive, but contains archives at different levels; it is
 a "transarchive" (pp. 84)
- It is a collection or assembly of material, since anything can be converted
 into bits and uploaded (ie. there are no protocols which regulate what is
 excluded, what noise) (pp. 85)
- BUT it does contain archives of protocols which enable material to be
 organized into continually reconfigurable, temporally limited organizations
 of content (pp. 85)
- The generative rules and protocols CAN be archived but the outcomes can only
 be documented [Ernst uses the example of a video art installation, the video
 tape can be archived but the realization of the installation can only be
 documented] (pp. 85)
- Short section on relation of digital memory to digital archiving
- Digital memory micro-temporality is superimposed upon historical archive
 macro-time (they are different, but happen in the same place w/ different
 registering regimes) (pp. 87)
- The space of digital memory is a precondition for digital micro-time insofar
 as it enables the high speed of data processing (higher speed requires more
 space) (pp. 87)
- "What makes the difference between memory and an archive is an organized
 archival barrier." (rules of exclusion) (pp. 87)
- All computers are digital archives since they are for data storage &
 retrieval, they contain digital memory which stores/operates along a set of
 protocols [contained in the way memory/processing is physically constituted]
 (pp, 87)
- Short section on the actual role of digital archiving
- Digital archiving of analogue material is primarily about how it is
 made-accessible/disseminated in the present rather than its longevity (pp.
 88)
- This makes its material-specificity less important; it must be subsumed to a
 new non-semantic alphanumeric encoding (archaeography) to gain that usability
 (pp. 88)
- A section on archiving media art
- Digital archiving of media art will require "laying bare the algorithms --
 the arché -- of the archive." (pp. 89)
- This algorithmic level = "submedia space" as per Boris Groys since "as media
 carriers the media apparatuses are as good as inaccessible to the viewer."
 (pp. 89)
- Importance of evaluating works on two different criteria: archivability and
 need for archiving, both especially important since media art often resist
 archiving (fleetingness of digitality, their existence as algorithmic
 artefacts)
- The issues of the inherent instability of digital media, its tendency to
 deteriorate physically & become unreadable due to obsolescence (pp. 90)
- "As Volker Kahl points out electronic communication "is based on time. It
 leaves no traces apart from its result which lies outside this process,
 unless traces are deliberately laid." (pp. 90)
- The question of whether media art, which already has its own erasure in mind,
 needs archiving (pp. 90)
- A section where Ernst answers that question: media art does need archiving,
 but in a manner that is attuned to the digitality of media art (pp. 91)
- This archive would operate on archival content which is already computational
 (that is, existing as file formats and not different media), they are already
 able to be generative in the way Ernst proposed above, through operations on
 their data content (alphanumeric bytes) from the POV of the computer (pp. 91)
- Final section which sums up the above and closes with a couple main points:
- A genuinely digital media object/archive is processual, it cannot be engaged
 with at a standstill (pp. 93)
- Digital memory stores as much as it erases, and the process of storage
 requires continual erasure and rewriting (pp. 93)
- Computational devices may be static artefacts, but they only become important
 when they're working processes are happening; they are their action (pp. 93)

Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories
- Main argument: the change from mechanical/textual storage to fluid
 electromagnet storage requires a new model for analysing this dynamic form of
 memory (pp. 95)
- Section where Ernst provides an overview of digital archival dynamics
- Digital archive = "regeneration, (co-)produced by online users for their own
 needs." (pp. 95)
- There is still a form of archiving (arché) which provides the possibility of
 the dynamics (pp. 95)
- Description of the digital archive not through "the transarchival notion of
 "organizational," cybernetic, feedback-based, instant memory..." but through
 "material memory agencies" which are hardware and institutional and operate in
 time (albeit at non-human timescales) (pp. 97)
- "Media archaeology hierarchy of technical memory levels:" (pp. 97)
- ROM (protected, static memory)
- The register (memory which is read-write and directly addressable; compare to
 RAM)
- The accumulator (calculation-specific space which temporarily hold results,
 see CPU accumulators and how they work)
- The buffer (transient data storage)
- Modes of accessing stored data (direct access storage, sequential access
 storage, eg. How data is actually stored and how one must retrieve it.)
- Associative storage (addressing of stored elements by content)
- Close coupling of the above memory types to timing levels: (pp. 97)
- Cycle time (refresh rates, "clock speeds" of processing and on the bus; ie.
 machine-internal cyclic time)
- Latency (the time it takes for data to be shifted and relocated; this time is
 visible at the interface and is linear insofar as an event happens)
- Access time (latency+transfer time, time from the point of view of the
 interface: from command to retrieval to relocation to appearance at the
 interface)
- Ernst stresses the permanent movement of memory at the micro-level
- Demonstration of the generalization of digital archival dynamics
- No longer accumulation but permanent transfer of elements (pp. 98)
- [This aligns with supply-chain dynamics where storage is only a temporary
 resting place in shipping networks; is this the location of interoperability
 between architectural processing and capital?]
- "... no delay between memory and the present..."
- "With supremacy of selection over storage, addressability over storage, there
 is no memory in the emphatic sense anymore; archival terminology -- or rather
 the archive itself --  becomes literally metaphorical, a function of transfer
 processes." (pp. 98)
- Digital space not about memory as cultural record but "about a performative
 form of memory as communication." (pp. 99)
- Gesture toward change from archival order to archival field literally
 underpinned by electromagnetic field dynamics (pp. 98)
- "...the cultural techniques of re-activable storage are in a permanent state
 of latency." (pp. 98)
- Ernst redefines storage/memory in light of the above discussion in re
 dynamics
- Memory defined as "a device into which information can be introduced and then
 extracted at a considerably later time" means that "storage is nothing but a
 limit value of transfer." (pp. 100)
- "Storage is a transfer across a temporal distance." (pp. 100) [this shows up
 earlier than Ernst to differing degrees and explicitness; see "Digging up the
 Pas T" (bpnichol 1981)and how it shows in in McLuhan, I've noted this in
 Neo-Colonialism of the Global Village (Ginger Nolan 2018)]
- Transformation of "deep archives" to "flat" archives, in the sense of
 material configuration and not necessarily "governance" (pp. 100)
- Defines arché as "the governing rule for the emergence of sensible phenomena
 at all." (pp. 100)
- Sums up that memory should now be thought of a "cybernetic memory" which is
 not storage for posterity but an ingredient in present operations, systems of
 short-term storage that are the condition of data processing (pp. 101)

Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television
- Main thrust is that TV is defined less by its content than by live
 transmission which is characteristic of the medium
- Ernst starts by providing the basis for a media archaeological approach to TV
 (pp. 102), that narrativity/semantics is already undermined in TV (pp. 103),
 that cultural studies discourse analysis can't deal with TV's
 medium-specificity (pp. 104) while media archaeology "searches the depths of
 hardware for what can become a program." (pp. 104)
- Of importance is that, "For media archaeology, the only message of television
 is this signal: no semantics." (pp. 105) Here, signal and noise have nothing
 to do with communicating some content or meaning but are noise = continuity
 (sensible data stream) and signal = discontinuity (the extraordinary, the
 unexpected) (pp. 105)
- Quick cuts (identified on pp. 103) is on the side of continuity of
 transmission, noise (no need to relate blocks of data to each other in
 continuity of broadcast); Live transmission (identified on pp. 103) is on the
 side of signal, the need for the extraordinary (pp. 106)
- Ernst goes into a discussion of live transmission which makes up the rest of
 the argumentation (pp. 106-112)
- Extraordinariness of display as a function of qualitative noisiness (low
 quality image) (pp. 107-108)
- the extraordinariness of display as a function of turning an occurrence into
 an event through broadcasting live (pp. 109, discussion of the news)
- Veracity of extraordinariness/liveness through textual marker "broadcasting
 live" that cannot be directly verified through receiver feedback (pp.
 110-111)

Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?
- Two part discussion: 1) epistemological reflection on the term "media
 archaeology" 2) case studies (outlined on 113-114)
- PART 1: epistemological reflection
- Demonstrates the epistemic difference with media history
- Media history is about continuities, lineages which make "permanent
 connections between heterogeneous parts" (pp. 115)
- Means focus on the trace of an event (Ernst uses the example of the HP garage
 and of the 8-Bit Museum's preservation of computer lineage) (pp.115)
- Media archaeology is about describing the "nondiscursive practices of the
 technocultural archive without reducing the archive to its technical
 apparatuses"
- Means focus on the storage, rereading, and rewriting of processual artefacts
 (eg. source codes) with a view to the specific operations of the codes (pp.
 115)
- Introduces the "anarchive" which is in opposition to ownership and
 artefactual stability through the example of game piracy and abandonware (pp.
 115)
- Prehistory of the computer example showing media history's desire to find
 pre-histories of computation, compared to Kittler's focus on differences (pp.
 115-117)
- Stresses the way that media of the past can only be investigated materially
 through other media filters, themselves tempering what can be revealed and
 known (Benjamin's optical unconscious and Lacan's computation) (pp. 117-118)
- Of epistemic importance for media archaeology of digitality (as for
 computational media themselves) there is no multimedia, just a single medium
 which is able to emulate all other media at the interface (pp. 118-119)
- This produces a non-spatialized knowledge (insofar as all elements are
 transmitted/stored in the same form) which is temporal through the continuity
 of the data stream (pp. 120)
- Importance of interactivity in which accessing an element can also be a
 rewriting or reorganizing of the archive, feedback instead of unidirectional
 transmission (pp. 121)
- Also of note is that interactivity requires the multimedia conceit of the
 interface despite backend continuity (pp. 121)
- Media archaeology thinks media relations differently from media history
- Media history = writing  printing  digital (pp. 123)
- Media archaeology looks at how all of the above relate in a non-teleological
 way via short circuits; what components of the past are still present, where
 do they now take place (pp. 123)
- With the move from print archives (the organization of material is dealt with
 in the same way as the interface does) to digital archives (single medium in
 the backend enabling multimedia at the interface) the archive becomes a
 "discrete matrix of life itself" (pp. 125)
- PART 2: Case studies
- 1: Virtual reactivation of no-longer playable sonic media at Hornbostel's
 Phonogramm-Archiv (pp. 126-127)
- Demonstrates digital disregard of multimedia in the internals (visual reading
 of sonic media to turn it back into sound)
- 2: Berlin hospital Cherité medical image archive (pp. 129-130)
- "The archival regime of memory is not an idiosyncratic choice but a rule
 governed, administratively programmed operatin of inclusions and exclusions
 that can be reformulated cybernetically or even digitally." (pp. 129)
- Digging up points of discontinuity and absence with media (the Nazi film
 project thrown into a lake as the red Army approached Berlin & rediscovered
 with sensors)
- 3: Angela Buloch's Blow Up (pp. 130-137)
- Demonstrates the potentials of how digital archiving no longer addresses
 semantically, but by the data constitution of content (in this case, the
 ability to address specific image pixels)
- 4: The Internet (pp. 137-140)
- General implications: breaking clear distinction between "(stored) past and
 (the illusion of) the present" (pp. 137), from space (location) to topology
 (address) (pp. 138)
- "Although the Internet still orders knowledge, apparently without providing
 it with irreversible hierarchies (on the visible surface), the authoritative
 archive of protocols is more rigid than any traditional archive has been." (pp.
 139)
- [implications for non-hierarchical organization in general; the more
 hierarchically fluid a condition is, the more intensive are the protocols
 each element must abide by/submit themselves to]
- Ends off on the opposition of digital anarchiving (anarchoarchiving) to very
 constitution of the traditional archive which is based on storage as
 ownership (pp. 140)
- Two kinds of memory will remain: 1) digital-owned memory which destroys the
 analog versions of its content, based on ownership (eg: streaming services)
 2) anarchive as mentioned above which is in opposition to ownership (pp. 140)


Part III. Microtemporal Media
- Parikka identifies time as a central theme in media archaeology (pp. 143)
- In comparison to other media archaeologists (eg: Zielinski, Huhtamo) Ernst is
 less interested in phenomenal time (geological deep time, social time, human
 time) than timing in the machine: "microtemporality" (pp. 143)
- Internal media time and external media time (media have durations that might
 not be visible to us) (pp. 144)

Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point of View
- Main argument: "narration and counting can be seen as functions of
 alternating conditions of the media." Narration and counting are different
 but related (pp. 147)
- Brief outline of the relation between the two
- Numerical ordering as cultural practice before being implemented in media
 (pp. 147)
- Oral traditions are narrative, however, the narrativity is serial, ie.
 countable, in different ways (mnemonics, syllabic metre) (pp. 147)
- Longer examination of narration/counting in relation to history (pp. 148-152)
- Use of an etymological method (tellan is "to put in order" narratively and in
 counting) which provides a way in to talking about chronologization (pp. 148)
- Chronology, annals, king lists, descriptive lists, are telling-as-counting
 that enumerate events serially though they are not yet history (pp. 148-149)
- Clocks and the mechanization of telling-as-counting
- Telling-as-counting (annalism) a dataset which resists connecting events to
 each other and making any other ordering than temporal seriality (this then
 this then this) (pp.151)
- History as sensemaking, pattering which takes annalistic "data" and patterns
 it into a narrative story (pp. 151)
- Movement from annalistic "diagram" of the past to a micro-narratively
 embellished movement across the diagram (pp. 151)
- Section where Ernst uses Lessing's Laocoon (again) to examine description vs
 narration (pp. 153-153)
- Ernst maps that difference to Lessing's splitting of temporal and spatial
 media: description = painting, spatial; narrative = poetry, temporal
- "Description is at odd with narrative..." (you can't have both at once,
 description interrupts narrative to hold its continuity in brackets for a
 moment; E states this back on pp. 148 as well) (pp. 153)
- What is important though is that description (mapped to archaeology, annals)
 and narration (mapped to history) are both present in the same medium of
 text, though they might flip back and forth
- Short section where Ernst reveals the breakage in the above separation in
 film where the technical basis of film is seriality (of frames) while it
 appears as spatial image (pp. 153-155)
- Time drives the bus here though since it operates on the technical level with
 spatiality being su8bsumed and emergent-from sequence (pp. 155)
- Space and time are both present, but operate in different zones with one
 taking the lead over the other at the basis of the medium
- Section on digital aesthetics which shows the breakage of Lessing again, but
 flipped (pp. 155-157)
- Here, space drives the bus in the spatiality of the screen that has no
 inherent sequence (pp. 155)
- But, time operates on the sub-level (media archaeological level of hardware)
 in serial, yet cyclical, computational microevents which hold the whole
 spatial edifice up (pp. 155)
- Tracking serial locations in a continuous space as the means of producing a
 sense of time (as opposed to in film where time is stable and changes on the
 screen trace spaces) (pp. 156)
- In film, time is the medium for space and in digitality, space is the medium
 for time (pp, 156)

Distory: One Hundred Years of Electron Tubes, Media-Archaeologically
Interpreted, vis-à-vis One Hundred Years of Radio
- This chapter presents a history of radio from the point of view of its
 technical underpinning, the electron tube, as opposed to its media content
 regimes, the institution of broadcasting (pp. 144); this media archaeological
 radio was not defined by "macrotemporal programming" but microtemporal
 oscillation (pp. 158)
- Ernst proposes that the beginning of broadcast marks the end of radio a
 "producer of media knowledge: the beginning of radio as a mass medium refers
 to yet a different type of radio." (pp. 158-159)
- Section on how radio short-circuits historical time (epoch-making,
 chronologization) by the fact that its apparatuses can still function, radio
 proposes a new way to think its own temporality (pp. 159-162)
- a tube radio from 192X can still pick up signal and is therefore of the
 present even if its "world" is gone, effecting the short-circuit, a
 "compressed time with respect to our sensory perception." (pp. 159)
- Outlines two kinds of pre-radio tubes
- [NOTE: Ernst hews quite closely to the individuals as prime-movers of the
 invention of tubes, a kind of undermining of his own project which shows up
 again in the last chapter of the book]
- De Forest's Audion (triode vacuum tube): for radio transmission through
 oscillation; attenuation equalization of oscillation, demodulation of a high
 frequency signal, amplification of resulting low frequency signal; ideal for
 speech transmission (pp. 161)
- Von Lieben's tube: for telephony; minimizes distortion on telephone lines
 (pp. 161)
- Ernst sets up the rest of the conversation: he will show how tubes cut
 transversally across "media complexes" connecting them to one another against
 the grain of history (especially histories of media which overcome one another
 linearly) (pp. 162)
- "Media-epistemological entities are at odds with those histories that further
 differentiate media only as the process of such technologies developing into
 mass media." (pp. 162)
- Section on how the media archaeological (early) phase of radio is not just a
 pre-history but also an alternative to radio as mass media
- Epistemic message of radio: speech is fleeting, it degrades and has no
 staying power (this move: speech  signal  waves = linguistic meaning  sound
 signal  noise), speech breaks down (pp. 162)
- This phase is characterized by radio as not yet a medium for semantic content
 (pp. 162-163)
- Morse code transmissions through "spark gap" transmitters; serial burst
 transmission rather than continuous broadcasting, this is transmission of
 signal without semantic content which must be encoded on one end and decoded at
 the other (pp. 163)
- Non-computational digitality (this short circuit) (pp. 163)
- Broadcasting turns the waves (high frequency) itself into a medium in which
 semantic signals (low frequency) are inscribed while spark gap is entirely
 different in how it transmits information (serial, bit by bit) (pp. 164)
- Mention of radio broadcasting (its mass media character) through interface
 with financing/marketing [another instance where the individual (Edison or
 Marconi eg.) take on the roll of "great minds"] (pp. 163)
- Section that hooks radio tube into scientific experimental knowledge (pp.
 165-166)
- "For technological archaeology, the defect is the true index of the real."
 (pp. 165)
- The tube as base grid (the kind of operative diagram) for how to read its
 instantiations as media (tubes instantiated in radio, in computing, in
 television) (pp. 165)
- The tube's use in experimental measurement and verification runs counter to
 its instantiation as a mediatic component (pp. 165-166)
- Section discussing digital radio broadcasting (pp. 166-168)
- Another short circuit by which noisiness (to human ears) of the digital
 signal connects back to noisiness of cathode ray tubesl; following this
 through Brownian motion and thermodynamics (pp. 167)
- Another short circuit as digital transmission returns: radio broadcasting is
 encoded again as serial digital transmissions, as information as opposed to
 continuous analog signals (pp. 166-167)
- Section on how computation changes the tube's status without changing its
 internal material constitution, showing how it can bridge various media and
 times (pp. 168-171)
- Change from modulation to digital encoding changes the epistemological and
 practical nature of radio; tubes are displaced from radio transmission to
 computation (pp. 168)
- In computation, they worked like transistors, their use as flip-flops and
 early IC's (Schottky Transistor package which uses a Schottky diode to make
 sure all the charge in a transistor is cleared; this prevents transistors from
 getting stuck in the on state) (pp. 169)
- Tubes in computation feed-back on theorization of cybernetics (pp. 169)
- The tube changed its use-status (Ernst says "status of being") without
 changing its technical arrangement, it crosses a change from analog to
 digital processing without itself changing (pp. 170)
- Ernst asserts that this exploration of the tube reveals that the digital can
 be "described entirely within the bounds of the analog." (pp. 170)
- At its base, technical level, digital and analog media work with the same
 components (pp. 170)
- From the point of view of the hardware component, from the mathematics,
 digital media does not displace analog media, but renders itself within the
 bounds of the analog or as a modality of the analog

Toward a Media Archaeology of Sonic Articulations
- Main argument: listening to the "sonospheres" of the past through replaying
 past recording media constitutes a new kind of historical knowledge, one that
 is media aware (pp. 172, 183)
- Section which compares historical and media archaeological sonosphere
 reconstruction (pp. 172-174)
- Historical: subjugation of sonosphere to historical discourse/writing (pp.
 172)
- Media archaeological: reenactment of the sonosphere (pp. 173)
- Media archaeology approaches what the humanities cannot deal with: media as
 its technical a priori (pp. 173)
- A media archaeological ear for the past which deals with noise (non-semantic
 signal) as the sonic trace of a historical condition (pp. 174)
- Non-historical study of the past since it cannot be subsumed to
 historiography (narrativization), it is a historical condition without the
 event (pp. 174)
- Section comparing technical recording and symbolic transcription (pp.
 174-175)
- Symbolic notation records signal only, it acts as a filter which only passes
 semantic content; symbolic notation makes decisions about what is deemed
 "tradition" (pp. 174)
- Technical recording deals with signal and is therefore indifferent to the
 content of the sound it records: it picks up semantic content along with the
 background noise (pp. 174)
- This exposes the cultural event to experimentation and analysis on the
 technical level, a non-hermeneutic analysis of a cultural condition (pp. 175)
- A section which outlines media archaeological reenactment (pp. 175-177)
- Media archaeological reenactment is based on the repeatability of technical
 media (ie. one instance of playback is theoretically the same as any other)
 making it closer to the scientific institution of experiments than historical
 reconstruction (pp. 175)
- Reenactment of the actual "sound generating setting" sets up a historical
 short circuit where we are dealing with an invariant acoustic condition (the
 physical/technical operation/laws of the artefact does not change) despite the
 change in our culturally tuned sonic awareness (pp. 175-176)
- On 175, Ernst uses the example of the Pythagorean monochord
- When put to use, past sonic artefacts change from being historical (inert and
 subject to historiography) to being processual (being media again through
 their action) (pp. 177)
- "...acoustic "understanding" of the past..." which is not speculative but
 actual
- [NOTE: Ernst trusts media to record everything of a specific condition.
 There's an interesting extra level to mediatic, non-semantic recording which
 is where media find themselves. This has to do with what kinds of
 political-economic and cultural mechanisms they find themselves
 within/interfacing with]
- A section which introduces the specific technique of media archaeological
 reenactment (pp. 177-178)
- "there is a memory of auditory culture in the past that is not historical but
 media archival." (pp. 177)
- Acoustic archaeology = use of historical instruments to replay sounds; this
 is an engagement with our sensorium is remains historical in that sense
 (empathetic) (pp. 178)
- Media archaeology = use of present media to investigate past media,
 specifically measuring media which can rectify signals as "moving diagrams"
 (pp. 178)
- Section on acoustic measuring media to show their difference from
 historiography (symbolic inscription) and that they produce an indexical
 relation between sound and image. Ernst does this by presenting a few disparate
 examples (pp. 178-181)
- Section that sums everything up (pp. 181-183)
- "Media-active archaeology can be applied to past sound, generating a
 different kind of audio archive." (pp. 181)
- The media-active readings of past sonic media converts them into non-semantic
 units which can only be accessible to human analysis through "operative
 technomathematical diagrams" (pp. 181)
- Change in how we access the past since sonic "events" can be identically
 repeated and measured empirically (pp. 182)
- "The media archaeological exercise is to be aware of the fact that at each
 technologically given moment we are dealing with media and not humans, that
 we are not speaking with the dead but dealing with dead media that operate."
 (pp. 183)

Experimenting With Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing
- Main argument: media archaeology does not deal with artefacts but with
 events; Ernst investigates this through how media exist as active processes
 on the microtemporal level of the apparatus and what the apparatus does to the
 "temporal sense" of the user (pp. 185)
- Sets this up in the intro by showing how interaction with media is a form of
 experimentation (whether literally through measuring media or a kind of
 "reverse experimentation" of using media that was once an experimental
 measuring device) (pp. 184)
- Defines experiment as event and allows for the media
 "experiment/reverse-experiment" to be thought through epistemological
 processualism (eg. Whitehead) (pp. 184)
- Sets up his three case studies: the Pythagorean monochord, Hertz's radio
 experiment, and Alan Turing's computation as discrete states (pp. 185)
- Ernst will argue that in each of the above settings there is a
 "time-invariant event" at work within the apparatus and the "epistemological
 dispositif" (pp. 185)
- This invariance is at the level of "physical nature," "There is always the
 imminent "veto" that comes from physics." This underpins the dynamics of
 "culturized" actions and allows media to observe and record it by virtue of
 being underneath it (pp. 185)
- Pythagorean monochord case study (pp. 185-186)
- Reenacting the monochord means reenacting the relationship between sound
 vibration and integer numbers (pp. 186)
- Essentially, the inert diagrammatic relationship is presented as a process
- The invariant aspect of the physics means that there is no difference between
 our version in the present and the original; there's a communication across
 historical time (pp. 186)
- The physical invariants provide a view into invariants of knowledge over time
 as opposed to historical specificity; we can see directly that the knowledge
 revealed by the monochord is the same despite context (pp. 186)
- Hertz radio experiment case study (pp. 186-189)
- The experiment which verified the relation between electricity and magnetism
 also contained within it at the microtemporal level the historical invariant
 of radio wave transmission (pp. 187)
- Mathematical diagram of the extents of electro-magnetism is animated as a
 process (pp. 187)
- "The experimental system "knew" it [radio transmission] already" on the level
 of the apparatus' microtime. But human detection was not yet a thing (pp.
 188)
- [note: "already" is for a specific sensing group in a specific place, not a
 universal already but a local and uneven already that acts or does not act at
 different levels and extents]
- Turing and computation case study (pp. 189-191)
- This case study deals with simulation of the world as an experimental process
 (pp. 189)
- Introducing an opposition (sort of)
- Mathematical simulation is an inert diagram of a temporal process (pp. 189)
- This is semantic-symbolic and is outside of physics itself, an abstraction
 (pp 189)
- Analog simulation (analog computers) are physical simulations which operate
 by means of physical laws and are tied to these (pp. 189)
- This is not an abstraction from the world, but is immersed in it (pp. 189)
- The distance of the observer is negated due to the immersion (pp. 191)
- Digital simulation happens between those two poles, it produces a virtual
 space where time can be variable by animating the mathematics (pp. 191)
- "mathematical moments of the real." (pp. 191)


Appendix: Archive Rumblings: An Interview With Wolfgang Ernst
- An interview that Ernst did with Geert Lovink. Below are some interesting
 points made:
- "My media archaeology is an archaeology of the technological conditions of
 the sayable and thinkable in culture..." (pp. 195)
- "The real multimedia archive is the arché of its source codes; multimedia
 archaeology is storage and rereading and rewriting of such programs," (pp.
 196)
- Ernst's sort of response to Parikka's critique of his work's refusal of
 politics (pp. 198)
- Ernst's critique of "knowledge management" approach to knowledge (pp. 199)
- "...this approach dissimulates the existence of material memory agencies --
 both hardware and institutions -- which still govern the power of what can be
 stored legally and technically, and what will be forgotten."

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