http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520262744
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary
2. Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study
Erkki Huhtamo
3. On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media
Eric Kluitenberg
4. On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine
Jeffrey Sconce
5. Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock
Thomas Elsaesser
Part II: (Inter)facing Media
6. The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern
Machiko Kusahara
7. The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch
Wanda Strauven
8. The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports
Claus Pias
9. The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Part III: Between Analogue and Digital
10. Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation
Paul DeMarinis
11. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media
Wolfgang Ernst
12. Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance
Jussi Parikka
13. Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium
Casey Alt
14. Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
15. Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past
Vivian Sobchack
Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
"Taken together, this excellent collection of essays by a wide range of scholars and practitioners demonstrates how the emerging field of media archaeology not only excavates the ways in which newer media work to remediate earlier forms and practices but also sketches out how older media help to premediate new ones."
—Richard Grusin, author of Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11
“Where McLuhan’s Understanding Media ends, Media Archaeology actually begins. Refusing the often futile search for the eternal laws of media, Media Archaeology does something more difficult and rare. It literally brings the history of media alive by drawing into presence the enigmatic, heterogeneous, unruly past of the media—its artifacts, machines, imaginaries, tactics, and games. What results is a fabulous cabinet of (media) memories: the imaginary moving with kinetic frenzy, histories of what happens when media collide in the electronic space of the virtual, and stories about those strange interstitial spaces between analogue and digital.”
—Arthur Kroker, author of The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism
“This brilliant collection of essays provides much needed material and historical grounding for our understanding of new media. At the same time, it animates that ground by recognizing the integral roles that imagination, embodiment, and even productive disturbance play in media historiography. Yet these essays constitute more than a collection of historical case studies; together, they transform the book’s subject into its overall method. Media Archaeology performs media archaeology. Huhtamo and Parikka excavate the intellectual traditions and map the epistemological terrain of media archaeology itself, demonstrating that the field is ripe with possibilities not only for further historical examination, but also for imagining exciting new scholarly and creative futures.”
—Shannon Mattern, The New School
"Media archaeology is a wonderful new shadow field. If you are willing to step outside the glow of new media, this book's approaches can shift how you experience the objects and experiences that fill the new everyday of contemporary life. No one captures the beauty of studying new media in the shadow of older media implements and practices better than Erkki Huhtamo, the Finnish writer, curator, and scholar of media technology and design famous for his creative work as a preservationist and an interpreter of pre-cinematic technologies of visual display. He has teamed up here with Jussi Parikka, the Finnish scholar who has brought us an insect theory of media, to give us this long-awaited collection of essays in media archaeology. The surprise of the book is that the essays collectively bring forward a range of approaches to considering archaeological practice, giving us new ways to think about our embodied and subjective orientations to technologies and objects through the lens of the material remnants of practice, rather than offering a narrow definition of the field. The collection moves between computational machines and influencing machines, preservation and imagination, offering a range of ways to live the new everyday of media experience through the imaginary of archaeology."
—Lisa Cartwright, co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
