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Remembering Networks

Alan Liu

in Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

This chapter begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era—Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos Jr., and William ... More

This chapter begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era—Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos Jr., and William Gibson (1992)—to call for a method of “network archaeology” extending media archaeology. Network archaeology facilitates understanding the sense of history in our postlinear age of digital networks—one filled with buzzing, flitting ephemeral or dynamic artifacts that make a mockery of archiving, yet that urgently requires methods not just of archiving but of open, transparent archiving. Past eras created networked artifacts and systems in their own way. The chapter braids together research on web archiving, scientific workflows (data-analysis workflows facilitating reproducible research), data provenance, and digital humanities prosopography to make the case for remembering networks through new digital archiving methods. Remembering networks, it argues, is foundational for providing our networked age with its appropriate, distinctive sense of history.Less

Coda

Charles Musser

in Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s

The first section characterizes the structure of feeling of US presidential elections during the long 1890s, making comparisons between that decade and the contemporary moment, noting similarities ... More

The first section characterizes the structure of feeling of US presidential elections during the long 1890s, making comparisons between that decade and the contemporary moment, noting similarities between the campaigns of William McKinley and Barack Obama. It briefly considers new media moments such as radio and television as well as recurrent structures of politicking in the twentieth century. The second section considers the shift from Film Studies to Film and Media Studies and the dialogic relations between the study of early cinema and the emerging field of media archaeology. Finally considers ways in which the illustrated lecture can be analyzed within the framework of Documentary Studies.Less

Imagining the New Media Encounter

Alan Liu

in Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

This chapter studies "narratives of new media encounter" (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to ... More

This chapter studies "narratives of new media encounter" (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to suggest that major historical changes in the sociocultural order are mirrored in narratives of media history. Often, as in the case of Marshall McLuhan's writings, such narratives follow a plot of progressivist media determinism—of necessary change from old media to new media—even as they also reveal the more ambivalent experience of a "contact zone" between civilizations. At once descriptive and interpretive, tales of new media encounter are a foundational form of media theory—a kind of media archaeology of media theory. They show how societies experience history as communication and information media, and communication and information media as history. They register the experience of history as media history. Finishing on the promising example of a recent collection of essays on the digital humanities, the chapter concludes by asking the critical question: what is an imaginatively enriching, rather than deterministic constraining, narrative of new media encounter?Less

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

Archives as Archaeological Sites

Gabriella Giannachi

in Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday

This Chapter shows how archaeology offers a set of translating and mediating practices that help us to build an understanding of the apparatus of the archive as an amalgam of materials that may have ... More

This Chapter shows how archaeology offers a set of translating and mediating practices that help us to build an understanding of the apparatus of the archive as an amalgam of materials that may have been produced at different points in time. To unearth the archive as a site, the chapter introduces an archaeological toolkit including elements such as survey; excavation; media archaeology and remediation. The chapter also shows how the archive operates as strata. In particular, the chapter focuses on the capacity of the archive to facilitate the production and transmission of our presence, our present, and our identity. By analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson’s !R.A.W. project archaeologically, the chapter shows the inter-relatedness of materials and the media used to frame them, unpacking how archives ought to be read contextually as inter-archives.Less

The Shards of Zadar: A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema

Ulrich Meurer

in Classics and Media Theory

By ‘unearthing’ artefacts from folded layers of time, media archaeology undermines linear historical discourse: in this regard, this chapter addresses an exemplary art-based project on the origins of ... More

By ‘unearthing’ artefacts from folded layers of time, media archaeology undermines linear historical discourse: in this regard, this chapter addresses an exemplary art-based project on the origins of cinema that takes the epistemological metaphor of ‘excavation’ at its word. In 2011, the Canadian artist Henry Jesionka discovers several ancient bronze and glass objects on a Croatian beach, dates the pieces to the first century CE, and identifies them as components of an intricate Graeco-Roman mechanism for the projection of moving images. This rewriting of media history not only illustrates how traits of materiality and contingency interfere with teleological history; it also reflects on industrial capitalism’s paradox claims of ‘reason’ and the ideological presuppositions of progress: Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of a merely simulated Rationality of Capitalism (1997) suggests that traditional narratives of technological invention are invariably organized around a clandestine and insufficiently repressed nucleus of the unforeseen, unpredictable, and irrational. By admitting to a similar element of chance or lost control, Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema project and new founding myth of cinema comment on the logic of media archaeology as an expression of late capitalism’s waning belief in its own rationale.Less

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

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

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

At the Interface: Multimodal Sensing and Intelligent Learning Systems: The Dynamic Transformation of the Cityscape and Its Ongoing Study

Bill Seaman

in Digital Cities: Between History and Archaeology

The contemporary city is quickly changing in line with the quixotic nature of today’s array of computational media. As a result, we need to begin to create new technological methodologies to aid in ... More

The contemporary city is quickly changing in line with the quixotic nature of today’s array of computational media. As a result, we need to begin to create new technological methodologies to aid in the study of the cityscape over time. This chapter presents some interesting ideas, given that the physical nature of buildings and material infrastructures change at a different rate from that of contemporary digital media. In terms of the cityscape, the digital media and their presence in differing forms are evermore ubiquitous. The author’s approach is to combine two areas of study—cyber-archaeology and media archaeology—in the service of future research. The notion is to create intelligent new systems for the archiving and perusal of multimodal media. He proposes new computationally intelligent approaches to generative virtual environments and relational databases. Also, he points to the nature of context and the limits of current computing in terms of discerning that context. And he asks: As humans we can quickly size up situations, shifting conceptual contexts without a problem; can we build new polysensing systems to help augment the machinic understanding of context and define a vast compendium of relationalities, as well as develop new multimodal search methodologies? This would help us create contemplative media contexts that lend insights into our ongoing learning in terms of research and cultural understanding of the present, enfolding multiple chosen perspectives.Less

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

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

Typewriter Concrete Poetry as Activist Media Poetics

Lori Emerson

in Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

Chapter three focuses on poetic experiments with the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Fascicle as Process and Product

Lori Emerson

in Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

Chapter four looks at Emily Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as a way to challenge the coherence of the book in the mid to late 19th century.