Full Citation and Summary
Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Polity Press, 2016.
This book, first published in 2012 and since reprinted, provides an overview of
Media Archaeology, its disciplinary relationships, internal debates, and
methodological approaches. In it, Parikka stresses Media Archaeology as
theoretical and practical, having been taken up by artists. It is a follow-up
to Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011) which
Parikka edited in collaboration with Erkki Huhtamo, synthesizing the trends
emergent in the discipline. Parikka is a professor of technological culture and
aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art and was trained as a cultural
historian in Finland.
Chapter Notes
Introduction: Cartographies of Old and New
- Thrust of book: to outline media-archaeology's potentials for digital culture
research (pp. 2)
- Differentiates it from "archaeology of digital culture" (pp. 2)
- "how to think media archaeologically" (pp. 2)
- Media Archaeology = a means of examining contemporary new media culture
through past new media with special attention given to marginal, failed, or
minor apparatuses and practices (pp. 2)
- Means of analysing "regimes of memory" and creative practices (pp. 2)
- Sees media culture as "...sedimented and layered, a fold of time and
materiality..." (pp. 3)
- a set of theories, methods and approaches which examine the "mediatization of
cultures of memory" (pp. 5)
- General approach of "starting in the middle," in the present and work outward
from there (pp. 5)
- Positions Media Archaeology in a cultural context in which notions of old and
new are blurred as new media emerge while old media are remediated (pp. 3)
- Present's Media Archaeology's background sources: Foucault's archaeological
method, Benjamin's examination of modernity, New Film Theory, and studies in
digital/software cultures (pp. 5)
- Major move from Foucault's epistemology/conditions of existence to Kittler's
hardware orientation that Parikka argues (and will argue later) builds upon
Foucault (pp. 6)
- Heterogeneity is at the core of Media Archaeology along with an embrace of
its multiple origins (pp. 7)
- Media Archaeological themes and contexts (not exhaustive and open to
expansion): (pp. 5)
- Modernity
- Key "turning point" in many media archaeological theories due to its
technological change, social reorganization, and emergence of Capitalism (pp.
7)
- Emergence of a new sense of history through institutionalization, presence of
the past (pp. 7)
- Sensory changes in modern urban environments (pp. 7)
- Cinema
- Core media archaeological topic since it was a key media technology of
modernity (pp. 8)
- New Film Theory approach through: 1) archival work; 2) theories of
spectatorship, power, and gender (pp. 9)
- Positioning cinema in a greater thrust of visual and mediatic practices; "the
attraction" (pp. 9)
- Examination of "others" suppressed by teleological film histories (pp. 10)
- Diversification as important as convergence
- Digital turn as "epistemological switch" which reveals relations and parallel
histories (pp. 10)
- Histories of the present
- Archaeology as implicitly and explicitly about the present (pp. 10)
- Examination of "newness," past newness, the new as rearticulating societal
relations, expert knowledge, professionality, amateurism, insider/outsiders;
"relativity of the new" (pp. 11)
- Huhtamo's "topoi" of media culture: "recurring, cyclical phenomena and
discourses that circulate" in media culture (pp. 11)
- "History as a `multi layered construction'" (pp. 11)
- Compulsory newness and Capitalism -- Zielinski's psychopathia medialis (pp.
12)
- Close connection to artists examining media cultures through their work (pp.
12)
- Alternative histories
- The idea that "it could have been otherwise", and from there the insistence
that it can be otherwise now (pp. 13)
- Research into non-mainstream/non-standard media apparatuses (pp. 13)
- Challenging newness of supposedly new technologies; challenging the idea that
there are singular origins; challenging technological history as a singular
homogenous path (pp. 13)
- Horizon widening beyond media as entertainment media (pp. 14)
- "epistemological perversions" -- Thomas Elsaesser
- Media Archaeology as "portable" and "mobile" (pp. 15)
- Taking place in: the archive, in free-form "concept labs", in between
academic departments, art institutions (pp. 14-15)
- Media Archaeology as artistic method (pp. 16)
Media Archaeology of the Senses: Audiovisual, Affective, Algorithmic
- This chapter focuses on Media Archaeology in Film Studies, focusing on
embodiment and sensing (pp. 16)
- Main argument: that media archaeology in film contexts has the potential to
expand into a larger intermedial research methodology which focuses on
sensing (pp. 19)
- Media archaeology provides a good method for analysing how our senses are
always medialized and historically constituted (pp. 20)
- Media Archaeology in Film Theory uses cinema technologies and their
historical changes as a means of registering epistemic transformations; media
as tool or "dispositif" (Parikka focuses here on Thomas Elsaesser) (pp. 21-22)
- Contextualizing film in a large historical context as "moving images" beyond
the closed boundaries of cinema, etc. with a core focus on the body as
inscription surface and already medialized (pp. 22); Film theory is
historicized as well, theory read with history (pp. 23)
- Rethinking the primacy of visuality for a greater embodied sensorium;
rethinking whether or not digitality is really a new kind of sensation (pp.
23)
- Another definition of Media Archaeology: "an investigation into the
apparatuses as events and experiences...[]...theoretically rethought
genealogies that are able to `put in crisis habitual classification
categories...'"
- Film Theory expanding beyond the visual towards film as a multisensory
"attraction" which operates on an already multi-sensing body (pp. 23-24)
- "The attraction" operates beyond a single screen event and encompasses an
intermedial condition which is not reducible to visuality and is tied into
social interaction and Capitalist mechanisms (leisure) (pp. 25)
- Anne Friedberg's "mobile" and "virtual" cutting across various practices of
mastering the outside world: cinema, shopping, and tourism (pp. 26)
- Zielinski's "audiovisions" which seeks connections across various
technologies (pp. 27-28)
- From the above two who work from visual to multisensory, a mode of
examination which starts from affect, machines that cannot be reduced to
vision (eg. Games digital and otherwise) (pp. 28)
- Implications of affect, focus on experience over meaning, meaning outside of
representation, emphasis on media archaeology (pp. 29)
- Affect = "the embodied, visceral, pre-conscious, but also relational, tuning
of bodies of various kinds." (pp. 31)
- Addressing media where affect is not reduced to emotions or feelings but
"multisensorial, kinesthetic (moving), pre-conscious capacities and
thresholds." note: this is allied to phenomenological approaches (pp. 30)
- Replacing internal/external binary of vision (seeing as interface between in
& out) with senses constituted as a fold in the inside [again note how
Deleuze is used in comparison to digital design] (pp. 30)
- Media archaeology engages affect through examination of how affect is
understood, ie. experimental apparatus (pp. 30)
- General expansion of the attraction in Film Studies to a greater diversity of
embodied senses (pp. 33)
- Two Media Archaeological approaches through the emergence of the digital
through Film Theory:
- Orientation to the interface between digital tech and people, the effects of
media: embodiment and affect (pp. 34)
- The critique (Kittler et al) that this orientation focuses too much on the
body and disregards the materiality of media (pp. 34)
- Orientation to the algorithm and processing, the material processes of media
[affinity w/ history of science] (pp. 34-35)
- Necessity to understand media's basis in maths and science to gain full sense
of mediatic changes (eg. Kittler's study of the Fourier Transform), the
technical preconditions of media (pp. 35)
- Parikka provides the example of digital images, "codec culture" and the
necessity to look at digital encodings (pp. 36)
- Stress upon media-specificity of Media Archaeological investigation (pp. 36)
- On this side, the ability to see how mediatic mechanisms interface-with
Capitalist economics (Crary, Gere) [though the main arguments seem to be
analogic atm, dig into this] (pp. 37)
- Two main turns at the time of publication for Media Archaeologies of film
which map to the above orientations
- "genealogies in which media are always formed in intermedial relations," this
is the more embodied approach through multisensory effects (pp. 38)
- "archaeologies of media in the more technical sense," this is the approach
which foregrounds media materiality (pp. 38)
Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects
- This chapter focuses on the importance of "imaginary media:" media that may
not have existed and the supernatural as a Media Archaeological topic of
study (pp. 16-17)
- Imaginary media = (Zielinski's def.) "media non-existent, fabulated, or at
one point deemed impractical for any serious mass production, or just at some
point vanished or dead" (pp. 43)
- Not media of prediction, but media of past newness (pp. 45)
- Media critique is not just about making statements but also making things
(art, design, fabrication) (pp. 43)
- "Imaginary" beyond its usual Lacanian psychoanalytical sense (pp. 45)
- Relation to "media not-quite-real" which are not entirely object based; eg.
Wi Fi which consists both of objects (routers, cables) and non-objects
(electromagnetic fields) (pp. 45)
- General argument: Imaginary media allow for following alternate strands in
media history (non-linearity) while challenging contemporary assumptions
concerning media (pp. 45)
- Contextualizing actual media, engaging with the "hopes, desires, and
imaginaries of mediation" (Parikka relates this method to Raymond Williams)
(pp. 46)
- Lacanian approach through lack: investigation of how imaginary media produce
seeming unities and rationalities (pp. 46); imaginary media and the logic of
the myth as ideological support system (pp. 47)
- Non-Lacanian (media archaeological-oriented) approach: investigation of
underlying conditions that allow the possibility of imagining certain media;
related to Foucault's method on the conditions of knowledge (pp. 47) but that
put material near the discursive; "Media too are epistemological machines."
(pp. 48)
- Key points of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge: 1) "Archaeology is
Monumental", it is focuses on the fact that something is a monument and not
its meaning; 2) "Archaeology focuses on the specificity of the discourse, and
not on establishing continuity or transition"; 3) "Archaeology works outside of
disciplines"; 4) Archaeology does not point to origins, it is rather interested
in description (pp. 48)
- This approach allows a link between imaginary media, technical media culture,
and institutions (pp. 48)
- (Eric Kluitenberg) Imaginary media tied into situated knowledge to show how
they relate to specific material practices (pp. 49)
- Siegfried Zielinski's division of imaginary media: (pp. 50)
- "untimely media and machines:" outside of their own time, realized long
before or after their invention
- "conceptual media and machines:" impossible to realise in the actual world,
diagrammed, modelled, schematized, but never executed
- "impossible media and machines:" designed specifically with the knowledge
that they could never be realized and who, nevertheless, impact the factual
world
- Zielinski's "variontology" of media from Deep Time and the Media = individual
variations of media over "master media"; turning points and fractures in
non-progressive understanding of media history (pp. 51)
- Imagining media as a means of imagining alternate futures (against
inevitability of future proposed by normative understandings of media)
- Main critique of Zielinski: Methodology turns to procession of "great men"
inventors through focus on individual case studies; no methodological reason
for this focus (pp. 52)
- Comparison w/ Zoe Beloff's artistic work as a more complete or complementary
approach which focuses on remixing past media; imaginary media as breaking
apart unities; materiality of imaginary (pp. 53-55)
- Imaginary media and the theme of ghosts, supernatural, death, and psychical
communication
- Sconce's three key themes of haunted media which provide views into their
embedding in larger discourse networks: 1) disembodiment; 2) teleportation;
3) "anthropomorphizing" of media (pp. 55)
- Parikka provides a few examples that show the breadth of this (pp. 56-57)
- Haunted media as part of material of discourse networks (pp. 57)
- Kittler's assertion that technical media record "The Real" and not "The
Symbolic" or "Imaginary" in the Lacanian framework; The Real in all its
noisiness as the haunting within media (pp. 57)
- Zizek's methodology of stripping back horror to reveal the social relations
underneath applied to imaginary media: stripping off the "imaginary" and
seeing what kinds of social relations are revealed underneath [one media is set
up to obscure another] (pp. 57-58)
- Imaginary media as index for the non-human side of technical media; imaginary
media as deeply material (pp. 61)
Media Theory and New Materialism
- This chapter charts the materialist drive in Media Archaeology (pp. 17); main
themes are things, materiality, and medium-specificity (pp. 63)
- Hardware focus as a response to etherealization of media (their seeming
invisibility or virtuality that turn-of-the-millennium cultural theorists
like to emphasize) and to "cabinet of curiosities" impetus in media archaeology
(bringing the artefact back to its political-economic and social contexts) (pp.
64-65)
- Kittler's Hardware media theory
- Mathematics and engineering as what concretely construct worlds through tech.
(pp. 67)
- Concept of "discourse networks" (Aufshreibesystemes - lit. "Inscription
systems") as application of Foucault to media (pp. 68)
- Discourse network = "...can also designate the network of technologies and
institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and process relevant
data." (pp. 70)
- Looking at "old media" as primarily for the transmission, storage, and
processing of information
- Mediatic systems as providing insights into networks of power [the power
focus in very important]
- Media as non-reducible to content or social relations, but as involved in
producing both of those things by forming perception, memory, and how social
relations are effected (pp. 68)
- The core of media is the physical distribution and circulation of signals;
using the Shannon model which focuses on the internal mechanisms of
communication rather than the meaning-making by communication receivers (pp.
69)
- Media impose regimes of sensation and use on us which we accommodate
ourselves to "in order to be functioning subjects"; machinic agency which
treats humans and media as interchangeably programmable (pp. 70)
- Before technical media, techniques of media; both engage in regulating the
body and teaching certain patterns and relations (pp. 71)
- Kittler's use of Lacan's tripartite structure of Real, Symbolic, and
Imaginary as a means of interfacing psyche w/media; historicizing theories of
Freud and Lacan in terms of media and tech. [Homology of psyche's circulation
w/circulation of information in media systems] (pp. 72)
- Section on "pyschotechnics" expands upon the interface between human psyche
and how media work on it as a crucial form of contemporary power; military as
testing ground for civil technologies of power (pp. 73-76)
- Kittler in general: signal processing over semantics (pp. 77) system design
perspective over hermeneutics (pp. 78)
- Parikka stresses that Hardware approach can provide needed specificity and
detail to political-economic thinking [ie. anti-capitalism] while hardware
approach eschews articulating its political position (pp. 73)
- Siegert's approach through "standards"
- Focuses on systems of communication which subject users to their structure
through standardisation; eg. the postal system (pp. 78)\
- Objectification through standards (pp. 79)
- "...technology and standards precede meaning and enable it." (pp. 78)
- Computation as one kind of processing among many others which are not
computational; focus on the process of mediation opens up what is considered
media (pp. 79)
- Digital as a new condition which subsumes all other media, including the
process of production and which must be analysed by "descending" beyond the
media it contains (image, text) to its underlying operations (computational
hardware, computer code, codecs) (pp. 81); going inside the machine allows for
engagement with how political-economic implications: power circulation through
hardware-software, ownership of production & communication, changes to labour,
"platforms", control of knowledge/tools of production (pp. 81)
- Necessity to rethink media through mathematics: ontologies of media from
computation, commands, addresses, data, busses, registers, RAM; Von Neuman
architectures as the architectures of power (pp. 81-82)
- Importance of machine time, time-specificity, and time-critical processes
(Ernst) (pp. 82)
- Time criticality = "internal creative function of processuality" (pp. 82);
machinic agency (pp. 83)
- Not non-narrative but rethinking what narrative is: narrative as one
operation among many other technical operations
- Centrality of the archive over people; the archive as more-than-textual
- A marked "Kittler-Effect" on New Materialism of the Anglo-American schools
(pp. 85), Parikka lists a few Anglo-American New Materialist thinkers on pp.
84
- New Materialism = interest in objects, material processes, posthuman, and
nonhuman; intensive materiality of bodies in motion and "movement moving";
philosophical materialism as opposed to Marxist political-economic materialism;
a response to post-structuralist turn to immaterial signs and virtuality (pp.
84)
- Breadth of research positions: abstract materialism, political physiology,
radical empiricism, material feminism, material philosophies of science (pp.
84)
- Kittler's theories as providing technological basis for post-structuralist
theories, turn from societal scale research to machinic scale in American
theory (pp. 85); proliferation of disciplines such as software studies, media
ecology, etc...
- Bringing in questions of ontology (ie. what are digital media?) and of
methodology (how do we study digital media?) (pp. 87)
Mapping Noise and Accidents
- This chapter focuses on how "noise" can provide an important reading of media
history against the grain; the "underbelly of communication" which includes
non-communication, anomalies, and contagions (pp. 17)
- Media archaeology is interested in anomalies, non-mainstream. Precursor of
this in Benjamin's analysis of modernity and capitalism from ruins and
fragments (pp. 90)
- Noise as a legitimate and important topic for media archaeology in the strain
of Benjaminian analysis (pp. 91)
- Noise includes viruses, spam, scammers, non-communication, communication
breakdowns, essentially anything that prevents smoothness of communication
- Against the normative digital technological narratives of communicative
smoothness, instantaneity, and frictionless interfacing
- Other predecessors in Wolfgang Schivelbusch [The Railway Journey and his book
on 1930s "new deals"] and Paul Virilio [Virilio's accidents]; also see
Parikka's own work on computer viruses
- Noise as sonic noise
- 19th cen technologies of sound recording bring in new kinds of reproducible
sound beyond music and speech: time axis manipulation, splicing, also noise
that the recorder picks up unintentionally -- sounds of the medium itself,
sounds of the environment, sounds of mediatic process (eg. overdubbing, reuse
of wax cylinders) (pp. 92)
- Sound recording picks up interpretable signals and the extra,
non-interpretable signals, the supplements of communication (pp. 93)
- Noisiness as an artistic aesthetic w/ideological interfaces: field
recordings, noise = sound of progress in Futurism (pp. 94)
- Doug Kahn: "the trouble is that noises are never just sounds and the sounds
they make are never just sounds: they are also idea of noise," [the ability
of noise to mask signal, noise to mask other noise, and signal to mask noise]
(pp. 94)
- Noise-specific inscription media that allowed for noise manipulation; sound
as understood through noise (pp. 94)
- "Diagrammatic of noise and noise reduction" are central to Kittler et al
understanding of media through signals (pp. 95)
- Claude Shannon's mathematical model
- Communication consists of sender, receiver, and channel as well as noise
which invades from the outside (pp. 95)
- Important to note Shannon does not exclude noise from his thinking about
communication systems: it is diagrammed as an inherent component within the
system rather than being excluded from communication entirely (pp. 95)
- Conceptually, noise is modality of modern communication systems which deal
with signals rather than signs; communication as an engineered system which
is not human oriented (pp. 95)
- Mathematical theory of communication connected to war and its specific forms
of control/regulation: drilling, psychological manipulation, secrecy &
covertness, speed; modern media as making humans interfaceable with machinic
processes (pp. 96)
- "In short, we are dealing with drill and distraction, but distractions are
always already part of the drill" (Winthrop-Young on Kittler's media theory
in relation to war
- Connection through who supports scientific research (in the case of WWII,
mobilization of scientists as components of total war; later scientific
funding from military indirectly and directly)
- Realization that noise was everywhere: physical theories of entropy and
thermal noise communication as system of feedback and control, the ability
to shape, control, and manage noise in a system (pp. 97)
- Physics allows for seeing unpredictability as problem that can be managed, if
not solved (pp. 99)
- Statistical mechanics provided the means to measure and describe information
and uncertainty; problem of communication couched as a problem of entropy
control (pp. 100)
- Embedding of communication within larger field of modern thought in which
noise, incompleteness (Hilbert, Godel), and exceptions were seen as integral
to functioning systems (pp. 97)
- Post-WWII cybernetic models of feedback as a means of isolating disturbing
anomalies from systems; combatting these anomalies and noise through
redundancy (pp. 98)
- Redundancy guarantees reception of message; strategic repetition combats
uncertainty which was seen as a base characteristic of communication
- Redundancy later becomes/enables noise in communication systems (eg. DDOS
attacks, spam messages, viral programs); problem in the communication channel
transforms into problem of differentiation and classification which happens at
the receiver (pp. 98)
- Issues of classification require insulating the human user from "dirt" by
placing a machine discriminator in between them and incoming signals; with
this emerges a new form of machine-machine communication (pp. 99)
- The concept that noise can be another source of information and lead to
emergent orders which were born from noise and uncertainty adapted from
statistical mechanics and mathematics (pp. 100-101)
- Cybernetics can, then, be seen as a kind of archiving in which inclusion is
produced by exclusion [ontological predication, existence of one thing
precludes the other/existence of one thing produces a parallel other thing]
(pp. 101)
- Shannon's model = homeostasis is privileged over change; challenged by Donald
Mackay's idea that information is the change that the message achieves (pp.
101)
- Noisiness as illicit communication through a channel (faking messages,
tapping lines, eavesdropping); necessity to guarantee the identity of
different communication system elements (pp.102)
- Codes and encryption also developed as a means of increasing efficiency of
communication channels, being able to fit more information into any given
transmission
- Securing of information is closely tied to Capitalism (pp. 104)
- 19th cen electric telegraph is presented as important to the development of
cryptographic noise reduction, showing how it ties into epistemology
(universal medium is not supposed to be able to countenance noise), governance
(licencing and user exams), nationalism (warfare, boarders)
- Stressing that humans were deemed the main source of error in the systems;
this connected to gender politics of 19th cen: misogynistic objectification
of women under technical gaze of man despite women working in closest proximity
to technical media (eg. switchboard operation and typing)
- Relation between imaginary media (haunted media) and noise
- The in-between points of medial networks acquiring lively qualities through
noisiness which resists decoding (pp. 109)
- Noise is important as a means of revealing how normal (successful)
communication works (pp. 110)
- Potential approaches: aesthetic, technical, political, acoustic (pp. 109)
- The contemporary position of noise in digital culture: digital systems are
seen as metastable and vulnerable, "noise question" as governmental rhetoric
(eg: cyberwarfare, internet privacy/surveillance, digital infrastructures) (pp.
110)
- Parikka provides some examples of artists working with noise (pp. 111-112)
Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage
- This chapter maps a need to rethink the archive as a research context,
examining how our regimes of memory are embedded in software contexts (pp.
17). More specifically, this chapter investigates new, digital notions of the
archive as modes of information inscription connected to changing capitalist
economic relations (pp. 115)
- The archive as a medium that has become "too effective" ie. it has faded from
view and become invisible, leaving the illusion that there is no support and
content flows seamlessly (pp. 113)
- Archiving turns artefacts into monuments of the past, controlling what is and
is not present in history, everything else is considered trash [content that
escapes official archiving being taken up by other archival mechanisms, outside
The Archive as other Archives] (pp. 114)
- Power still resides in the archive despite its digital expansion: in software
architectures, political economy of platforms(pp. 115)
- Emphasis on media archaeology as empirical activity, following-up Foucault's
expansion of what is archival (pp. 113)
- Databasing (generalization of archiving) produces "information realities"
[rather than narratives] (pp. 114)
- Intimate relation between memory and processing (pp. 116)
- Rethinking of the relation between storage and memory (pp. 117)
- A digital archiving that forefronts executability over bit-perfect
preservation (pp. 117)
- Presence of time in the museum: 1) archival artefacts as monuments of time, a
reconstructed and recorded temporality; 2) Time exhibits itself through
deterioration, an intrinsic temporality that cannot be regained (pp. 117)
- Dual move in digital archiving: material decay is the impetus for
digitization, digital storage media are unstable and prone to decay
themselves (eg. optical media become obsolete and themselves decay over time,
digital file formats go obsolete and corrupt over long periods of non-access)
(pp. 119)
- Archiving of any type requires continuous maintenance and accessing as part
of its constitution of preservation (pp. 119)
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's point on the mistaken conflation of memory (constantly
in a state of degeneration, already fleeting) and storage (stability and
permanence, availability); we should understand digital media as an enduring
ephemerality (pp. 119)
- Digital preservation is a form of renewal through its necessity for
constantly rereading, erasure, and rewriting its own content across various
media (archives in motion making artefacts more processes than objects) (pp.
120)
- Dynamics of contemporary digital archiving practices [Eg: tagging practices
in archive.org]
- Much of the digital heritage discourse surrounds phenomenology of digital
objects and their participatory potential which focuses media specificity of
experience [my eg: playing a pc game from the 90s on a 90s computer] (pp.122);
the opposide side of which is media non-specificity of how archives are used,
remixed and reorganized (pp. 123)
- Archives are more about transmission than storage (Ernst) through their focus
on accessing and searching (pp. 123)
- Transfer protocols, search algorithms, refresh rates, and file formats (how
those formats are read) are the underpinnings of archives (pp. 123)
- Documentation (a piece of media can be documented in its installed form) vs.
archiving (a piece of media can be archived media-materially) (pp. 123)
- Archives are a living environment which transform in relation to their
content (pp. 124)
- Machines as archives (Ernst) which can work on old media and transform in
relation to the media they are supposed to work on; machinic agency (pp. 125)
- Matthew Kirchenbaum's media forensics which goes deeper into materiality of
informational systems which goes beyond the screen towards internal backend
of computing (pp. 126-127)
- The importance of "bad data," (noise) the fact that even ephemeral or deleted
data leaves physical traces; the importance of providing full processuality
of digital media through examining source code along with the full breadth of
its development (eg: commenting, plans, institutions, hardware design and
specs, etc...) (pp. 128)
- Beyond the above is the importance of executing digitally archived data and
operating upon it to watch its activity in action [process over object] (pp.
129)
- Software =/= source code only, software cannot be reduced simply to a series
of logical instructions but is a larger practice of programming (pp.130)
- Engaging with media through operating on them: learning how hardware work
with discourse through "playing with" operational examples (pp. 131)
- A machine is not a description of past media, but a concrete form of past
media principles
- Ernst: Diagramming collects the possible capacities of machinic processes,
the machine in all its concreteness is how the diagram functions as a
process; the only way to understand media objects are not as objects but
through their processes (pp. 132)
- Critique of Ernst's focus on the machine: no effective link between the
machine as operative artefact and political-economic embedding of the
machine; the approach can only be fruitful if it approaches directly this
political-economy of media (pp. 133)
Practising Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation
- This chapter focuses on Media Archaeology in creative (art mostly, but also
design to an extent) practices (pp. 17)
- Media archaeology is not just a theoretical position (research), but a
practice of making media (art/design) and "doing media history differently"
(eg: art institutions) (pp. 137)
- Non-linearity of past-presents is the approach of media archaeological art
- Ways old media are reengaged in artistic contexts:
- "Artistic works that visually engage with historic themes" (pp. 138-139)
- Leaning towards the nostalgic mode of retro
- "Invoking alternative histories" (pp. 139)
- Criticality through the it-could-be-otherwise position
- "Art of/from obsolescence" (pp. 139)
- Reuse/hacking of electronic media, media remediation, "useless media
solutions" (pp. 139)
- "Imaginary media that are constructed and not just imagined" (pp. 139-140)
- "Media archaeological art that draws from concrete archives"
- Oriented towards curatorial art: working like a historian but presents the
research in media other than writing (pp. 140)
- "Media archaeological art methods that dig not only into the past, but inside
the machine and address the present" (pp. 140-141)
- Parikka reiterates the danger of "weirdness for weirdness' sake" and
nostalgia/retro coolness in the media archaeological method which loses the
political construction/embedding of media technologies (pp. 144)
- Media archaeological art which engages gender, "the aesthetic-scientific
bases of technopolitics," ideologies of progress, environmental issues (pp.
144)
- The potential of media archaeology to "mobilize new forms of temporality"
which challenge "myths of progress," teleology, and linear time (pp. 144),
also the potential to rethink creativity as collective rather than the realm of
the individual genius (pp. 145)
- Michel Serres' "percolated time" which can flow in many directions, a
non-linear way of understanding temporality as big F Folds, a "foldable
diversity," media archaeology can force us to think of time as "pleated" [note:
this in relation to digital architectural uses and hopes for folding and what
it could do] (pp. 146)
- Zielinski's "deep time" which looks outside of the "short term use value
promoted by capitalist media industries" (pp. 147)
- "Zombie media," media salvaging which extracts new value (artistic, some
other value) from discarded media [note how that value is enacted/valourized;
is there monetary exchange? Is it reappropriation or reselling?] (pp. 148)
- Material approach as practical epistemology; concrete processes which enact
the paower relations which history/cultural studies investigates (pp.
151-152)
- Art/media activist practices on the consumer side (rather than labour side),
which feed towards production (pp. 155-156)
- Zielinski: learning the details of operation as a means of developing
alternatives to capitalist media economies. "It is the step from consumption
to production." [a form of parallel power, regaining MOP through self-design,
related to early-2000s anti-consumerist/autonomist anarchism] (pp. 156)
- "designers are actually in a privileged position concerning media critique
with the ability to create new media objects, processes and uses -- in short,
worlds." (pp. 156)
- [note: designers are positioned over assemblers, appropriation of
manufacture/assembly to the act of design; also note how objects make not
just "worlds" but the borders of these worlds (how are the borders made?
through ownership? Either way, there is a border in this model)]
- "media critique through production" (pp. 156)
Conclusions: Media Archaeology in Digital Culture
- This chapter sums everything up and provides a short discussion of the
transhistorical, transdisciplinary, non-linear nature of Media Archaeology
(pp. 18)
- Emphasises that the goal is to do things with media archaeology rather than
just critique or explain (pp. 161)
- "mapping of future potentials instead of merely histories," which makes media
archaeology a "political figure of knowledge" since the future is itself
political (pp. 161)
- Not the traditional tools of "interpretation, understanding, and critique"
but the new tools of media analysis that want "to use, to pervert, and to
modulate" adapted from D &G's ATP) [disciplinization; differentiation from a
methodological position which is viewed as spent]
- "Cartographic" modes of knowledge adapted from D/G's "nomadology" which
produces "new modes of existing, thinking, and creating" through connectivity
(pp. 161)
- The various materialities at work in media archaeology:
- "Materialities of cultural practice" (pp. 163)
- Phenomenology of media practices and affect
- "Materialities of materials" (pp. 163-164)
- How non-humans engage with human sociality
- "Materialities of technologies" (pp. 164)
- Hardware orientation
- "Media archaeology as a critique of temporality through mapping: 1) the old
in the new; 2) the new in the old 3) recurring topoi; 4) ruptures and
discontinuities" (pp. 164)
- Pre-historic media times, non-human timescales (long-span geological time,
infinitesimal machine times, "nature times") [non-human timescale is a
phenomenological formation: non-human = non-human sensible] (pp.165)
- The importance of failure to media archaeology, failure as a critique of
newness (pp. 167)
- "...media archaeology has potential as an innovative 21st-century arts and
humanities discipline that investigates non-human temporalities and does not
succumb to individualizing stories of heroes, but wants to address those
material and cultural contexts and forces that are beyond our control -- but
might suffer from our effects."
