Media Archaeology Research Articles

Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture by Haidee Wasson

Reviewed by: Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture by Haidee Wasson Gaurav Pai (bio) Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture by Haidee Wasson. University of California Press. 2020. 288 pages. $85.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. The recent expansion in the study of nontheatrical and amateur film—both made with small-gauge film technologies—resembles that of film noir around three decades ago. Scholars studying North American film discovered a new tranche of films that had hitherto been judged to be of inferior quality, not worthy as objects of scholarly historiography, and subsequently relegated to the margins of cinema and media studies. Patricia R. Zimmermann fired the first major salvo for amateur media in 1995 with her monograph Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, and soon thereafter historians such as Alan Kattelle and Anthony Slide began collating information from amateur and specialty periodicals, while Rick Prelinger began cataloging thousands of films that were shown outside of movie theaters.1 In the past two decades, the journal Film History has produced at least four issues dedicated to amateur and nontheatrical film, edited by scholars who have gone on to produce book-length [End Page 224] monographs and edited collections.2 Common to all this scholarship is the claim that this diverse collection of films has production histories, technologies of reception, and aesthetics that are radically different from that of popular feature films. Amateur and nontheatrical filmmakers rarely followed an industrial mode of production; their work was mostly seen outside of theaters, and its contents ranged from the educational to the sponsored, and even the experimental. That most of these films were made with small-gauge technologies only enhances this binarized theorization, where nontheatrical cinema is seen as the opposite of theatrical cinema. Haidee Wasson's new book challenges this supposed opposition. By examining the portability of the equipment that was used to make, disseminate, and watch amateur and nontheatrical films, Wasson recontextualizes them in the broader arc of film history from early cinema to digital media. By firmly ensconcing film practices based on portable technologies in twentiethcentury American culture, Wasson helps readers take another step inside the still evolving field of nontheatrical film, within the broader fields of cinema and media studies, media archaeology, and American studies. Wasson's central argument is that portable, or small-gauge, film technologies played as significant a role in the cultural, technological, and sensorial production of media consumers in the twentieth-century United States as Hollywood movies—clearly a transgressive take on the traditionally understood relationship between the two. For Wasson, portability refers to "a set of foundational capacities that transformed both recording and playback devices and thus affected the ways in which words, sounds, and images have been inscribed, stored, and then circulated and accessed."3 The noninflammable "safety" film stock of small gauges such as 16mm and 8mm offered such portability and allowed for industrial films, educational films, military films, amateur films, and science films to be screened at multiple venues outside the traditional movie theater. Wasson explains that the personnel behind film projection technologies intended for nontheatrical spaces used gauge as a "tactic to make portability seem less threatening to the studios and to theater owners, still mighty lynch pins in the film ecology."4 After World War II, these portable technologies grew in usage. Indeed, Wasson provides detailed statistical evidence to argue that portable projectors came to outnumber movie theaters in the years just after the war.5 So while conventional film history sees the 1950s as the fall of classical Hollywood and the rise of television, it was also a boom time for small-gauge film technologies and film stock sales. In this way, Wasson decenters the movie theater at the center of our imagination and understanding as the principal way moving images were consumed and enjoyed in the twentieth century. Or, put another way, she places portable [End Page 225] small-gauge film at the center, rather than at the periphery, of our assumptions about cinema and its histories. Everyday Movies paints a portrait of a sprawling technological infrastructure of making, showing...

Reissuing Indonesian Independent Music: Technology-Mediated Nostalgia, Hauntology and Future Projection

This research seeks to look deeper into interrelationships between technology, past, and nostalgia in musical reissue products of Indonesian independent recording labels. This research adopted qualitative-descriptive method. Data were extracted from documents which are in the form of reissue releases. This research used Media Archeology and Hauntology perspective in analyzing the data collected, which are in the form of physical reissue releases, photographic, and poster archives. Based on the results of analysis it can be concluded that nostalgia is a technology-mediated condition. Even though reissue releases are laden with past elements, it can be utilized to project future by tracing or identifying various potential creativities contained in past cultural products.

Media archaeology-based Visual Music

This article describes the intersection of Media Archaeology and Visual Music in my artistic practice that repurposes obsolete devices to investigate new connections between light and sound. I revive and hack tools from our analogue past: oscilloscopes, early game consoles, and lasers. I am attracted to their aesthetic difference from the ubiquitous digital projections: fluid beam movement, vibrant light, infinite resolution, absence of frame rate, and line-based image. The premise behind all my work is the synthesis of both image and sound from the same signal. This strong connection envelopes the audience in synchronous audiovisual information that reveals underlying geometric properties of sound. In this text I describe the practice and the aesthetic potentials connected to few analog and digital hybridized systems to generate new sonic and visual experiences.

The Hybrid Color Film: Multiplicity of Space, Time, and Matter

Hybrid color films of the 1920s such as The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)—that is, films comprising a mix of different historical color processes—are a particularly fruitful resource for the comparison of the silent era’s various color technologies. This article analyzes these cinematic hybridizations and argues that this type of film is much more than the sum of its parts. In embodying a multiplicity of layers of space, time, and color on a literal and metaphorical level, hybrid color films are not only symptomatic of the transformation of the medium in the 1920s but also symbolic of current approaches to film historiography based on media archaeology.

A difficult history of light. About metaphysical ideas of “light writing” formulated before the birth of photography

The reflections presented in this article are devoted to Junko Theresa Mikuriya’s book, A History of Light. The Idea of Photography. It is a unique view on the search for pre-photographic origins of photography in the field of philosophical writings ranging from Plato, through the neoplatonic philosopher Jamblich’s enquiry, to the texts by Philotheus of Batos and by an early Renaissance philosopher, Marsilio Ficino. When thinking about metaphysics present in (moving and still) images, one should not forget about the metaphysics of the image itself. The idea of photography – regardless of whether we are witnessing a fundamental change in an ontological transition from an analogue to a digital form of image recording – obliges us to discuss the “history of light”, as this is what Mikuriya does. While locating the discussed concepts in the context of the history and theory of photography, as well as the archaeology of media, the author of this essay engages in a dialogue with Mikuriya and polemically discusses many of her hypotheses. Key concepts such as chalepon, photagogia, triton genos, phôteinographeisthai are analysed in order to indicate inspiring moments in the Mikuriya’s reflections, but also a kind of interpretive abuse in the process of reading and analysing philosophical texts addressing the issues of light.

A Media-Archaeological Interpretation of the Optical Device: Magic Lantern Represented in Hyungsub Shin’s Latest Artwork

The purpose of this study lies in interpreting the works of the artist Hyungsub Shin using the “media archaeology” method, to explore a genealogy of media archaeology and use the findings to promote the development and expansion of media archaeology. Media archaeology is an area in media art that pursues the excavation of past media and the aesthetic use of the media in new ways. Building on recent media archaeological accomplishments, this study points out that existing media archaeology artists mostly restrict themselves to the electronic and electric media in the 20th century, and explores the possibility of sustainable expansion of research on media archaeology by discussing technologies from other periods. As part of the efforts, this study looks into the optical device -

Online Newspapers in Web Archives: An Evaluation Based on the Archive Approach of Web Historiography and Media Archeology Studies

Değişen medya ortamında giderek daha fazla içerik dijital olarak üretilip çevrim içi olarak yayımlanırken bu kapsamlı ve karmaşık ortamın nasıl arşivleneceği meselesi birçok disiplin tarafından önemli bir sorun alanı olarak görülmektedir. Bu bağlamda çevrim içi gazetelerin nasıl arşivlendiği konusu da giderek önem kazanmaktadır. Diğer yandan web arşivlerindeki çevrim içi gazetelerin medya özelliklerinin neler olduğunun ortaya konulması bu materyalleri araştırma nesnesi olarak inceleyecek olan tüm alanlar için önem taşımaktadır. İki bölüm olarak tasarlanmış olan bu çalışmada ilk olarak dijital ortamda üretilen ve çevrim içi olarak yayımlanan gazetelerin korunması konusu literatür taraması yapılarak incelenmektedir. Çalışmanın ikinci bölümünde gazetelerin, web arşivleri içerisinde ortaya çıkan yeni formları iki farklı araştırma yaklaşımı üzerinden ele alınmaktadır. Web arşivlerindeki çevrim içi gazetelerin yapısal özellikleri web tarihyazımı çalışmalarının web arşivlerini değerlendirme biçimi üzerinden incelenmektedir. Medya arkeolojisi çalışmaları içerisinde gelişen arşiv yaklaşımı ise teorik çerçeve olarak konumlandırılmaktadır. Web materyallerinin arşivlenmesi meselesini gazetecilik ve medya araştırmaları perspektifinden ele alan bu çalışma bir yandan konuya ilişkin kapsamlı bir alan değerlendirmesi ortaya koymayı hedeflerken diğer yandan konuya ilişkin sonraki çalışmalara katkı sunmayı amaçlanmaktadır.

Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

Mordmedieringer

AbstractThe so-called Torgersen case is one of the most famous murder cases and criminal proceedings in modern Norwegian history, as it started in the late 1950s and still figures in the judicial system, even after the convict’s death. Among the multitude of medial occurrences in the wake of the case we find three dramas, including Finn Iunker’sDet skjendige drapet i skippergata. In this article Iunker’s play is studied in a media archeological perspective, informed by German materialist media theory, focusing on media technology, communication systems, transmission, noise, and meta mediality. A key assertion is that Iunker’s play not only can be studied through the lens of media archeology, but to a certain extent can be read as media archeological excavation of the past, focusing on hypermedial aspects such as noise. Finally, the media archeological approach allows for a brief discussion on drama form and modern media culture.

Cultural Memory as a Means of Understanding Transculturality

Memory studies have been particularly active since the second half of the 20th century and include a mix of fields of culturology, social psychology, media archeology, political philosophy, and comparative literature. Memory studies have formed the basis of both collective and individual identity studies, as well as the study of psycho-social factors in understanding traumatic memory and attempts to overcome trauma. Memory studies have activated an in-depth analysis of the construction of national and cultural identities and brought them into the context of transnational and transcultural studies.Based on the above, the purpose of this report is to provide a transcultural understanding of national culture based on the study of cultural memory, which is primarily based on the study of national identity and the analysis of the compositional nature of common / shared myths.

THE DEEP TIME OF BITCOIN: EXCAVATING THE "WORK" IN PROOF-OF-WORK CRYPTOCURRENCY SYSTEMS

Estimates place Bitcoin’s current energy consumption at 141.83 terawatt-hours/year, an amount comparable to Ukraine. While Bitcoin’s energy problem has become increasingly visible in both academic and popular discourse (see Lally et al. 2019), the computational mechanisms through which the Bitcoin network generates coins, proof-of-work, has gone under-examined. This paper interrogates the “work” in proof-of-work systems. What is this work? How can we access its material history? I trace this history through a media archaeology of computational heat, in an attempt to better situate the intimate relationship between information and energy in proof-of-work systems. I argue the “work” in these systems is principally heat-work, and trace its ideological constructions back to nineteenth-century thermodynamic science, and the reframing of doing work as something exhaustible, directional, and irreversible (Prigogine & Stengers 2017; Daggett 2019). I then follow thermodynamic discourse through Cybernetics debates in the 1940s, illustrating how, early in the formation of Information Theory, the heat-work undergirding the functioning of a “bit” was obscured and compartmentalized, allowing information to be productively abstracted apart from its energetic infrastructures (Hayles 1999; Kline 2015). I conclude with a discussion of the heat-work within the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), Bitcoin’s principal mining tool, arguing that proof-of-work mining is not a radical exception to the computing status quo, but rather a lens through which to think more broadly about computing’s complex relationship to energy, and ultimately, how this relationship can be different.

When data drive health: an archaeology of medical records technology.

Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today’s electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today’s electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease.

‘There Was Modernism. Then There Was Digital:’ Kenneth Goldsmith and the Updating of Literature

The notion of literature as an obsolete form, out of sync with its own time, has been a familiar one ever since modern media displaced the literary from its previous centrality in culture. Expounding on poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s express ambitions of bringing literature up to date with contemporary media culture, this article engages the larger stakes of his work with a view to an ‘updated literature’ – a literature, as it is here considered, 'beyond textuality.' Informed by the theoretical perspectives of Friedrich Kittler and the broader field of media archeology, the article posits literature’s turn toward the generalized ‘informational milieu’ of contemporary network culture and its concomitant break with modernist notions of medium specificity. Although the provocations of both Goldsmith and Kittler have received much previous attention; in seeking here to bring them together in a committed way, this article also moves beyond the limits of their approaches to rethink the problem of literature’s dubious distinctness in our age of networks.

Dreamlike Environments: “Story-living” in Virtual Reality Installations

This article examines the narrative identity of a new emerging medium, the virtual reality installation. In order to do so, the representation of dream states often presented in virtual art will be considered as a metareflexive model to be analysed in order to comprehend the distinctive characteristics of this experience. From this point of view, the study distinguishes virtual from physical art installations, the experience of which has been compared by Claire Bishop to the process of de-codification of dreams, focusing on the concept of incorporation. Accordingly, this incorporated experience of immersive images will be considered in relation to contemporary dream theory, formulated in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. At the same time, a second focus will be devoted to the use of the dream metaphor in new media art dealing with media archaeology and in particular in the interactive artwork Beyond (1997). In conclusion, the analysis of two contemporary virtual reality installations metariflexively dealing with dream experience, Somnai (2018) and The Key (2019) will lead to the individuation of a common experiential model: storyliving instead of storytelling.

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

Braided Senses and Tangible Technics: Strange Encounters and Ethological Exploration at the Media Archaeology Lab

This paper presents excerpts of tangible, sensual research at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), framed within a reflection of the bodily and mental experiences and a discussion of media haptics and ethological theory.

СВЕТОКИНЕТИЧЕСКОЕ ИСКУССТВО ФРЭНКА МАЛИНЫ В ДИСКУРСИВНОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ ЭКРАННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

The article studies the work of Frank Joseph Malina (1912–1981), scientist, rocket engineer and artist, within the discourse space of screen culture. Modern screen science aims to explore the broad intermedia connections and cultural contexts associated with analyzing the technological, informational, and communicative features of digital screen surfaces, as well as determining their influence on the human cognitive and sensory apparatus. Technological art can be perceived as one of the discourses of media archaeology, within which the topoi of modern screen forms are identified and aestheticized. The prospects of research within the declared discourse field are associated with the fact that the creative response to intensive scientific and technological development concentrated on the key problems of the changing system of cultural communications. The screen as a boundary, as a window into the reality of representation, as a place for the “assembly” of corporal and sensory response to interaction with the information space—these and other meanings were addressed by envoys of technological art. Curiosity about the work of F. Malina in the context of screen culture is associated with his lumino kinetic experiments. They were aimed at the artistic mastering of the world standing on the verge of entering the digital virtual space. The article emphasizes that at the heart of his research was a screen form in which light fluxes gathered together thanks to electromechanical systems; in which light radiation came into contact with the human eye and body. Through his art, Malina explores the possibilities and limits of human perception, inevitably changing in the era of intensive scientific and technological development. The directions of his exploration testify to the discourse modeling of the modern computer screen. They can be taken as harbingers of the cultural communications of the digital age.

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive Meredith A. Bak (bio) Researchers whose work falls under the multidisciplinary umbrella of childhood studies are accustomed to thinking creatively. “The traces of childhood found in archives and special collections,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, “may tend toward the ephemeral.”1 Sánchez-Eppler also acknowledges the difficulty of finding the child’s perspective in the archive, pointing out that “[r]ecords of childhood and records made by children have been housed in archives and library special collections all along, although they have usually been classified in a manner that tends to obscure rather than highlight their presence.”2 Childhood studies has much in common with certain areas of media history. For instance, many scholars of childhood and practitioners of media archaeology contest teleological models of history that conform to a kind of “developmental paradigm,” and researchers in both fields maintain similar orientations to the archive as a repository to be interrogated and reinterpreted for missed perspectives.3 During the research for my book on nineteenth-century optical toys, I became used to venturing into archival spaces that did not register immediate or obvious connections to cinema [End Page 168] and media history.4 I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts—an institution that endeavors to collect “everything printed in what was once British North America before the year 1877.”5 Yet their outstanding children’s literature collection includes several intricate movable and novelty toy books, which adapted pre-cinematic visual effects and gestured to experiences of spectacle and spectatorship that cinema would further institutionalize. Optical toys appear in the collections of such institutions as the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London, and the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, where they are not typically or primarily regarded as objects of media history but for their relevance to the history of childhood. These objects’ inclusion across such varied collections demonstrates Sánchez-Eppler’s assertion that classificatory systems can conceal some associations just as much as they can illuminate others. Excavating the significance of optical toys as toys required archival encounters that sought these artifacts embedded within the visual and material worlds of childhood rather than within networks of meaning that prioritize the optical effects they produced (which have served as the primary basis for their link to the invention of cinema).6 Resituating these toys in this way opens up opportunities to view their functions as instruments of perceptual pedagogy, not as oppositional to the pleasure they afforded in play but as closely linked. If evidence of film and media’s longer history is distributed in such diverse archival contexts, interwoven with other narratives, to what other unexpected sources might we turn to trace histories that have remained under-considered? Moreover, can familiar texts in cinema history be reread to point us to previously overlooked forms of evidence? A new research project on the history of toys that come “to life” brought me to accounts of the origins of stop-motion animation and to a passage in Albert E. Smith’s 1952 memoir, Two Reels and a Crank. Smith recalls making a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1897 or 1898—shortly after he and James Stuart Blackton founded Vitagraph studios: “Vitagraph made the first stop-motion picture in America, The Humpty Dumpty Circus. I used my little daughter’s set of toy wooden circus performers and animals, whose movable joints enabled us to place them in balanced positions. It was a tedious process inasmuch as movement could be achieved only by photographing separately each change of position.”7 The film is not extant and may never have been made at all. If the film had been made, Donald Crafton hypothesizes, it was [End Page 169] not until later, between 1902 and 1905.8 Smith’s claim to have made The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898 is not widely believed by animation historians (and indeed, it can be disproven). However, his statement also raises an intriguing link between early animation and children’s play culture. This unexplored connection suggests...

Escavações de audiovisualidades em narrativas site-specific

Propõe uma discussão a respeito das audiovisualidades – tomadas enquanto qualidades audiovisuais que se atualizam em formatos diversos em nossa tecnocultura – presentes em duas narrativas as quais foram projetadas para serem acessadas e acionadas em conexão com determinadas localidades (site-specific): os projetos artísticos 34N118W (2003) e A Machine to See With (2010). Metodologicamente, apoia-se na perspectiva da arqueologia da mídia enquanto visada que propõe a realização de escavações materiais – no sentido da descrição e resgate de imagens e documentos sobre os observáveis e memoriais – para autenticação de devires tecnoculturais que podem ser percebidos nessas obras. Nesse movimento, são propostas quatro camadas de audiovisualidades narrativas: caminhantes, urbanas, locativas e guiadas. Em articulação, estas camadas dão a ver estéticas de conectividades híbridas que seguem sustentando lógicas de desafio ao estatuto das imagens técnicas.

Siegfired Zielinski – archeolog i wariantolog mediów

In this article, I present the chosen themes of Siegfried Zielinski’s, the Greman media theoretician, thought. It concerns his two great complementary projects: media archeology and variantology. I discuss those issues in two parts of this article. In the first part, I depict the media archeology project from a “methodological” perspective – here I point some assumptions form which Zielinski starts his reflection on media. The second part is devoted to the theme of the teology of mediality, which is a consequence of his variantological approach. Here, other figure appears – Vilem Flusser; theoretician who also sees in this unexpected juxtaposition (of what is divine/religious and what is medial/technical) a useful metaphor describing phenomenons of contemporary culture.