*I hasten to assure you that this is not an April Fool's hoax.
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=631
RESETTING THEORY
CTheory Interview
Archaeologies of Media Art
Jussi Parikka in conversation with Garnet Hertz
Introduction
Media archaeology is an approach to media studies that has emerged over the last two decades. It borrows from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler, but also diverges from all of these theorists to form a unique set of tools and practices.
Media archaeology is not a school of thought or a specific technique, but is as an emerging attitude and cluster of tactics in contemporary media theory that is characterized by a desire to uncover and circulate repressed or neglected media approaches and technologies. Its handful of proponents – including Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Elsaesser, and Erkki Huhtamo – are primarily interested in mobilizing histories and devices that have been sidelined during the construction of totalizing histories of popular forms of communication, including the histories of film, television, and new media. (((And if you don't like that idea, man, I don't even want to TALK to you.)))
The lost traces of media technologies are deemed important topics to be excavated and studied; "dead" media technologies and idiosyncratic developments reveal important themes, structures, and links in the history of communication that would normally be occluded by more obvious narratives. This includes tracing irregular developments and unconventional genealogies of present-day communication technologies, believing that the most interesting developments often happen in the neglected margins of histories or artifacts.
In 2007, Jussi Parikka published Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang Publishing, New York). In Digital Contagions, Parikka provides an insightful articulation of media archaeology as a research methodology, which he implements to construct a clear cultural history of computer viruses. Parikka inverts the assumption that computer viruses – which are semi-autonomous and self-replicating pieces of computer code – are contrary to contemporary digital culture, instead arguing that computer viruses define the social and material landscape of computer mediated communication. [1]
Although computer viruses are often considered as a disease and breakdown within the ecology of media, Parikka argues that these marginal computer programs provide key clues to the material and incorporeal conditions of the network age. They are not accidents of media culture, but increasingly the natural mode of digital media. In other words, the ontology of network culture is viral-like. [2]
In this conversation with Garnet Hertz – who graduated with a PhD in Visual Studies on the topic of media archaeology and media arts from University of California, Irvine – Parikka discusses media archaeology as a methodology of academic research in media studies and the media arts. In the process of constructing a theoretical foundation for media archaeology, they discuss and explore the topics of interdisciplinarity, historiography, art, new media, and academia.
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Garnet Hertz: I see Digital Contagions as bringing clarity to the ambiguous concept of media archaeology, and would like to continue to clarify the term here. To begin, how do you define media archaeology, and how do you envision it as a project, movement or an approach?
Jussi Parikka: Media archaeology... ambiguous? Indeed. (((Gets popcorn.))) I was just reminded by an archaeologist at Cambridge that there is a sub-discipline in archaeology called "media archaeology." Such contexts do not always spring to mind when we consider media archaeology from a more theoretical perspective.
For us in media studies and media arts it is quite often the footnotes of Foucault, Kittler, and the dead media of Bruce Sterling (((getting a little deader every day))) that provides the context for the media archaeological way of doing analysis. 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.
After the initial period of tackling the concept of media archaeology in the early 1990s, it is now crucial to take the idea forward and make it more theoretically rigorous. I am not saying it was not rigorous, but there was never a thorough discussion among the "practitioners" of media archaeology. [3] (((That's because the entirety of 20th century media isn't dead yet, but it's dying so fast that, yeah, this is gonna be a colossal field of scholarly research. There are gonna be guys walking around with thumb drives that have every photon ever broadcast by CBS, ABC and NBC, for instance.)))
GH: Do you think media archaeology needs to be explored in reference to traditional critical theory?
Let's take a specific thinker to frame media archaeology – Foucault, for example. Clearly, Foucault does not name media per se, and only offers hints of leverage into media through institutions, inscription, and materiality. Media technologies have difficulty fitting into Foucault except via the formulation of the subject via discourse ...
(...)
Media Archaeological Resources (((wahoo)))
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Gebhard Sengmüller (http://www.gebseng.com/)
Paul Demarinis (http://www.stanford.edu/~demarini/exhibitions.htm)
Julien Maire's The Inverted Cone at Transmediale 2010 (http://www.transmediale.de/en/inverted-cone)
Julius von Bismarck's The Space Beyond Me at Transmediale 2010 (http://www.transmediale.de/en/space-beyond-me)
Garnet Hertz's Dead Media Research Lab (http://www.conceptlab.com/deadmedia/)
Zoe Beloff (http://www.zoebeloff.com/)
David Link (http://www.alpha60.de/)
Micro Research Lab, Berlin (http://www.1010.co.uk/org/)
Jussi Parikka's Cartographies of Media Archaeology blog at (http://mediacartographies.blogspot.com/)
Alex Galloway and Ben Kafka's New York University course titled "Media Archaeology" in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/2010spring-Media_Archaeology_syllabus_v6.pdf)
Mediaarthistories-blog (http://mediaarthistories.blogspot.com/)
The Web Dossier of the 2004 Media Archaeology and Imaginary Media event in Amsterdam, organized by Eric Kluitenberg (http://www.debalie.nl/dossierpagina.jsp?dossierid=10123)
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Jussi Parikka holds a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and is Reader in Media Theory & History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He is the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute and also the co-director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ArcDigital). Parikka's new book Insect Media, forthcoming in 2010, focuses on the media, theoretical, and historical interconnections of biology and technology. The co-edited collection The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture was released in 2009, and Media Archaeologies is forthcoming in 2010. Currently he is writing a manuscript on the theory and methodology of media archaeology for Polity Press.
Garnet Hertz is a Fulbright Scholar and contemporary artist whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is a Faculty Member of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine and is Artist in Residence in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at UC Irvine. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF, and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture series on electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and the popular press including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.
