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Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

An introduction to WE’s media theory in relation to German media theory, Kittler and the wider Digital Humanities debates

Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History and Narrative of Media

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Ernst introduces the idea of how the machine itself register time even before the intervention of the human observer

The Posthuman: What Are the Digital Posthumanities?

Gary Hall

in Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities

What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a ... More

What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a rigorous “piratical” reading of RosiBraidotti’s The Posthuman. Since the focus of this chapter is on how theorists act, it also explains the philosophy Hall is endeavoring to perform in some of the projects and actions he is involved with. Chapter 4 looks at two such projects in particular. The first is Open Humanities Press (OHP), a non-profit open access publisher Hall co-founded in 2006. The project covered in most detail however is a series of books Hall co-edits as part of OHP called Living Books About Life.Less

Media Archaeology as a Transatlantic Bridge

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

specifically written for this Anglo-American edition, Ernst gives his own introduction to media archaeology and archivology

Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Chapter 6: elaborates the media philosophy of archives by arguing that the spatial and metaphorical set of interface concepts we have are insufficient to understand what the archive is in digital ... More

Chapter 6: elaborates the media philosophy of archives by arguing that the spatial and metaphorical set of interface concepts we have are insufficient to understand what the archive is in digital cultureLess

Introduction: Cinema’s Grey Spaces

Stephen Monteiro

in Screen Presence: Cinema Culture and the Art of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Hatoum and Gordon

Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space ... More

Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space and the “black box” of the movie theatre. This introduction challenges that approach, arguing that new methods and research drawn from media and cultural studies—rather than art history—are critical to contextualizing the origins and significance of such art. It demonstrates how these works and the terms of their display may diverge from the standards of the move theatre while including aspects of other forms of popular film and video culture, from the drive-in to the peep show. It concludes by laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and historically rooted approach to the relationship between art and popular media, one better suited to identifying and measuring the artistic influence of an extraordinary range of popular media forms and practices.Less

Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Ernst contextualises his media archaeological method in relation to the art/cultural historical theories of Stephen Bann

Ticking Clock, Vibrating String: How Time Sense Oscillates Between Religion and Machine

Wolfgang Ernst

in Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between

This chapter presents a media-archaeological approach to the study of religion and technology in order to reformulate religious practices in technological terms. The chapter focuses on the historical ... More

This chapter presents a media-archaeological approach to the study of religion and technology in order to reformulate religious practices in technological terms. The chapter focuses on the historical development of mechanical clocks, from their origins in the monasteries of mediaeval Christian Europe to the oscillating time-keeping mechanisms that lie at the basis of modern computers. The author argues that, despite the original religious and cultural goals that fostered the development of mechanical time-keeping, the history of the oscillating clock reveals a non-cultural, techno-poetical element at work, as demonstrated in the chapter's analysis of one of the clock's key mechanisms: the anchor escapement. Once set in motion, the anchor mechanism of the oscillating clock operated according to its own its technical logic, resulting in the generation of time-based media processes that challenge our very conceptions of historical narrative and the place of religion therein.Less

Toward a Media Archaeology of Sonic Articulations

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Chapter 9: the chapter addresses the epistemological challenges in a sound based historical excavation

Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity¹

Tiago de Luca

in Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics

This chapter looks at the way in which the whole world has been imagined in visual and audiovisual media. In particular, it explores how the trope of global travel was exploited in nineteenth-century ... More

This chapter looks at the way in which the whole world has been imagined in visual and audiovisual media. In particular, it explores how the trope of global travel was exploited in nineteenth-century panoramas that had the ambition to encompass the entire world, such as the georama, the cosmorama and round-the-word moving panoramas. By looking at these earlier examples in mass visual culture, the chapter hopes to provide a useful framework to examine the way in which the whole world has reemerged in contemporary audiovisual culture.Less

Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

addresses the questions of real time memory through the media technology of television, and the emergence of new kinds of dynamic archives as part of the post-broadcasting era

Distory: One Hundred Years of Electron Tubes, Media-Archaeologically Interpreted, vis-à-vis One Hundred Years of Radio

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Chapter 8: the chapter offers a case study of the media archaeology of the radio, or actually of the electron tube as a way to understand the grey, often neglected role of components in media history

Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Chapter 10: this chapter continues to elaborate the link between sound and mathematics, through three brief case studies of Pythagoras, Hertz and finally with Turing and the emergence of the digital ... More

Chapter 10: this chapter continues to elaborate the link between sound and mathematics, through three brief case studies of Pythagoras, Hertz and finally with Turing and the emergence of the digital ageLess

Moving pictures, moving on

Nicholson Heather Norris

in Amateur film: Meaning and practice c. 1927–77

Chapter 9 is both reflective and forward-looking. Discussion acknowledges the broad shifts within amateur activity, its variety and also the profound scope for further activity as amateur film gains ... More

Chapter 9 is both reflective and forward-looking. Discussion acknowledges the broad shifts within amateur activity, its variety and also the profound scope for further activity as amateur film gains new visibility and as digitisation widens access and opens new opportunities in archival practice and outreach. Interests in amateur cinema have mushroomed during the writing of this book amongst scholars, archival circles and other users. The writing seeks to reflect that dynamism and diversity of intellectual, creative and other possibilities, whilst remaining faithful to the multiple stories and memories represented by the filmmakers and films that have contributed to the book. Links to media archaeology, memory studies and the repositioning of amateur practice within more integrated understanding of visual cultural history spanning cinema and television are suggested. Challenges and possibilities lie ahead. Acquisition, conservation and interpretation for films must continue as must the alternative framings of conceptual, theoretical and disciplinary interests that will emerge, refine or replace those offered here. This book seeks to further stimulate wider curiosity, critical understanding and enjoyment of amateur film practice as its approaches its centenary.Less

Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Continues along the same themes of microtemporality and elaborates how the digital memory is always dynamic, in movement

Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point of View

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

Chapter 7: the chapter elaborates the idea of the common roots of narratives and counting in calculational practices, and continues to discuss the digital as calculation, not narrative, culture

Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts

Aura Satz and Jussi Parikka

in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

Stemming from their common interest in media archeology and the idea of the air as a medium of encrypted signals, Satz and Parikka explore the themes emerging from Satz's film installation 'Impulsive ... More

Stemming from their common interest in media archeology and the idea of the air as a medium of encrypted signals, Satz and Parikka explore the themes emerging from Satz's film installation 'Impulsive Synchronisation' (2013). Satz has used various technologies as the subject of her work, including the Chladni plate, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and optical sound, looking at how such objects tap into ideas of knowledge and communication in their use of notation systems, languages or codes. Satz is also interested in bringing to the fore key female figures largely excluded from mainstream historical discourse in an ongoing engagement with the question of women’s contributions to labour, technology and scientific knowledge. The starting point for ‘Impulsive Synchronisation’ was a 'Secret Communication System' patented during World War II by Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and American composer George Antheil. This invention of 'frequency hopping', designed to protect radio-controlled torpedoes from enemy disruption by distributing the signal over many frequencies and synchronising the transmitter and receiver in rapidly changing patterns, has become the basis for today's spread-spectrum technology. In Satz’s work, these technologies are referenced to explore visual, musical and data notation, as well as its encryption, synchronisation and decipherment.Less

Redesign: Data’s Turbulent Pasts and Future Paths

Colin Koopman

in How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

This chapter develops an argument for what resistance might look like under conditions of infopower. Equally important, it also describes what forms such resistance to infopower are unlikely to take. ... More

This chapter develops an argument for what resistance might look like under conditions of infopower. Equally important, it also describes what forms such resistance to infopower are unlikely to take. A key argument is that resistance calibrated to infopower is irreducible to mainstream theories of democratic deliberation that presuppose information in such a way that they cannot confront it as a political problematic in its own right. The chapter criticizes influential communicative accounts of democracy that have structured much of recent normative political theory. Primary targets include the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and the work of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The chapter shows why both of these theories are structurally unable to confront information itself as a political problem. A precursor for a more viable approach is found in the work of Dewey’s interlocutor, and sometimes foil, Walter Lippmann. Rather than suspending communication-centered politics by way of a turn to aesthetics (a prominent option for contemporary political theory), an alternative is sketched in a turn toward technics and technology. On this view, resistance to infopolitical fastening is best mounted at the level of designs, protocols, audits, and other forms of formats.Less

Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

A chapter in which the microtemporality of digital archives is introduced, and set as different from the classical archive definition/practices