Digging Deeper: Media Archaeology
1:30 p.m., Saturday, April 16, room 716 | Faculty respondent: Shannon Mattern
Reconsidering the Radio in Media Studies
Media studies today largely concerns itself with issues relating to “new media,” but what ever happened to good ol’ radio? This paper aims to highlight current perspectives and uses of radio to demonstrate its continued relevance to the discussion and debates within media studies. Proclaimed by some as an obsolete medium, radio still finds many uses, such as serving social/grassroots movements and being instrumental to policy-making processes worldwide. Now widely accessible, radio is in use by the majority of the world’s population yet is largely excluded from the debates, research and criticism within the academy. From local, low frequency, digital, regional, pirate, and governmental broadcasting arrangements, for many, radio still functions as their primary source of information that prompts their social activities and political participation. Constituting a severe oversight in media scholarship, reconsidering the use of radio and their cultural effects will stimulate interest in understanding the contemporary configurations of this outmoded media technology both domestically and abroad. Confronting the fact that the history and practices of radio are not the same all over the world, by exploring the current state of the oft-forgotten medium in its international scope, questions at the nexus of media, culture, globalization and political economy will emerge as being central to the discussion of the current media moment, the history of technology, and more generally, the composition of the global information economy.
The Primacy of Projection in Cinema
It is hard to contest the inherent heterogeneity of cinema, a medium born from the combination of different languages and techniques. Even today, as it goes through radical transformations of its material underpinnings, formal possibilities and dynamics of circulation, cinema retains a rather stable identity. To a certain extent, it is not only possible to specify what cinema is, but also to use it as a parameter to qualify other mediatic practices (e.g. soft-cinema, live cinema and database cinema) or their historical circumstances (as pre-cinematographic or post-cinematographic).
Among all visual media, cinema seems to be privileged as the logic through which technological changes are rationalized. Because of this epistemic relevance of the cinematographic medium, we propose that the investigation of its ontology can be advantageous to the field of media studies in general. This paper aims to contribute to this endeavour by focusing on the moment that is celebrated as inaugural to cinema.
Based on the critical analysis of the first screenings performed by the brothers Lumière and their commercial triumph over Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, we propose projection to be the central technique around which the specificity of the medium is defined and sustained. We conclude by trying to extend the technical definition of projection (as an ambivalent transport of images) to a conceptual level, in an attempt to promote it as the operational principle behind every dispositif, opposed to the stable capacities of storage and transmission.
Supplementary materials: Through the Dark Room (PDF)
Net Art and the Agency of Things
Blogs, Flickr accounts, Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, Second Life avatars: our personalities in the ever-expanding virtual world continue to merge with those in the actual world, forcing us to rethink relationships and identities. Yet, even a quick study of icons of the Middle Ages would show that virtual worlds have existed long before the invention of computers. Centuries before the advent of Wi-Fi, premodern Christians believed they could instantly traverse space via the connection of objects from holy sites. Today, because we must adhere to the strict language designed by companies such as Facebook, we question how well our identities are translated through our online profiles. However, images, icons and books of hours also had to adhere to a strict visual vocabulary. Those who used these objects nonetheless perceived them as accurate representations of that which they worshipped. The pious would pray before these virtual representations of the divine—before their “profiles,” their avatars—and were led to imagine that they stood before Christ himself.
The paper will examine a range of Net Art from the late 1990s to present day, which functions through and comments upon our working relationship with the internet and computers. Looking simultaneously at parallel dialectics within icons and religious objects of the Middle Ages, we will see that our blossoming obsession with new media mirrors the piety experienced during the premodern era.
2 Comments for Digging Deeper: Media Archaeology
Rory Solomon | April 14, 2011 at 3:07 am
menotti | April 15, 2011 at 4:57 am
That’s an interesting direction to take the debate on. The idea of “projecting backwards” – and in fact, the very topic of archeology – evoke some references that were essential to my paper, but not really explicit it in.
One is Carlo Ginzburg “indexical paradigm:” a mode of knowledge based on the deduction of facts based on their traces – footprints, fingerprints, fossils, etc. Ginzburg says that this paradigm is likewise central to classic scientific research and forensic investigation. It is based not only on finding the traces, but on “producing evidence:” making the traces a form of text from which “what happened” can be read.
In that sense, “producing evidence” – and therefore, the most empirical science – in as much as it seems to be the uncovering on undeniable truth, is no more than “projecting backwards.” And the same applies to History. Every form of historicization depends on some historiography, some writing of the past localized in the present. As such, if foregrounds a virtual origin to the actual traces. Through this, I think we can connect epistemology to historiography.
The other reference is Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of a “deep time of the media.” Zielinski came up with the idea that (audiovisual) mediation has been around well before modern devices, even before their victorian forerunners. He will find it in the Ancient Egypt, for example. By assuming so, he points out how the origins that have been previously defined by media studies are coercive. The analysis of “new media” gains a lot if we become able to look beyond these points of origin, reframing our objects. I’d say that this shift entails recognizing science as the production of evidence, instead of the uncovering of truth.
(Coincidentally, one of Zielinski’s strategies, which he calls variantology, is based on finding unexpected correspondences between systems and objects that are not directly connected inside the field of research – similar to what Rory does, by evoking phantasmagoria or the idea of the master’s voice in response to the papers).
But alas, let’s see where this debate might take us live! =)
(btw, the concept of “indexical paradigm” is in this essay http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/1/5.extract)
I am really looking forward to these presentations! And I am starting to think about some of the interconnections between them. In particular, if we are to expand projection as a conceptual framework, perhaps we could test this by applying it to the other two subjects being discussed here. Perhaps this applies more towards “genealogy” than “archaeology” per se, but can we “project backwards”? maybe as a way of theorizing about actual or possible histories. In regards to “the agency of things,” we could think of, for example, phantasmagoria. In regards to radio, perhaps we can think of “his master’s voice,” or, the way the body of a leader is projected via voice, across space and into the home for a “fireside chat” or a fascist address.
Perhaps we could even use projection to consider a symmetry of past and future. The way we are at a focal point, with projection extending outward in both directions. The mirrored utopias of the projection screens on opposite walls of the heterotopia of the viewing theater.