Media archaeology

For the archaeology of the Media region, see Medes § Archaeology.

Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. ^[1] Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called dead media, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. ^[2] Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge. ^[3]

The theories and concepts of media archaeology have been primarily elaborated by the scholars and cultural critics Thomas Elsaesser, Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, and Wolfgang Ernst, taking off from earlier work by Michel Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge, Walter Benjamin on the culture of mass media, and film scholars such as C.W. Ceram on the archaeology of cinema. ^{[1] [2] [3]} Other writers who have contributed to the discipline's emergence include Eric Kluitenberg, Anne Friedberg, Friedrich Kittler, and Jonathan Crary. ^[1] New media theorist Jussi Parikka defines media archaeology as follows:

Media archaeology exists somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s. I see media archaeology as a theoretically refined analysis of the historical layers of media in their singularity—a conceptual and practical exercise in carving out the aesthetic, cultural, and political singularities of media. And it's much more than paying theoretical attention to the intensive relations between new and old media mediated through concrete and conceptual archives; increasingly, media archaeology is a method for doing media design and art. ^[2]

Computer labs that archive and preserve obsolete technology are termed media archaeology labs, such as the Electronic Literature Lab that allows scholars to access electronic literature on "appropriate computer equipment."

Within the field of media archaeology, and its subfield of media archaeography, additional attention is directed towards both practical uses and theoretical analysis of modern, technologically advanced media (photography, phonography, and various audiovisual and digital records) as sources in archaeological, historical, cultural and other scientific studies, ^[4] with special emphasis on research possibilities that stem from technically recorded data. ^[5]

See also

• Electronic Literature Lab
• The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space

References

1. Parikka, Jussi. "'With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be': An Interview with Zoe Beloff". Electronic Book Review, 24 October 2011.
2. "CTheory Interview: Archaeologies of Media Art". Conversation between Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz, ctheory.net, 1 April 2010.
3. Natale, Simone. "Understanding Media Archaeology". Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37 (2012), pp 523–527.
4. Ernst 2011, p. 241-242: "Media are not only objects but also subjects (“authors”) of media archaeology. The term media archaeography describes modes of writing that are not human textual products but rather expressions of the machines themselves, functions of their very mediatic logic - just as photography in Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature registers physical (optical) reality in a way not performed by the painterly human hand anymore."
5. Ernst 2011, p. 242: "Technological media such as photography and computing became active archaeologists of physical realities that are often inaccessible to human senses, as in the case of ultraviolet photography of ancient manuscripts, or the reconstruction of “lost” sound signals in damaged Edison wax cylinders by optical scanning and digital processing."

Sources

• Ernst, Wolfgang (2011). "Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media". Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 239–255.

Further reading

• Alloa, Emmanuel. Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media. Columbia University Press, 2021.
• Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
• Grau, Oliver. Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality. In: Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Vol. 32, Issue 5, 1999, S. 365–372. (English extract of Master Thesis: Die Sehnsucht im Bild zu sein, Hamburg 1994).
• Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka (Eds.). Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. University of California Press, 2011.
• Huhtamo, Erkki. "Time traveling in the gallery: an archeological approach in media art." In Immersed in technology, Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod (Eds.). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA 233–268. 1996.
• Kluitenberg, Eric. Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. Rotterdam NAI Publishers, 2006.
• Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Polity, 2012.
• Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Mean. MIT Press, 2008.