Media Archaeology, Zombies, Rebels, Weirdos

Media Archaeology

Intro

Media archaeology or archaeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media.

Media theorist Jussi Parikka writes: 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.
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The theories and concepts of media archaeology have been primarily elaborated by the scholars and cultural critics Thomas Elsaesser, Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, and Wolfgang Ernst, taking off from earlier work by Michel Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge, Walter Benjamin on the culture of mass media, and film scholars such as C.W. Ceram on the archaeology of cinema. Other writers who have contributed to the discipline's emergence include Eric Kluitenberg, Anne Friedberg, Friedrich Kittler, and Jonathan Crary.

Obsolescence and Disposability

Obsolete only in relation to the established? Obsolete only as a reaction to the mainstream?
If we define obsolescence as something that has fallen out of fashion or has become unwanted, unusable, or outside the mainstream then this definition relies on the constitutive mainstream itself. What we have to realize first is that obsolescence seems to be a key logic of capitalist production anyway -- a logic which entails that of continuous production of the new through the production of obsolescence as well. Obsolescence does not just happen; it is produced as part of the consumer cultural logic. The enormous piles of waste and ecological crisis are an index of that kind of logic of obsolescence.

on ewaste

Zombies, Rebels and Weirdos

DEAD media

Five Principles of Zombie Media

Protests

Bartholl Highscreen
Bartholl On
Life is a beach and then you die

Celebrations or warnings

OBELIS KBenoit Obelisk
TEMPLE Benoit Temple
phone symphony Mobile Phone Symphony

New ways for the familiar

The drum buddy
David Moises Stuff Works
Recyclism Broken
Refunct Media