Media Archaeology Research Articles

Inventing Pasts and Futures Speculative Design and Media Archaeology

Inventing Pasts and Futures Speculative Design and Media Archaeology

Media and values: Stanisław Pietraszko and culturological media studies

The paper offers a media-studies-inflected interpretation of Stanisław Pietraszko’s thought. Adopting the perspective of cultural mediology of the humanities, I analyze both Pietraszko’s published writings and his notes from the as-yet unresearched archival collection of his index cards. My focus is on the nexus of communication and technology, a theme rarely discussed by Pietraszko and even more rarely addressed in the reception of his work. I propose a reading of Pietraszko’s postcard-focused “Messages and values” as “Media and values,” in doing which I seek to make contemporary interpretations of his ideas more nuanced. Although Pietraszko, who was indebted to the cybernetic theory of communication, wrote about “messages” rather than “media,” he also explored the non-verbal properties of the carrier, which he believed to be replete with references to values. This encourages locating his article in the field of media-studies inquiry even though the very term “media” does not appear in the text at all. Given that Pietraszko’s conception can be regarded as epitomizing the former stage in the development of cultural theory with its emphasis on relative autonomy, I note the anachronic quality of his thought vis-à-vis technology. At the same time, I point out the parallels between the study of singular and “gone/renderedredundant” messages he proposed and the pursuits of today’s media archaeology.

Brief Technical History and Audiovisual Parameters of Electromechanical Television

The purpose of the research is to characterize the most important milestones in the technical history and audiovisual parameters of electromechanical (mechanical) television of the 1840s–1930s as an audiovisual ecosystem. Research methodology. The study uses, firstly, an ecosystem approach, which made it possible to qualify television as a networked audiovisual ecosystem with internal dynamics and external interactions, and secondly, media archaeology as a field that attempts to understand the early stage and electromechanical practices of television through the prism of technical history, and, thirdly, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, generalization and abstraction when working with theoretical material. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the article comprehensively and at the appropriate theoretical level considers the most significant milestones in the development of electromechanical (mechanical) television of the period and its audiovisual parameters. Conclusions. It is proved that during the 40 years since the patent for the “Nipkow disc” was granted in 1885 to the first public demonstration of television moving images by the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird in 1925, electromechanical TV has gone through a rapid and very significant path from broadcasting a static image (analogue of photography) to transmitting a moving image (analogue of cinema). It has been substantiated that despite numerous experiments aimed at “collaborating” the means of preserving and transmitting sound and image (telegraph, radio, telephone), early mechanical television broadcasts remained silent and black and white. It is emphasized that further technical development and improvement of audiovisual parameters of mechanical television led to the deepening of audiovisual synthesis in the industry and its transformation, which first resulted in the emergence of electromechanical and electronic systems with the ability to preserve colour images and later regular and cable television broadcasting systems.

“Cinema was becoming more real”

This study examines the historical legitimacy, aesthetic potential and limitations of the vertical screen image through two dimensions: cross media comparison of the New Wave of French cinema and the creative practice of thevertical screen image in the complex new media environment of today. This studyfollows the principle of unity between history and logic to explore in detail theinfluence and inspiration of the narrative aesthetics of French New Wave films on the creation of short videos in the vertical screen era, starting from the four dimensions of “telling” and “showing”, as well as narrative time and narrative space. Through the media archaeology of film history, it is easy to find that many features of short video creation coincide with the creative concept advocated by the French New Wave.

Notes on camera obscura: three contemporary artistic perspectives on the path of photography


 In 1971, Rockne Krebs presented an immersive artwork composed of the optical phenomenon of the camera obscura, among other elements. Although this artist appears to be the first interested in this phenomenon, it was only from the 1990s onwards that the artistic practice of camera obscura as room installation became widespread. In the decades since, several authors have included it in their production—developing projects of a photographic nature through different approaches, mainly focusing on projected image or spectator participation. Through the method of media archaeology, it is possible to find three lines of contemporary artistic research on the phenomenon: camera obscura related to meta-photography in Abelardo Morell’s works; immersive installation pieces as proposed by Zoe Leonard; and projections of other worlds in the work of the artistic duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. This paper aims at a comparative study that intends to analyze these three paths, underlining the characteristics of some contemporary artworks and contextualizing their elements to the history and use of camera obscura in the photographic context.

Excavating Amnesia: A Media Archaeology of Early Internet Art from Singapore

Abstract: The notion of ‘newness’ is a tenacious apparition possessing discourses of new media art. Artistic explorations engaged with technology in Singapore tend to be perceived in discontinuous fragments, imbuing such practices with an apparent ahistoricity. This essay seeks to disturb this amnesia beneath which Singapore new media art histories appear to rest. By drawing upon Jussi Parikka’s elucidation of media archaeology, two early instances of internet art by Singaporean artists will be analysed: Ocarina (1994), a digital art object housed within the virtual Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum, and the internet performance/installation presented at Documenta11, alpha 3.4 (2002), by collective tsunamii.net (artists Charles Lim Yi Yong, Woon Tien Wei, and scientist Melvin Phua). These works, bracketing the period of the mid-1990s to early-2000s, are examined in relation to existing discussions of internet art in art history, as well as discourses of technology inflected by Singapore’s attempts to build and consolidate internet infrastructures through masterplans and initiatives. This essay thus gestures towards the complications and contrivances in thinking about Singapore’s new media art as a discursive entity, which is interwoven with regional historiographies of art and technology, and a project intrinsically related to questions of modernity and contemporaneity.

Archaeology of the Eyeball: Lu Xun, Eye-Gouging Myth, and Ocular Anatomy

This article situates Lu Xun at the intersection of late‐Qing folkloric discourse and medical science by studying his 1925 essay “Lun zhaoxiang zhilei” (“On Photography”). “On Photography” is a rich yet enigmatic piece of writing that has yet to receive critical attention on its own terms in the scholarship of either Lu Xun or Chinese visual culture. Lu Xun's essay includes a folklore account of “foreign devils” plucking out locals’ eyes and pickling them in a jar. Bracketing the magic lantern incident held by many as the primal scene of modern Chinese literature, this article suggests that Lu Xun's account of the eyeball offers a no less significant example of how an alternate optical device can be employed to reflect China's encounter with colonial modernity. Adopting the method of media archaeology, this article argues that Lu Xun's essay holds the key to tracing a genealogy of the eyeball from its embedment in feudal superstition to its embodiment of antimissionary sentiments, from figurative representation in Chinese medical classics to physiological simulation in anatomical treatises, and from anatomical visualization to optical abstraction and modulation. This genealogy constructs the eye as a historically valid subject that morphs from the eye to the eyeball and then to the eye again, a genealogy that is revealing of how China grappled through a crucial period of political, cultural, and scientific sea changes.

The New Virtuality: A Video Essay on the Disappearing Differences Between Real and Unreal

This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real-time. Through readings of film and media theory, archival research, textual readings (across paintings, digital art, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture) and media archaeology, the essay argues for virtuality as a multi-paradoxical and discombobulating vacillation: believed yet disbelieved; manipulated yet recognisable; realistic yet fake. This renewed understanding of the virtual also signals the pliability of post-truth and its concomitant challenges to frameworks of disbelief, reliability and certainty. It constitutes the new battleground for understanding the politics of current and future realities and histories.

An amusing optical toy for the hands?: reassessing nineteenth-century British paper peepshows through embodied knowledge

ABSTRACT My article examines the structure of the nineteenth-century British paper peepshow and the experience of using it. Inspired by the agenda of media archaeology, I argue that an analysis of this medium that goes beyond excavating details of an obscured optical recreation can bring new insight into our understanding of peep media and nineteenth-century visual culture. By discussing the origin and circulation of the paper peepshow and detailing the clear distinction between it and media like the peepshow box and pop-up books, I detach the paper peepshow from the genealogy of these media while stressing the significance of its intermedial relationship with other nineteenth-century visual entertainments. I then adopt the notion of embodied knowledge to explore users’ engagement with this medium, drawing from personal handling experience in archives as well as theoretical conceptualisations. My article argues that peering into the paper peepshow should be understood as an act of creativity and imagination, and that the tactile played a crucial role in users’ interaction with this medium. This study thus fits well in debates about the embodied or multi-sensory vision in the nineteenth-century context, and functions as another example that affirms the active agency of users of visual recreations of this period. Overall, by analysing significant features of the paper peepshow and the experience of peeping into it, my research also constitutes a small but important expansion in the current understanding of peep media.

Remediation processes and reading protocols: A genealogy of digital comics

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of digital comics by quickly reconstructing their salient evolutionary lines, contextualizing them within the broader media landscape and discussing the directions they are prominently developing. It begins by tracing the many remediations that have marked the history of comics, foregrounding some tensions underlying the comics form: seriality and its implications; the dialectic between popular form and artwork; and the influence of orality, most evident in their early days and again, many years later, after the digital turn. In particular, we will highlight the close relationship between cinema and comics and, after the advent of digital, between the latter and video games. In underlining affinities and divergences between diverse media forms, the article focuses on two particularly significant examples: Lorenzo Ghetti and Carlo Trimarchi’s To Be Continued, a webcomic capable of experimenting with and enlivening many of the possibilities of digital comics; and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, probably the most successful compromise between the complexity of plot, storyworld breadth and formal features on the one hand, and expansive, participatory transmediality on the other. In doing so, this article aims to achieve a quick yet compelling overview of digital comics from the perspective of media archaeology, situating them both diachronically throughout their history, and synchronically, in relation to the other media that feed them and are in turn fed by them, cyclically, across media boundaries.

Tracing the rise of video halls and transient media forms in Bengal: an archaeology of the non-archived

ABSTRACT The lack of archival materials and objects appears as a primary challenge in conducting research on the history of media and communications in India, specifically while writing a comprehensive historical account of Bengali cinema. This paper will try to look at video halls and video tapes as the transient media spaces and objects. In the case of West Bengal, video tapes and video halls are an important part of media history about which little has been written or researched. This paper will try to look into the process of writing media history of scarcely archived media forms following the method of media archaeology and question how the method becomes important in cases of absence of archival materials. This paper will also try to enquire how media ethnography unfolds a different narrative of media history which is otherwise absent in the material archives or institutional records. Using the theoretical framework of the study of archives, this paper tries to explore new archives which present a different history of intermedia transactions in the history of Bengali cinema.

Swarm–Hybrid–Technology: The Transmedial Possibilities of Becoming-Insect

According to Rosi Braidotti, insects are determined by their in-between-ness and continuous becoming. The paper analyses the assemblage of insect figurations on two levels: non-human technology and unnatural narrative in stories about a transformation. Following Jussi Parikka’s media archaeology research, becoming-insect is examined on transmedial examples from literature (Franz Kafka—The Metamorphosis), film (David Cronenberg—The Fly), video games and VR (All in! Games—Metamorphosis) and networked media. According to Jan Alber, exploration beyond human stances and defamiliarization in narrative fiction leads to the shift of cognitive frameworks. Radically Other insects transgress the anthropocentric paradigm and execute posthuman assumptions by a hybrid entanglement with humans and machines.

Going Viral: The Media Anthropology of the “Quarantine Subject” in the Context of Biopolitics and Psychopolitics

Abstract This essay explores the outlines of the “quarantine subject,” a construct that has formed along the borderlines of viral, immunological, psychopolitical, and biopolitical metaphors. The focus is grounded in media archeology and media anthropology. Under media anthropology lies a basically German philosophical anthropological tradition that explores the convergence of biological and cultural dimensions. Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen have only recently been rediscovered in the English-speaking world.1 Hans Belting, for one, has elaborated a triple image anthropology that uses the triad of picture–medium–body in the interpretation of various aesthetic paradigms. This essay maps the convergence between the three dimensions emphasized by Belting and the digital-virtual turn driven by, among other factors, the COVID–19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. The goal is the elaboration of a speculative “quarantine subjectivity model,” one that is determined by geographical and social factors, such as Internet access and technological integration, as well as a relatively “moderate” degree of quarantine measures. (MZN)

Gambiarra and the In(ter)dependent Condition

This article analyzes the relationships of interdependence between musicians and natural or artificial agents of their environment. Considering processes of recycling and refunctionalization of materials with artistic purposes, such relationships are observed in the construction of instruments involving gambiarra in their manufacturing, with a focus on the specific case of an experimental music duo, Senyawa. The paper is theoretically and epistemically grounded in studies focusing on gambiarra, media and ecology, and media archaeology. The methodological procedures encompass analyses of instrument manufacturing processes developed by Wukir Suryadi, one of the members of Senyawa. As a contribution to studies of sound and culture, the article concludes that, through creative practices involving obsolete media materialities, gambiarra processes allow us to observe the continuous relationships between technology and nature in the design and manufacturing of technical artifacts.

Contextures of hate: Towards a systems theory of hate communication on social media platforms

ABSTRACT We inquire into different perspectives and patterns of problematizing online hate speech within the social sciences from a systems-theoretical perspective. Our results identify five different research perspectives adopted by studies on the issue: (1) systematic perspectives on problems of operationalizing (online) hate speech; (2) intentionalist perspectives on actors and their motives; (3) consequentialist perspectives on victims of online hate speech; (4) perspectives on media affordances, infrastructures, and strategies of online hate speech; and finally, (5) normative perspectives on the consequences of online hate speech. Additionally, we want to propose a functionalist perspective on hate communication and, for this purpose, develop a systems-theoretical and media-sociological framework for analyzing online hate speech. A systems-theoretical perspective connects to a process-oriented paradigm of doing hate speech. Instead of asking what hate speech is, a systems-theoretical framework focuses on how different communicative contextures empirically produce different understandings of hate communication. We will make four research proposals: We will (1) conceptualize hate as hate communication, then proceed to (2) analyze different communicative contextures, (3) develop media archeology of negation and conflict communication, and finally (4) focus on the function of conflict and hate communication for the emergence of (counter-)publics.

Echoic Re-Presencing

This paper considers listening as a method in media archaeology—a cluster of technology-oriented approaches to the past that attend to “dead end” inventions outside teleological narratives of progress. In particular, Wolfgang Ernst’s media-archaeological ear advances a materialist approach which favors listening to “the technical signifier rather than […] the acoustic or musical signified.” However, this perspective is subject to recurrent critiques from feminist scholars who highlight the lack of regard for the asymmetrical power structures that undergird technical objects and their exclusion from historical narratives. As a case study, and interrogation of the possibilities for a feminist media archaeology, this paper examines the work of Daphne Oram, a British composer whose contributions to electronic music have been routinely overlooked, and the excavation of her work in Oramics: Atlantis Anew (2011), a film by Aura Satz. The archival vestiges of Oram’s composition technique, in which visual notations on celluloid are sonified by her Oramics Machine, align with, and demand consideration beyond, Ernst’s “ascetic approach to signals.” Through a close reading of Satz’s film, I suggest that her simultaneous attention to the material processes of sound technologies and the erasure of women’s labor posits a necessary extension to this mode of enquiry. Considering recent feminist interventions in media archaeology, as well as critiques in sound studies that drawn on feminist STS to challenge the presumed universality of listening, this paper proposes a framework of media-archaeological listening as echoic re-presencing. Oram’s work, and Satz’s re-prescencing of it, therefore open up possibilities for listening otherwise to the sonic past.

“Kongqi” Theory and the Aesthetic Spirit of Chinese Film

Abstract Based on the traditional Chinese “kong view” and “qi view” of classical literature and art, this article aims to further construct localized Chinese film theory, by combining methods and approaches to media archeology, and comparing Chinese and foreign literary aesthetics and film art poetics. The ancient Chinese word “dianying” (electric shadow) basically carries the same connotations as the modern word “cinema”, which is internally connected. The “kong view” (empty) and the “qi view” constitute the Chinese aesthetic foundation for the “kongqi” (atmosphere) theory of Chinese film. This theory has been nourished by western aesthetics since the 1920s, absorbing both film spirit theory and film art poetics. With exchanges and dialogues between ancient and modern language, and between China and other countries, this article examines the ways in which the “kongqi” (atmosphere) theory has nurtured a large number of outstanding Chinese film authors, and highlights the aesthetic spirit of “One World One Qi” that is perceived in Chinese films.

Autonomous weapons of pleasure. Media archaeology of automated killing in military and gaming technologies

ABSTRACT The article examines the relationship between the military model of autonomous weapons and the use of AI combat entities in computer games. The author explores how the technological and discursive model of autonomous weapons functions in the software created to entertain the players. The methodology of the article is based on Kittlerian media discourse analysis and media archaeology. The article focuses on a case of predatory AI that hunts the player in Alien: Isolation game. The author compares technologies of automated warfare (the Igloo White Operation, Predator and Reaper drones, Project Pigeon etc.) with the game to reveal that certain military aspects (automated tracking, killing, manhunt, mental manipulation etc.) recur in the software. The pleasure of playing games masks the military entrapment. The author explains how the software exploits the joys of being ‘immersed’ in a machine. The gameplay implements the cybernetic project of man-machine interaction, providing the player with an illusion of control. In reality, the AI system manages the player’s behaviour and emotions, making them enjoy being preyed on. The author ponders how the domesticated pleasure of playing against killing bots may be used to develop autonomous weapons and become weaponised against humans.

To be seen in the showcase: the use of oral history and the media archaeology in research on pioneering cinema

RESUMO O presente artigo combina metodologias multidisciplinares, como a história oral e os estudos relacionados às arqueologias das mídias, para investigar o “Cinema de Vitrine”, exibições feitas nos anos de 1930, no interior do Rio Grande do Sul, pelo fotógrafo ucraniano Sioma Breitman (1903-1980) na vitrine de seu estúdio fotográfico, a Casa Aurora. Ao construir uma narrativa sobre uma mídia até então desconhecida, propomos uma discussão sobre memória, esquecimento e a importância de novos olhares para a história das mídias, em especial do cinema.

Achronologies, Materiality and Mechanics of Time in Optical Moving Image Systems

Within the fields of animation, media archaeology and film, much attention is placed on the image and the viewer. This article will broaden this focus to explore the moving image as a form of time in an expanded context of animation which triangulates the device with the image and viewer. The devices discussed form part of optical image system artworks that the author has researched and developed. These devices project moving images of light and have diverse historical and opto-mechanical underpinnings. The systems present their own form of optically generated time, not of minutes and hours, but of movement and light, which the author terms time-light. The article explores how revealing the mechanism generating the moving image can establish a new ontology for the device by critically engaging the viewer in how time is constructed, mediated and experienced. Being both ‘object’ and a ‘subjective experience’, time is deeply connected to our human and post-human relationship with technology. The subjective experience of the moving image in conjunction with its decloaked device can therefore make explicit our techno–human relationship with time.