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© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
1Media Archaeologies
FORUM
Media Archaeologies*
Media-Archaeologies: An Invitation
n Angela Piccini
University of Bristol, UK
a.a.piccini@bristol.ac.uk
When members of the Committee for Audio-Visual Scholarship and Practice in Archae-
ology (CASPAR) decided to participate in a conference on media archaeology held in
Bradford, UK in September 2014, they saw this as an opportunity to dispel familiar
stories about what archaeology does and to demonstrate the diverse ways in which
archaeology investigates media technologies, assemblages, and material-discursive
networks (cf. Kittler 1990). As Wolfgang Ernst (this volume) sets out, media archae-
ologists differentiate their work from archaeology-as-such in that media archaeology
“unfolds techno-mathematical sub-strata of current interface culture”. Although media
archaeology shares with archaeology-as-such a focus on material temporalities, it is less
about historicized concepts of time than it is about the processuality of technological
devices and operative media signals (Ernst, this volume). However, it is the challenge
of understanding this time-critical processuality that is of precise interest both to those
working on archaeologies of the contemporary world and to media scholars with inter-
ests in the material.
The Bradford conference was an opportunity to discuss how archaeology has always
been a practice of investigating what Bernhard Siegert describes as “cultural techniques”; it
is an investigation that decentres the “distinction between human and non-human by insist-
ing on the radical technicity of this distinction” (Siegart 2015, 8; cf. Parikka 2013). Media
technologies form part of the material-discursive assemblage that produces distinctions
between human and non-human. Or, as Greg Bailey (this volume) puts it, following Karen
Barad (2007), media technologies are the proper domain of the archaeologist because
they operate within systems of observation and measurement that produce agential cuts
* Editor’s note: We received more responses to this Forum topic than we have been able to include in
the print issue of the journal, and have published a number of additional, online-only articles on the
journal’s website at www.equinoxpub.com/JCA
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
2Forum
that world the world. What emerges through reading the interdisciplinary contributions to
this Forum is that media archaeology is much like archaeology-as-such in so far as strict
denitions and agreements about what it is and is not are hard to come by.
The archaeologists assembled here practice careful excavation, yet they also argue
for the value of eldwalking, archival attention, and buildings recording. The special
forms of archaeological practice that create excitement for, and gain traction with,
media archaeologists are just as important a question for archaeologists as they are
for media scholars. Although some of the participants in this Forum, which we believe
is the rst publication to bring archaeologists of the contemporary world and media
scholars together to discuss their various uses of the methods, metaphors, and gestures
of media archaeology, may call for a normative approach—a best way of doing media
archaeology that conforms to international archaeological standards of practice—oth-
ers wonder whether this might be one of those opportunities that invite archaeologists
to develop new ways of attending to contemporary assemblages that produce space
and time in ways that are profoundly different from the spatio-temporalities of, say,
structured deposition. Promiscuous methods, zombie technologies, struggles over
claims to rigour and proper naming can get in the way of work; the contributors to this
Forum instead position those questions as important features of the cultural techniques
that enact this eld.
Archaeology continues to struggle with its relationship to media. The dominant prac-
tice of critiquing narrative and representation fails to engage with the very technicity
with which archaeology concerns itself. Towards the end of 1975, Thomas Wight Beale
and Paul F. Healy took to the pages of American Anthropologist to lament the lack of
scholarship on archaeological lms. They noted that while archaeologists were writing
scripts and presenting to camera, they were not actually lming and editing. Reading
early attempts to think about media and archaeology makes clear that connections were
not recognized between the use of 16-mm cameras and Steenbeck atbed lm-editing
suites and the use of trowels, theodolites, graph paper, etc. in the production of archae-
ology. The camera stylo, the idea of the camera as writing implement that produces
ways of being in the world specic to its technicity (Astruc 1992 [1948]), needed to nd
expression through a consideration of the camera truelle, or trowel. Instead, nascent
media archaeology remained focused on critiquing exposition and no link was made
between the ways in which both camera and trowel produce the cuts in the world that
shape what is sayable and doable.
I, too, failed to see this link in my own PhD research in the 1990s (Piccini 1999).
While it began as an attempt to deconstruct media messages produced on television,
in museums, and in heritage centres, two things quickly struck me. One was the way in
which the material culture of heritage—from the “actual” archaeological record to their
various media (re)enactments—participated in the ongoing enactment of community.
That is, I was struck by the agentive transmediality of the material. The second thing
that struck me was the durable, persistent materiality of heritage media. The precise
forms that these media took led me to undertake spatial analyses of museum displays,
to photograph the weighty presence of the TV in my living room, and to consider the
bodily movements that people made while using clunky infrared audio kits at heritage
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
3Media Archaeologies
centres. In other words, I found myself using the techniques of anthropological archaeol-
ogy to understand media as material-discursive practice. Yet, that attention to material-
technicity remained implicit. I did not attend carefully enough to changes in photography
and print technologies associated with postcard production, nor did I investigate rapidly
shifting infrared technologies used in hand-held audio tours as specic techniques that
produced new worldings.
However, it was clear that archaeology could think about media in archaeological ways,
which seemed necessary at a time when the discourse around “new media” emphasized
digitality and networked subjectivity (Hayles 1999). Utopian new media studies suggested
that we might be freed from the fetters of actual esh and labour. Of course, even then,
it was not quite like that. Writers such as N. Katherine Hayles argued against a sense
of postmodernity’s fetishization of the dematerialized body and a virtualized reality: “The
body’s dematerialization, in other words, depends in complex and highly specic ways
upon the material and embodied circumstances that the ideology of dematerialization
would obscure” (Hayles 1993, 147; italics in the original). As Hayles observed, “one belief
from the present likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern orthodoxy that
the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction” (Hayles 1993,
147; see also Penrose 2013 on the archaeology of the postindustrial body). Critiques of
the digital as immaterial gathered energy after the rst Gulf War began to “take place” (cf.
Baudrillard 1993) in a way that Euro-North American scholarship could really feel. Looking
back now, it is easy to see a gathering storm of things in the material “turn”, a turn that
has itself now been carefully archaeo-historicized using “the taphonomic processes of
residuality, durability and sedimentation of the remains of past events” (Hicks 2010, 27).
At the tail end of “new media” textbook publication, scholars were explicitly acknowl-
edging the materiality of digital media (Lister et al. 2009, 19–22). However, while recent
texts, such as Johanna Drucker’s (2013) detailed taxonomy of digital materialities and
“performative materiality” (cf. Kirschenbaum 2005, 2008), and while graduate seminar
courses on media and materiality, such as Shannon Mattern and Sepand Ansari’s at the
New School, take readers and students on rich and diverse tours of thing theory, mate-
rial culture studies, non-representational theory, ecologies, textuality, and technologies,1
there is a discipline missing. Archaeology appears to have made little impact on attempts
to understand media’s circulations through, and enactment of, the world.
Despite the absence of archaeology-as-such from media scholarship’s concerns with
the material, media and archaeology have quietly engaged in a tentative conversation
across multiple sites for some time; a conversation that must acknowledge, but cannot
be reduced to, the inuence of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. In the limited space
in this introduction-as-provocation, I might point to a highly partial selection of different
events, in (deliberately) fragmentary order. In 1985, Friedrich Kittler wrote what came to be
translated, ve years later, as Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Kittler 1990), which gave
an account of the materiality of hermeneutics. Around the same time, Siegfried Zielinski
wrote his history and cultural technique of the video recorder (Zielinski 1986). In 2002,
1. The syllabus for the course at the New School can be seen here: www.wordsinspace.net/
media-materiality/2012-spring/?page_id=15
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
4Forum
Bristol University launched its Masters programme in archaeology for screen media (unfor-
tunately cancelled in 2014, just as media archaeology is gaining disciplinary recognition).
Although set up through a partnership with the UK’s Channel 4 and designed to teach
young archaeologists how to be better producers and presenters, it sought to explore with
students the critical potential for media practices that expressed, rather than represented,
archaeological dispositions, and the programme encouraged students to consider the
materialities of media technologies. In 2004, a lm scholar, Thomas Elsaesser, wrote what
was to become a highly inuential essay on the new lm history as media archaeology
(Elsaesser 2004). That same year, an archaeologist, Cassie Newland, wrote a dissertation
for an MA in Historical Archaeology on the archaeology of mobile phones (Newland 2004).
In 2005, Wolfgang Ernst, a classically trained archaeologist and early media archae-
ologist, wrote that
antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artefactual hardware, so to
speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a software. In a digital
culture of apparent, virtual, immaterial realities, a reminder of the insistence
and resistance of material worlds is indispensable, and all the more so from
a media-theoretical point of view. (Ernst 2005, 589)
In a similar vein, Jussi Parikka argued that
media archaeology needs to insist both on the material nature of its
enterprise—that media are always articulated in material, also in non-
narrative frameworks whether technical media such as phonographs, or
algorithmic such as databases and software networks—and that the work
of assembling temporal mediations takes place in an increasingly varied and
distributed network of institutions, practices and technological platforms.
(Parikka 2010)
In practice, according to Erkki Huhtamo, this media archaeology might be an enterprise
that involves researchers “‘excavating’ forgotten media-cultural phenomena that have
been left outside the canonized narratives about media culture and history” (2011, 203).
As such, media archaeology focuses on the “nondiscursive infrastructure and (hidden)
programs of media” (Ernst 2013, 59). The non-discursive and hidden programs of media
might be, as Cornelia Vismann has argued (Vismann 2008), the material operations by
which the state, subject, and law are enacted through practices of record-keeping and
the production and organization of les. Difference—of approach, material, and scale—is
therefore central to what has become formalized as media archaeology. Parikka’s long-
term collaboration with Erkki Huhtamo was published in 2011 as part of an attempt to
synthesize media archaeology’s diversity, a project crystallized in Parikka’s What is Media
Archaeology? (2012). Media archaeologists themselves acknowledge the productive
paradox entailed in the ways in which these recursions produce media archaeology as
a eld in the rst place (Parikka, pers. comm.).
And what of archaeology-as-such? From Silicon Valley to Atari dumps, from the mobile
phone to the media technologies of post-war astronomy, and from telegraphy to the
material-discursive actions of media as sensory prostheses, the global archaeological
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
5Media Archaeologies
community has produced a large number of important studies of media techno-assem-
blages that both map specically archaeological approaches and push at the limits of
archaeology as a discipline. What are the archaeological specicities that mark out a
distinct disciplinary approach to understanding media? Much like the archaeologists
investigating media, the media archaeologists are also interested in scalar change,
material-discursive assemblages, and deep-time relations as they pertain to media tech-
nologies and networks. How, then, might the practices of media archaeologists challenge
assumptions that archaeologists located within the discipline might have about their
methodological and conceptual specicities? And how might the practices of archaeolo-
gists, that extend far beyond the trench, contribute to the work of media archaeologists?
In short, where are the boundaries between media archaeologies and archaeologies of
media? How are those boundaries drawn, performed, and maintained? And how might
we work together to ask new questions of media technologies and their relations?
As the editors write in their Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology
of the Contemporary World:
Archaeology is, by very denition, the study of “old” or archaic things. Its
etymological origin lies in the ancient Greek ἀρχαιολογία (or archaiologia)―
ἀρχαῖος (arkhaios) meaning “ancient” and -λογία (-logia) meaning “-logy” or
“science of”. But contained within the name itself is an important sleight
of hand, for we would argue that it is impossible to study the “past” as if it
were somehow separate and external to the “present”.
(Graves-Brown et al. 2013, 1)
This sleight of hand invites archaeological investigation of all events and effects (Hicks
2010). Considering media archaeologically as material-discursive techno-assemblages
is by far more productive than an Anglo-North American media studies’ tendency to
reduce media solely to ideology, power, and meaning. Media technologies are signicant
intensities that enact the administrative structures, minerals, regulatory frameworks,
humans, frames, fossil-fuel-based energy, notions of love, hate, justice, and so on that
“world the world”, in the words of Karen Barad (2007, 160). Archaeological attention to
the scalar material traces of these over time and space contributes to this process, too.
In bringing together this Forum the contributors acknowledge the importance of subtle
differences and similarities performed across the scholarship. It is in part through difference
that we point to our shared concerns as they make their matter. The aim of this Forum
is not to set out a manifesto for a unied media archaeology that insists on a particular, if
always contingent and provisional, set of archaeological “best practices”. If anything, the
contributions to this Forum highlight the diversity of method, site, scale, and ethos that
we all use, and highlight the generative lack of any singular denitions of our disciplinary
afliations. Those differences are themselves contingent upon the media assemblages
through which we work and are worked. Media archaeology and archaeology-as-such
share concerns with dismantling and reconstructing media technologies in order to reveal
secret histories and lost lineages. They also share an understanding that it is through
the acts and apparatuses of observation and measurement—not just excavation—that
archaeology produces itself. It is this interest in practice, what Dan Hicks outlined in
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
6Forum
his important discussion of the material “turn” in his invitation to “look at archaeological
practices—how archaeology enacts things—to understand what archaeology is” (Hicks
2010, 87), that shapes our activities. As Michael Shanks has argued, it is the messy
mix of memory and collection practices characterizing modernity that are manifested as
“archaeology” via academic and professional disciplinary discourse (Shanks 2012, 32).
And what kinds of archaeology are we doing here in this Forum (cf. Clarke 1973, 6)?
Archaeologists-as-such practise landscape archaeology, eld archaeology, eld walking,
rescue archaeology, desk-based assessment. They focus on stratigraphic superimposi-
tion and conduct meta-archaeologies of historiographic narratives. Media archaeology,
on the other hand, is a material methodology that enables investigation of the cultural
layers of technology, grounded in a fascination with the fragment, trace, and ruin: “it is in
technical media that one nds the things a contemporary media archaeologist ‘reads’”
(Parikka, this volume). It describes, traces, and centres on conditions of relations and
unfoldings that appear to promise immediacy and authenticity (Winthrop-Young, this
volume). It is a time-critical process of technological devices (Ernst, this volume). It is
gestural, an anarchaeology that invites us to search for a world not identical to the one
that we are experiencing (Zielinski, this volume). Archaeology-as-such has moved away
from “revelation” towards an understanding of the archaeologist’s role in co-producing
materialities. The past does not sit passively awaiting interpretation; it is made. And so
it is perhaps unhelpful to try, fail, and fail again to settle a nal denition of archaeol-
ogy that would create a lasting connection between the media archaeologists and the
archaeologists investigating media. The contributions to this Forum demonstrate that
there are as many similarities across our interests as there are differences. In the printed
and online versions of this Forum, what the contributors express is a commitment to
thinking carefully and rigorously about the possibilities of existing and future encounters
between our disciplines. Yet, there are still demands being made of one another: in
order to be accepted, you must conform to archaeological norms. Those norms are, of
course, the very stuff of media archaeology.
I end with an invitation to an opening. What might it be to consider our differences and
our frictions as multiple possibilities? Consider while reading the following rich, gener-
ous, and diverse contributions what might happen if instead of seeing in one another
only decits, we reframe our encounters in terms of Gilbert Simondon’s theorizing of
the potential of transductive tension in the process of becoming (Simondon 1989; cf.
Stiegler 2009)? That is, according to Simondon’s thinking through the event and individu-
ation via processes of crystallization, the “genesis of a structure in a milieu in a state of
pre-individual tension requires […] a problematic coupling between the different realities
that it engages in communication” (Sauvanargues 2012, 64). Why is a collective and
reciprocal engagement necessary between non-archaeologists with interests in media
materialities and archaeologists with interests in media technological assemblages?
Perhaps, in recognizing that neither has reached an endpoint of being, that both continue
to emerge, new events of practice that open up new possibilities might crystallize for
each out of the materials through which we all work. Our problematic coupling speaks
to a disciplinary individuation that is always in process, is never nished, and which will
almost certainly produce new, unexpected things.
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015) 1–147
ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
7Media Archaeologies
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Angela Piccini is a Reader in Screen Media in the Department of Film and Television, University of
Bristol. Address for correspondence: School of Arts, University of Bristol, Cantocks Close, Woodland
Road, Bristol BS8 1UP, UK. Email: a.a.piccini@bristol.ac.uk
Sites of Media Archaeology: Producing
the Contemporary as a Shared Topic
n Jussi Parikka
University of Southampton, UK
j.parikka@soton.ac.uk
A Shared Contemporary
Media archaeology has commenced many times, in many forms. The term itself is most
often seen as a version of Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1972)
but with a further media technological determination that, according to the German media
theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990), has made it relevant for the age of technical media too. In
other words, Kittler’s claim was that in order to update Foucault’s methodological insights
we need to be aware that not all relevant cultural data necessarily come in the form of
written documents, books, and other texts that you discover in the cherished libraries of
the humanities. Instead, it is in technical media that one nds the things a contemporary
media archaeologist “reads”, from photographs to lm rolls, to computational media and
its algorithmic readability: what AI research, the digital corporate culture, and the military-
surveillance industrial complex are now trying to decipher as “machine readability”. Besides
Foucault and Kittler, cultural historians such as Erkki Huhtamo, lm historians such as
Thomas Elsaesser, and media theorists such as Siegfried Zielinski have contributed to the
emergence of the concept, which has never had one platform where it has been articulated.
Sufce to say, the term has, over the past years and decades, gone through various
metamorphoses and variations, testifying to the agility and dynamics of the concept
as forming a theory in motion (Bal 2002). The concept and discipline of archaeology,
which emerged in the nineteenth century out of antiquarianism, has accompanied the
emergence of modern interests in the self-understanding of a culture, as Knut Ebeling
(2012, 18) outlines in his massive study of “wild archaeologies”, the wanderings of the
concept outside archaeology proper. This cultural-historical insight into archaeology
unfolds the prescribed depth as the place where truth is found, the under-the-surface as
the rhetorical trope of discovery as an activity of digging, and the missing archaeological
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9Media Archaeologies
object as the clue through which the cultural self-understanding nds its solution. These
are of course themes that pertain closely to Sigmund Freud (Thomas 2009; Elsaesser
2011), who, indeed, is one of the focuses in Ebeling’s study. But what sort of a practice,
technique, is it that is employed in this cultural self-understanding, especially when con-
cepts from archaeology are transported into a (media) analysis of more recent history?
As both media archaeologists (e.g. Huhtamo and Parikka 2011) and archaeologists
recognize, it is the interest in the fragment, trace, and ruin that seems to bind the two
elds. Archaeologies of the contemporary have also addressed the constitution of
modernity through its garbage and modes of production, and, especially, consumption,
as well as by the spatial determinations of cultural practices and material culture, and,
at times, also technology (e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001; see also Piccini, this volume).
A shared ground between media and contemporary archaeology is often found in the
work of Walter Benjamin, who himself was responding to discussions already underway,
involving Johann Winckelmann much earlier and Georg Simmel as Benjamin’s closer
contemporary. Both elds are interested in material culture that emerges before the
written document and also after it, when the cultural techniques of reading and writing
are not merely executed by way of natural languages but by computational algorithms,
increasingly automated and working in different forms than human language. It is an
interest in the prehistorical and post-historical dimension that ties media archaeology
with archaeology. For media archaeology, we can say that it is something that stems
from historical methodologies but also comes in the wake of a new historicism detached
from the specic emphasis on language (both the written document and the spoken
word) as its sole focus. Instead, other modalities, other media materialities enter the
scene and come under theoretical consideration.
Perhaps one should start investigating what is the bind, the glue, in terms of objects of
analysis, instead of the intellectual lineages that connect the two elds that increasingly
share a fascination with the contemporary. Indeed, perhaps it is the notion and thematic
problematization of the contemporary that become one key shared ground where media
archaeology, stemming from cultural history and media theory, approximates some inter-
ests and methods in archaeology. Instead of trying to nd a Grand Theory that explains
and unies disparate and separate elds of knowledge production, it is better to look at
the shared techniques and objects of analysis (cf. Siegert 2008), where issues of what
“the contemporary” even is become highlighted. Works such as The Archaeology of the
Contemporary World (Graves-Brown et al. 2013), Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past
(Buchli and Lucas 2001), and many others are excellent guidebooks also to the media
archaeologist, especially when part of the attraction for the latter has been to nd ways
of how to expand what we mean by “media”. Not merely mainstream-media technolo-
gies, but also various cultural practices and technologies have been adapted as valid for
media analysis, as have also the themes of non-use of media: in other words, abandoned
media, electronic waste, and the residual (see Acland 2007; Parks 2007; Gabrys 2011;
Maxwell and Miller 2012). Interestingly, in archaeologies of the contemporary, the focus on
garbage—even coined as Garbology—has been already been tapped into (Rathje 2001).
The contemporary becomes articulated as the tension between past, present, and
future, where that tension becomes a topic in itself; the contemporary is the political
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category (see Brown 2001) that is able to address the multiplicity of times that stretch
across the normalized time categories of “past” and “present” or in media discourse:
“new media” and “old media” are not necessarily the most useful of terms, because they
divide time into a problematic, simplifying binary. As Lisa Parks argues: “By continuing
to use terms such as old and new media without reection or analysis, critical media
scholars risk inadvertently reinforcing the imperatives of electronics manufacturers and
marketers who have everything to gain from such distinctions” (Parks 2007, 33).
Instead, the often slightly metaphorical talk of historical layers of media serves, despite
its problems, as a reminder of the coexistence of different temporal levels of media
technological artefacts. The widely publicized search for the abandoned Atari games in
New Mexico (see Reinhard, this volume) was such an event where the elds of archaeol-
ogy and media archaeology conjoined in a recognition of the value of excavation for a
fragment of the contemporary. One still should ask what the relation is between such
widely publicized media event archaeologies and less-glamorous abandoned media
waste, e.g. in Lagos, Nigeria, or Guiyu, China; the performance of such media waste
locations is one of bodies that are tied in different ways to the global supply chains
of electronics.1 And yet they are contemporary to the global distribution of the digital
culture and its artefacts.
The contemporary—a fascination with the recent fragment of consumer society—
becomes a conceptual lead to an analysis that carries both a historical and material
value. It is increasingly in material practices that media archaeology has been able to
develop new methods that offer a fruitful ground for collaboration. Recently, Shannon
Mattern (2015) has recognized such between research into urban media archaeology
and the contemporary archaeological, including, for example, archeoacoustics.
Media Archaeology Labs
Consider again, against the backdrop of interest articulated by Graves-Brown et al.
(2013), how the emergence of media archaeology labs contributes to the artefactual
methods of opening up time through devices. Such institutional practices resonate with
the wider topic of humanities labs, where physical sites, “labs”, bring together professors
and students around joint research topics, underlining the situated techniques of knowl-
edge creation even in the humanities and also the specic technologies that are housed
under the umbrella term “digital humanities”. indeed, in terms of digital humanities, labs
have been characterized as the new (at least for humanities) “collaborative, team-based
ethos, embracing a triangulation of arts practice, critique, and outreach as they merge
research, pedagogy, publication, and generative practices” (Burdick et. al. 2012, 58).
Irreducible to, but resonating with, the emergence of digital humanities practices, the
media archaeology labs come in different forms while sharing an interest in the con-
temporary nature of the past. The original lab, the Berlin Media Archaeology Fundus
(MAF), is housed as part of the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt
University in Berlin. The Institute is led by Wolfgang Ernst, whose writings on media
1. Related to this topic, see the AHRC-funded project “Bodies of Planned Obsolescence” (http://
www.e-waste-performance.net/), which stages a different geographical focus for the performance of
digital waste and obsolescence.
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11Media Archaeologies
archaeology, archives, and time-critical culture have recently been translated into
English (Ernst 2013a, 2013b). The task of the MAF is to collect relevant electrotechnical
and mechanical technologies to connect as part of the teaching. It is not articulated
as an archive in the traditional sense—nor as a museum—but as a merging of various
theoretical and practice-based functions, which introduce different spatial arrangements
to humanities teaching and scholarship than are found in the classroom or the library.
Together with the Signal Laboratory, which is also connected to the Institute, the MAF
distances itself from the usual focus on the artefactual in terms of the design, the shape,
and context of any device, and instead taps into operationality. Indeed, technologies
such as radios and computers, and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes and
galvanometers, are treated as media epistemological frameworks. According to the idea
behind the MAF, what distinguishes the technological media object is that it reveals its
“essence” only when it is working—e.g. circuiting signals, processing sequences, etc. It is
this “time-critical” nature that reveals the signal-focused logic of this media archaeology.
The “archaeological object under the surface” refers to how machines store, process,
and transmit signals (see Parikka 2011). Students approach such devices as instances
of the technological epistemology—even called “epistemological toys”—which open up
ways of knowing the world from the technological perspective. This task is related to
media literacy, or media competency—the need to understand the basis of twentieth-
century modern media culture—but it is also a way to investigate how and where the
hardware turns into algorithmic and signal-processing principles.
In Wolfgang Ernst’s words, this relation to the technological as the—by design—
hidden processes inside the machine becomes the impetus towards archaeology as
Figure 1.
The Berlin Media Archaeological Fundus (image used by permission of the Institute/
Ines Liszko).
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12 Forum
the method of non-textual analysis; this is the point where media analysis turns from
text to the material, from traditional hermeneutics to diagrammatics:
Taking machinic elements apart in order to try to reanimate their function
is a way of media analysis in the strict sense: not restricted to textual
interpretation but to diagrammatic reading of circuit plans and material
hermeneutics (media-archaeological philology). If it comes to source code
in the case of ancient computers, we can take the name of the machine-
orientated programing language ASSEMBLER literally and dis- and
re-assemble it. (Emerson and Ernst 2013)
The MAF is not the only media archaeological laboratory, but the idea of a spatial
place for media analysis of historical artefacts has spread gradually over the past years.
Of the most established, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) in Boulder, Colorado, led
by Lori Emerson, has a similar agenda as the MAF, as it also represents something of
a mix between the archive and the museum. It is clear that in such instances, media
archaeology labs are hybrid sites of knowledge production that aim to bootstrap the
“archaeological” not merely as a methodology but as a situated practice of engaging
with material pasts in the contemporary. It is perhaps even better to say that the con-
temporary is not merely an object of reference, but is something that is produced by
way of the activities in the lab.
In Emerson’s words, the MAL sets itself against two too-easily domesticated assump-
tions:
a) the tendency to create neat teleological arcs of technological progress
that extend from the past to the present and b) the tendency to represent
such arcs through static exhibits that display the outside and surfaces of
these artifacts rather than their unique, material, operational insides.
(Emerson 2014)
The MAL collections are focused on the specic early period of home computing in
the 1970s and 1980s. Besides the collection, one specic aim through the residency
program is to open up the site as a multidisciplinary workspace for artists and writers,
who can also have rst-hand contact with the machines. Hence, the MAL becomes an
institutional version of Mieke Bal’s call for travelling concepts; institutional borders are
shifted within institutions by sites of liminal practice where historical knowledge meets
cultural theory meets artistic practice. Liminality can in this way be seen as an exten-
sion, or radicalization, of the term “interdisciplinary”.2 In some ways, such sites respond
2. I prefer to use in this context the notion of “liminal” instead of “interdisciplinary” to refer to the prox-
imity of theoretical and practical sides in such institutions. At times the two become inseparable. The
notion of interdisciplinarity has suffered an ination over the years, becoming more of a piece of insti-
tutional jargon cherished by management and policy statements than equipped with dynamic critical
potential. It is also in danger of freezing the disciplines purportedly linked, instead of emphasizing
the issues that fall in between disciplines (transdisciplinarity) and also how disciplinary boundaries
constantly shift back and forth when encountering new ideas, practices, habits, etc.
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13Media Archaeologies
to calls for “experimental media archaeology” (Fickers 2015) that are also practised in
institutional settings, such as art school collaborations with archaeology.3
Hence, I want to argue that it is through the emergence of such media archaeology
labs and humanities labs that one can also nd new ways to engage across disciplines
in constituting what the “contemporary” is. From the planned obsolescence of dis-
carded technologies to the sites of abandoned hardware with toxic effects on the soil,
the material is both a residue and an object of knowledge for both archaeologists and
media archaeologists. Digital culture and the massive multiplication of the number of
objects in technological culture have also impacted on the cultural heritage agenda, with
museums having to face the issue of curating technology—and curating and archiving in
technology. This means also acknowledging how technical media in some sense might
even resist preservation. This situation demands new methods and concepts in order
to understand this material culture. As part of this dilemma, issues of cultural heritage
have shifted from the usual institutions of cultural heritage—museums—to various hybrid
forms: from popular culture fascinated with archaeological metaphors to dump sites like
the Atari game dump in the Alamogordo desert, New Mexico, and from such academic
and artistic sites mentioned above to the wider natural environment which registers the
effect of history of technology through its waste load (see also Parikka 2015).
Developing such new forms of institutional practice enables us to understand how
media theory itself is also a practice that takes place in institutional situations and also
how it can be proximate to other disciplines, in this case archaeology (see again Mattern
2015). It is the contemporary as an object of fascination—material culture of technology
and media—which allows the development of new methods and collaborations. The
contemporary is not merely the old, or the new, but an acknowledgement of how past
technological ideas, systems, machines, and even infrastructures can be contempo-
raneous with us, and open up pastness in new ways. And it is the contemporary that
is being not merely reected but actively produced in these practical and theoretical
knowledge situations and institutions that carry the name of “archaeology” as an ethos
of tracing the material, from objects to the electromagnetic and the digital.
3. Art and design institutions have also addressed the artistic methods of recreation of media archae-
ological situations. At the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art, student projects
have included the Photosculpture project, led by two lecturers, Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin, in
2013. The same group has led the art school into collaboration with the university’s Department of
Archaeology, resulting in a joint publication on digital imaging and prehistoric imagery with multiple
authors across disciplines: Andrew Meirion Jones, Andrew Cochrane, Chris Carter, Ian Dawson,
Marta Diaz Guardamino Uribe, Lena Kotoula, and Louisa Minkin (Jones et al. forthcoming).
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Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art,
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15Media Archaeologies
Media Archaeology-As-Such:
Occasional Thoughts on (Més-)alliances
with Archaeologies Proper
n Wolfgang Ernst
Humboldt University, Germany
wolfgang.ernst@hu-berlin.de
Radical Media Archaeology Against the Soft Archaeological Metaphor
In Figure 1, a signpost warns construction workers not to violate bre optic cables buried
in the ground: Call before you dig.
Is this media archaeology? The true media archaeological sense of this scene here is
a twofold one. First of all, the warning does not refer to any kind of past, nor to a historic
archive. The reference is to the (impossible) archive of the present, in this case its tech-
nological condition (l’archive in Michel Foucault’s sense) for (tele-)communication. Radical
media archaeology is not about “digging” out “dead” media but investigation into the
technical (and symbolic) operativity of media processes—be it artefacts from the past or
in the present.
In a more deconstructive sense, media archaeology is a mode of permanent self-
reection on the technological conditions of a cultural enunciation. This becomes
Figure 1.
A sign post close to Princeton University, New Jersey (photograph by Axel Doßmann,
October 1995).
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apparent in the case discussed, since the recording of the signpost itself is preserved
as a photographic negative—a temporal latency for which the digital no longer allows
(as emphasized by Baudrillard 2007).
It took an effort nding a special ofce which is still provided with a “negative scanner”
to get the illustration in Figure 2 ready for publication in an online journal.
Let us therefore not get lost in the digging metaphor when it comes to technological
media culture and its tempor(e)alities. Archaeology as a proper discipline in popular dis-
course is still identied essentially with the eld excavation as archetypal image (even if
this is not fully justied any more); for media archaeology the gure of “unearthing” turns
into an empty metaphor. Revealing and discovering, here, is of a more difcult nature,
closer to Martin Heidegger’s epistemological discussion of ancient Greek aletheia than
to the at Enlightenment metaphor of “bringing to light”.
Interest in the temporal mechanisms and materialities of human culture once motivated
me to study classical archaeology—which I broke off after having passed half the curricu-
lum. I remember my growing impatience with a certain lack of theoretical reection within
the discipline in Germany. In those days in the early 1980s, my professor advised me to
read a book whose author’s name I could barely write down correctly: an “archaeology
of knowledge” by a certain Michel Foucault. Maybe the association of archaeology-
as-such (the academic discipline) with Foucault’s notion of l’archéologie is one of the
biggest misunderstandings which has happened in the recent intellectual past. Does
his use of the term have anything to do with professional archaeology at all? Readers
frequently felt seduced by the assumption that the discourse-analytic operation relates
to the digging metaphor in archaeology; but its core is, rather, structural and related
to propositional logics (Kusch 1991). The media-archaeologist—in partial alliance with
Figure 2.
Photographic negative of the sign post illustrated in Figure 1.
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17Media Archaeologies
Gilbert Simondon (Simondon 1958), but even more strictly—studies the non-discursive
conditions of a technological formation. The term “technology” is taken literally here: the
study of hardware operations (techné), which is in alliance with conventional archaeol-
ogy’s focus on the material-cultural artefact; and the study of logical set-ups (lógos),
such as the electro-magnetic switching for implementing symbolic algebra. In one of
its most radical versions, media archaeology extends even to the critical examination of
the rare earth that conditions technical micro-media on the granular level.
Foucault himself occasionally slipped into the metaphorical language of traditional
archival practice and archaeology-as-such. In an interview at Berkeley University, Fou-
cault once answered a student question about whether archaeology is a new method
or simply a metaphor. The English version reads like this:
We […] have the word “la arché” in French. The French word signies the
way in which discursive events have been registered and can be extracted
from the archive. So archaeology refers to the kind of research which tries
to dig out discursive events as if they were registered in an arché.
(Foucault 1978, 10)
From a computational point of view, such “archival” and “archaeological” terms have
become a dead metaphor that rather hinders the critical insight into what actually happens
on the signal level. What the micro-processor does in data processing is in fact assigning
storage locations and providing them with addresses—which is techno-mathematics
and techno-logistics rather than a simple cultural-symbolic practice.
Media archaeology is not simply an addition to the familiar archaeological hermeneutics
by comparing, for example, the description of the “pre-cinematic” image sequences
on the ancient Trajan’s Column in Rome to technologies like chronophotography. The
media-archaeological task is rather to reveal the discontinuity of the media-artefactual
message when compared with traditional cultural artefacts by describing their implicit
techno-mathematical operations.
Currently there are almost as many methodological variances of “media archaeology”
as there are denitions of “media” themselves—which for the purpose of clarity in this
text is decisively reduced to signal-processing media and their technological messages,
not their mass media or social media content. There is soft media archaeology, which
takes care of “dead media” (Bruce Sterling1) and which tends to be neglected in the
historiography of culture and technology or requires an “anonymous history” in the
sense of Sigfried Giedion (1948). Another variation of media archaeology remembers
imaginary or alternative media (Siegfried Zielinski’s “variantology”—Zielinski and Link
2006) or identies patterns of technological recurrence (“topoi”) within cultural and social
history (Huhtamo 2013). Against such “rediscovery” gestures, radical media archaeology
identies the cut induced by technologies into familiar cultural history in a non-historicist
way. Radical media archaeology has a sense of critical tempor(e)alities which escape
narrative conceptualization.
1. See the Dead Media Project website (http://www.deadmedia.org/).
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Radical media archaeology—in its technically “grounded” version—takes its departure
from technology in its proper sense. It concentrates on the epistemological insights
that can be derived from the close analysis of electro-mechanical media, electronic
media, and nally computative machines. “Radical” here refers to the afnity between
media archaeological analysis and mathematics, epitomized in the radical square root.
Fundamentally, media archaeology understands the arché in its mathematical sense:
algorithmic rooting in numbers. The logo of media archaeology is therefore √ rather than
the shovel or the le cabinet.
The task of media archaeology in relation to professional archaeology is to de-meta-
phorize its Enlightenment gesture of “bringing to light”, separating truly technologically
induced aesthetics from supercial effects.
To which academic department does media archaeology belong? Many archaeologies-
as-such belong to the history or to the classics departments, even though prehistoric
archaeology rather ts with the sciences (as has been declared since the late nineteenth
century—Frerichs 1981). Media archaeology, with its nal insistence on epistemological
questions, is rooted in the humanities, but with its methods and objects it ts computing
and the technical sciences. Its function is not the negation of the historical disciplines but
the necessary complementary perspective on what constitutes culture. “Historic” research
means context-intensive analysis (which is text-based indeed), and the linear ordering of
events—mostly achieved by historiographic narrative. Since the end of eighteenth century,
the emphatic philosophy of history and all manner of ideological “metahistories” (pace
Hayden White) served to reduce the experience of growing temporal complexity since the
French and industrial revolutions (Kittler 1989, 7–14, esp. 8). But complexity nowadays
can be coped with by computational probabilities in a non-linear way. That is where so-
called digital humanities (or computational philology) becomes a twin method to media
archaeology: informational aesthetics as developed in the heroic age of cybernetics had
a ‘cold’ media-archaeological way of looking at cultural artefacts (Rosen 2011)
Does media archaeology share this distancing descriptive gaze (closer to science
than to humanities) with archaeology proper? Here the study of cultural materialities is
not immediately subjected to the philological, textual lter of traditional hermeneutics.
But more radically, the media-archaeological gaze is the gaze by the technical medium
itself—like an optical scanner (or “imager”” for deciphering QR-codes) looks at the
artefacts. In that sense, media archaeology is closer to prehistoric archaeology than to
Greek and Roman archaeology, since here the human element is not textually interpo-
lated as happens in classical studies.
The relation between media archaeology and “archaeologies-as-such” is twofold. In
a direct way, media archaeology has a priority concern with the materialities of media,
like the archaeologist-as-such concentrates on material culture (even if processually
interpreted) —different from the philological approach, which subjects evidence to her-
meneutics immediately. The second relation is more abstract. Archaeology has been
among the earliest disciplines to apply scientic, then mathematical and computational
analysis to excavation data, which anticipated what is now called digital humanities
(Schreibman et al. 2004). When techno-mathematical tools of analysis are applied to
archaeology proper (Hodson et al. 1971), active media archaeology results.
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19Media Archaeologies
The Operative Presence of Technological Artefacts from the Past
What media archaeology can learn from archaeology proper is the material-oriented
ekphrasis, the close reading and artful description of the technically essential in devices
as the spatial coexistence of discrete elements. Somewhat different, however, is the
media-archaeological focus on outlining the operative being of technological artefacts,
since it is only here that materialities become medium (a difference remarked upon by
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his 1766 treatise Laocoon).
The relation between archaeological artefacts “as such” and media archaeological
devices is marked by a decisive difference in its mode of existence. Media studies at
Humboldt University in Berlin houses a so-called Medienarchäologischer Fundus, or
Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF).
This teaching and research collection, ranging from the uorescent vacuum electron
tube to the temperature sensor as a peripheral device of the early Commodore 64 com-
puter, includes “antique” technological artefacts which are of epistemological relevance.
They are neither meant to enchant the engineer only, nor do they serve to illustrate the
history of technology, which is better done by museums with their original specimens.
The MAF rather provides “archaeological” insights into actual media culture; an ancient
telegraphy relay, for example, is meant to open a discussion about to what degree
“digital” communication not only comes after but actually preceded the time of analog
media such as telephony and radio. In combination with the twin institution of a Signal
Laboratory, the collection’s aesthetics are based on the concept of an operative media
theatre, with its core theoretical assumption being that a technological artefact is in its
medium state only when it dramatically unfolds in signal transmission, recording, and
replay, and in operative symbol processing. Therefore, the items are not presented as
Figure 3.
Insight into the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University, Berlin (with the
author).
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20 Forum
objects in their past design, not as frozen pieces of hardware shelved in vitrines, but
are mostly stripped of their clothing, since the focus of media archaeological atten-
tion is directed towards the inside and the function of the objects. “Open source” and
“open access” is meant literally here, with a hands-on bias. Media artefacts from the
past thus do not appear primarily as historical objects with their contextual associations
and documentation, but in their presence as “time objects” (in the sense of Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology of time).
It is here that a time-critical difference from the traditional cultural archaeological
artefact arises. The latter can only be understood when reconstructing its performance
by humans (so-called cultural techniques), while technological media can be restored
to self-active statements. This view coincides with recent attempts within archaeology
to explore the more-than-human or even non-human agencies of artefacts, as shown
in Figures 4–6.
Media archaeology is not a subsidiary or auxiliary discipline to cultural history, but is
its non-narrative, non-textual alternative. In terms of historical research, the meaning of
a past material object rests in the information attached to it in the form of associated
textual records (Crowther 1988, 35–46, esp. 42); media archaeology, though, deals with
objects which can be re-enacted by virtue of their own inherent techno-logics. Here is
media archaeology’s distance from “cultural history”. The Antikythera mechanism from
late Hellenistic times, even if corroded to an almost entropic mass of metal, was still
able to be remodelled by Derek de Solla Price (Freeth 2008).
Figure 4.
A Webster wire recorder with gusle bow string from 1948. It looks like the dead end
of an electronic technology, but when restored to operation, all of the sudden a recording of
Bosnian oral poets (guslari) from the 1950s might resound from the spool (as made by Albert
Lord while preparing for his 1960 study The Singer of Tales).
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21Media Archaeologies
When the string of a monochord is picked, then divided into half and picked again, the
mathematical ratio of 1:2 sonically unfolds as a harmonic octave. The archetypal experience
that once led Pythagoras to develop his rational philosophy, which has deeply inuenced
occidental thought and aesthetics, is not simply historically distant by two-and-a-half mil-
lennia. The harmonic oscillations which were generated by the Pythagorean monochord
long ago, by virtue of the medium specity of mechanical vibrations still behave the same,
so that we can still share the original experience. However, the escapement-driven late
medieval mechanical clocks liberated oscillations from the impulse of the human hand.
Electric circuitry since the nineteenth century enabled the resonant circuit essential for
generating non-material oscillations and for receiving electro-magnetic waves. An antique
detector radio from the 1920s, locked up in some museum or private collection, will still
demodulate AM radio on medium-wave band if set in action again by simply providing
Figure 5.
Ferromagnetic core memory grids were essential in early electronic computing to
store data in a non-volatile way. It takes operative analysis to decode this message. Such
an artefact may be read out algorithmically to reveal its latent information after forty years.
Delayed memory of such kind is not historical, but embodies a different kind of tempor(e)ality.
Figure 6.
Different from other archival records, a technological diagram, such as this diagram of
a resonant creating periodic oscillations, is not historically distant but allows for regenerative
experience of a past as presence, which in this case would produce musical tones.
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22 Forum
it with an antenna, along with ear-phones and earth grounding. At that moment, the
technological artefact is not simply historically distant from the present by a century but
is archaeologically present: it can co-originarily be re-experienced by virtue of a technical
setting and corresponding infrastructure which remains invariant towards changes of
socio-cultural contexts and political regimes. Where some archaeologists may actually
ignore the technical presence of the Mesolithic bone ute that still plays by seeking its
“meaning”, archaeo-acoustics will focus on wavelength and reverberation (d’Errico and
Lawson 2006).
Even Heinrich Hertz’s late nineteenth-century legendary experimental setting of wireless
“radio” spark transmission in the lecture room of Karlsruhe Technical University can still
be rehearsed and still behaves the same. Media operativity allows for time-tunnelling,
which is well known from human experimental archaeology. The difference is the active
agency of media archaeological artefacts.
Different from the familiar material artefact in archaeology, media artefacts in a dialectical
synthesis combine what has been separated so far between historical and archaeological
sciences: text and materiality. In its most literal sense, techno/logy means rst of all logical
(mathematical, diagrammatical) knowledge which can be symbolically coded as “software”
and thus be transmitted across time almost without loss through re-enactment; thus by
algorithmic coding the task to be performed is developed into a time series. On the one
hand, the physical and logical laws of material media are suspended from relativistic cultural
historicism. At the same time, techno-logical knowledge has to be materially implemented
as “hardware” in order to become media-active; this implementation embeds the process
in a temporal context with its proper “historical index” (Benjamin 1999 [1955], 245–246).
In order to be executable, any algorithm has to take place in matter—even if this is just
numbers and letters on paper, written and read by humans (the Turing Machine).
Archaeology of Presence and Media Archaeology of the Present
Media archaeology starts with analysis of “presence” itself; in digital culture more than ever,
the present is immediately quantized, “sampled and held” (the electronic pre-condition for
realtime digital-signal processing). The audio-visual and textual present is being archived
as soon as it happens—from Twitter messages and instant photography to sound record-
ing. But even more dramatically undoing the traditional order of times, big data analysis
algorithmically predicts the future already as future-in-the-past (futurum exactum). Never
has a culture been more dynamically “archival” than the present epoch of digital media.
By chronotechnical immersion, media archaeology aims at being fast enough to analyze
such events as they happen in real time—thus sacricing the traditional claim by historians
and other historicist humanities that only from a temporal distance (a time lag) is critical
observation possible.
In accordance with such media archaeologies of presence in the techno-logical sense,
a more adventurous avant-garde academic archaeology couples performed presence
with the question over “how we create relationships with that which remains” and “the
analyses of signs, remains and traces of dynamic and processual phenomena that once
occurred in the consequences of an act” (Giannachi et al. 2012, 2). All of a sudden,
archaeology-as-such and media archaeology hold hands again.
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23Media Archaeologies
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Wolfgang Ernst is Professor for Media Theory at the Institut für Musik und Medienwissenschaft at
Humboldt University, Berlin, where he co-runs the Media Archaeological Fundus. Address for corre-
spondence: Institut für Musik und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden
6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. Email: wolfgang.ernst@hu-berlin.de
Artifactual Interpretation
n Grant Wythoff
Columbia University, USA
grant.wythoff@gmail.com
It was very late in the process of writing my dissertation—a cultural history of the
gadget—that I came across an article on using the archaeological record to reconstruct
social interaction during the Paleolithic (Gamble 1998). As a media studies scholar, it
wasn’t only the disciplinary differences that were so exciting (the dense network of cita-
tions, the seamless toggling between theoretical synthesis and quantitative analysis). I
encountered this one article that sat atop of a century’s worth of research and debate
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24 Forum
over what it means to interpret an artifact at a moment in which humanists like myself—
primarily trained in the analysis of text—are beginning to take up new objects of study in
what some have referred to as the “material turn”. Several years later, and deeper into
the literature on topics like the Mousterian debate and technofunctional variation than
I ever would have expected to be, I have found the history of archaeological thought
to be an immensely valuable, untapped resource for some of our current questions,
enthusiasms, and impasses in media studies.
Of course, the growing eld of media archaeology had already been a huge inuence
on my work. It was with the writings of scholars like Wendy Chun, Timothy Druckrey,
Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman, Eric Kluitenberg, and Jussi Parikka that I rst formulated
my approach to the gadget as both a functional device and a ctional device, a material
object and a cultural imaginary. But media archaeology is a eld that largely takes its
cue from a Foucauldian understanding of the term—archaeology as an analysis of the
conditions under which a certain object, statement, or discourse becomes possible or
sayable in a precise historical moment. A Foucauldian archaeology of natural history,
for instance, would analyze the “governing statements” of that discourse, as listed in
Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge:
those that concern the denition of observable structures and the eld
of possible objects, those that prescribe the forms of description and
the perceptual codes that it can use, those that reveal the most general
possibilities of characterization, and thus open up a whole domain of
concepts to be constructed. (Foucault 1972, 147)
The media theoretical adaptation of this Foucauldian concept is twofold: rst, that dis-
cernible objects and perceptual codes are themselves the products of media technologies.
All modes and kinds of knowledge bear the imprint of those instruments used to record,
organize, and express them. And second, that the histories of these technologies must
take into account the curiosities and forgotten paths not taken: quirky or fantastic inven-
tions that either never made it to the mainstream or now evoke a kind of retro-tech nostalgia
(stereoscopes, hand-cranked 8-mm lm viewers, card indexes, magnetophones, and
the like). Part of the eld is the simple challenge, common to all good theory, to think the
present state of things differently. What if the tablet computer took off as it was originally
proposed in the 1970s as a teaching platform for object oriented programming, rather
than the app vending machine it is today (Alt 2011)? What if the metaphors we use to
understand hidden computational operations—like copying a le, visiting a site—were
fundamentally different (Tholen 2002)? How do we go about imagining that?
But much is lost, I would argue, when importing this notion of archaeology solely in the
Foucauldian sense. In media studies, we need to be careful of moving too quickly from
a description of a given artifact to an account of aesthetics or power relations without
producing a model of how those circuits move in the rst place from technology to cul-
ture and vice versa. What is at stake in interpreting an artifact in the humanities? While
“interpretation” is usually associated with text, and artifacts are more closely connected
with practices of description, what would it look like to more clearly outline our own
hermeneutic when it comes to objects? In this sense, a sustained encounter between
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25Media Archaeologies
media studies and archaeology proper wouldn’t just be an experiment in taking “media
archaeology” at its word. Such an exchange could provide the occasion for a rethinking
of method amid the material turn. Let me explain.
Talk of a material turn has been percolating for close to 15 years now in a variety of
humanistic disciplines. As Ian Hodder writes:
It has become a truism in archaeology, anthropology, and the social
sciences and humanities very broadly, to recognize a “return to things”
over recent years, in contrast to the earlier focus on representation, and to
the long scholarly tradition that separated subject from object, mind from
matter. (Hodder 2011, 19)
For some, the material turn is seen as a potential answer to the exhaustion of critique,
challenging us to tinker with and describe cultural phenomena that seem to resist existing
theoretical frameworks (Hayles and Pressman 2013; Gillespie et al. 2014).
I think one of the things we’ve seen in recent approaches to “materiality” is not only
how capacious what we might call the “material turn” can be—across a wide variety
of methods, objects, periods, and disciplines—but also that there is a shared set of
assumptions in these new approaches to materiality. More specically, with emerging
elds like platform studies, various new materialisms, critical making, as well as media
archaeology, many more scholars now take the term “materiality” to mean the cultural
lives of physical, tangible materials, rather than an abstract philosophical category. Tim
Ingold’s wonderful article “Materials Against Materiality” critiques this latter approach:
“the concept of materiality, whatever it might mean, has become a real obstacle to
sensible enquiry into materials, their transformations and affordances” (Ingold 2007).
In media studies, the effects of the material turn have been rather kaleidoscopic. Even
though media studies is a discipline that thrives on decisive pronouncements regarding
the primacy of the material—from Marshall McLuhan’s “the ‘content’ of any medium is
always another medium” (McLuhan 2001 [1964], 8) to Friedrich Kittler’s “media deter-
mine our situation” (Kittler 1999 [1986], xxxix)—we’ve never settled on what precisely
our object of study is. Should a media-theoretical account of radio analyze its unique
narrative and cultural forms? Or on the other hand, should it focus on the specicity of
the technological substrates that afford these cultural forms?
The “changing materialist content of materialism”, as Raymond Williams puts it, has
in media studies classically reected a geographic divide (Williams 2005 [1978], 122).
It used to be a safe bet to say that while German media studies emphasized the role of
circuits, screens, and substrates—in other words the materiality of communication—
Anglophone approaches were preoccupied with culture, aesthetics, and identity, the
content delivered by those circuits. A 2003 collection of “key terms” for media studies
published in the UK, for instance, contains no mention whatsoever of “material” or
“materiality” among its 212 entries. The closest we get is in the denition of “medium”
as “simply any material through which something else may be transmitted” (Hartley
2002, 142). That “something else” is clearly the primary focus of the remainder of the
collection, which includes entries on celebrity, metaphor, multiculturalism, genre, and
symbol, for instance. Materiality in this account is a neutral carrier of culture.
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26 Forum
But the situation is no longer so simple on the American scene, with emerging
approaches beginning to take up what was previously a Germanophone emphasis on
the materiality of media. Again, to use some keyword collections as a yardstick, Bill
Brown’s entry in the 2010 Critical Terms for Media Studies includes “multiple orders of
materiality”, explained as
A phenomenological account of the interface between user and technology,
an archaeological account of the physical infrastructure of the medium, and
a sociological account of the cultural and economic forces that continue to
shape both the technology itself and our interactions with it.
(Brown 2010, 59–60)
Anna Munster, in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media published just last year,
shows how accounts of materiality are further complicated when the object in question
is “digital”. She writes that in new elds like software studies, attempts are being made
to connect the digital to social relations and historical practices:
Understanding the database, for example, as a material digital object,
means accounting for not simply the way it organizes and stores data but
how it enacts its mode of organizing multiply, the ways it transduces and
interrelates its multiple, proliferating levels of hardware, software, data, and
social practices. (Munster 2014)
So the idea here is that maybe, we can have a sort of hybrid analysis of the affordances
of the material substrate as well as the cultural codes written upon it.
All of this is to say, there has been no consensus on “materiality” as a topic in my
discipline. But the far-reaching material turn presents a unique opportunity for media
studies. If there is anything that unites our wildly diverse confederation of departments,
disciplines, and methodologies, it is McLuhan’s foundational aphorism: “the medium is
the message”. Today, it’s as if the fossil record of McLuhan’s spadework can be found
all over the humanities. In coming to terms with the specic forms of argumentation and
evidence that media studies scholars have at their disposal—and there are many—we
can offer up a methodology for conversations on materiality across the disciplines.
Similarly, clarifying this methodology against a rigorous engagement with the history of
archaeological thought can help us enrich the distinctive specicities of each approach.
Now that humanities scholars trained in textual hermeneutics turn their expertise to
material artifacts, such a methodology is very much needed.
But questions of method have been notoriously difcult in media studies. A recent call
for participation in a graduate Summer School for Digital Cultures on the theme of “Chal-
lenging Methods” admits that “media studies has not developed an overarching theoreti-
cal or methodological frame and [has] instead privileged object specic approaches”
(Sprenger and Engemann 2014). Surveying media studies’ eld of inquiry, Joseph Vogl
notes that “we still have no single, stable, well-demarcated canon of knowledge to
rely on, in spite of the widespread institutional and disciplinary establishment of media
studies” (Vogl 2008, 2). Operating untethered from any established epistemological
frameworks has produced “a mixing and clashing of methods and disciplinary traditions:
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27Media Archaeologies
approaches from literary study, history, art history, information engineering, journalism,
economics, communications, and the history of science all muddle together without
any particular guiding principle” (Vogl 2008, 15). But it’s precisely this wanderlust, this
intellectual promiscuity, that gives the discipline its unique style. It’s what allows Matthew
Kirschenbaum to bring computer forensics to bear on electronic literature (Kirschenbaum
2008), Markus Krajewski to compare nineteenth-century domestic servants and search
engines (Krajewski 2010), and Adrian Mackenzie to apply William James’s philosophy of
radical empiricism to contemporary wireless network infrastructures (Mackenzie 2010).
In fact, it may seem reductive to discuss methodologies for a discipline in which—to
invoke the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s famous dictum from Against
Method—“anything goes” (Feyerabend 1993). But we need not conne ourselves to ex
post facto reconstructions of brilliant research ndings or the prescription of deadening,
procedural checklists. If media studies generates an ever expanding toolbox of means
for thinking technologies, then we should embrace methodologies as thinking technolo-
gies, as Donna Haraway puts it (Lykke et al. 2008). Understanding media archaeology
as a point of exchange with traditional archaeology is thus not only a way to highlight
the distinctive interdisciplinarity at the heart of our discipline. It is also an opportunity to
engage with a special set of practices at a moment in which the question of material-
ity is both up in the air and of the utmost importance. In the age of the anthropocene,
as Fredrik Jonsson argued in a recent lecture, the question of integrating cultural and
material explanations of historical change is one of the most pressing methodological
problems for the humanities today (Jonsson 2014).
So how do we close the metaphorical divide between the “excavations” performed in
archaeology and media archaeology? We do things we might not otherwise consider: draw
our object of study, ll out a context sheet, experimentally recreate historical techniques,
and think in terms of geological time. We search both canons for guideposts for future
exchange. In addition to numerous intellectual afnities (compare Lewis Binford’s denition
of culture as “the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism” [Binford
1962, 218] with the analytic horizon of Friedrich Kittler’s “network of technologies and
institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” [Kittler
1992, 369]), there are several early points of direct contact between the two disciplines.
Paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s speculations on the effects of automation
and “audiovisual media” on the chaîne opératoire are one example from the mid-1960s:
Not having to “think with one’s ngers” is equivalent to lacking a part of one’s
normally, phylogenetically human mind. Thus the problem of regression of
the hand already exists today at the individual if not the species level. […]
Manual imbalance has already partially destroyed the link that used to exist
between language and the aesthetic image of reality. It is not a matter of
pure coincidence, as we shall see, that nongurative art is ourishing at the
same time as “demanualized” technicity. (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 255)
The lm scholar William Uricchio published a piece of media archaeology avant la let-
tre in 1981 on using the “tangible record” of early twentieth-century cinema in the eld
of industrial archaeology as a form of documentary evidence. This includes, perhaps
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28 Forum
especially so, avant garde lm, which made the machinery of modernity one of its primary
subjects (Uricchio 1981). Finally, there’s Peter Sloterdijk’s more recent essay on mediation
and distance, in which he suggests that “a genuine, unironic attempt to grasp early Stone
Age logic can help us understand what drives media technology and design” (Sloterdijk
2012). No doubt, there are many more.
Like the anarchic intellectual inquiry championed by Feyerabend, media studies and
archaeology are no doubt “much more ‘sloppy’ and ‘irrational’ than [their] methodological
image” (Feyerabend 1993, 160). But if we want to answer Angela Piccini’s challenge in
this forum’s introduction to “work together to ask new questions of media technologies
and their relations”, I think we’re well equipped to do better than exchange mere images
of each other’s practice.
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Grant Wythoff is Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and Lecturer in the Depart-
ment of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Address for correspondence:
Heyman Center 5730, Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, MC 4927, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Email: grant.wythoff@gmail.com
Becoming Archaeological
n Ruth Tringham
University of California, USA
tringham@berkeley.edu
n Michael Ashley
Center for Digital Archaeology, USA
ciao@codi.org
Becoming Archaeological
Archaeologists do not agree entirely on what it means to become archaeological. Being
buried under the ground surface is not one of the requirements; being “dead to the
world” and forgotten is. But the process is far from simple or linear, and can involve many
steps to prolong the life of a thing, whether building or small object, before it reaches this
demise. Michael Schiffer in his books Behavioral Archaeology (1976) and then Forma-
tion Processes of the Archaeological Record (1987) was one of the rst to give voice to
the analysis of these natural and cultural processes. He was working from observations
of modern behavior (in the southwest of the USA) in relation to materials, in which he
identied the cycle of the use-life of materials, from their procurement as raw materials,
their manufacture or construction into things, and their use, to their eventual discard and
deposition in, under, or on the ground; he recognized mechanisms to prolong the use-
life of materials including maintenance, curation, and repair, and then recycling, reuse,
conservation and preservation. Not surprisingly, since the 1990s, Schiffer has become
something of a “media archaeologist” himself, although he would not brand himself as
such, in applying his principles of behavioral archaeology to the rise and fall of non-digital
“technological” subjects (Schiffer 2011), including radios, electricity, electric cars, etc.
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In spite of the strong criticism that it received at the time of its rst publication (in the
1970s and 1980s from Lewis Binford and others), a recent re-evaluation of Michael Schiffer’s
“behavioral” approach points out that it has had an enduring effect on our understanding
of how things become archaeological (Reid and Skibo 2011). Since the late 1970s with
an interest in how stone tools were used and discarded rather than what shapes they
were made into, Tringham (1978) found the concept of use-lives that things had endured
on their way to becoming archaeological a useful way of organizing the analysis of any
material collection (whether stone tools, bone tools, ceramics, or architecture).
When Michael Schiffer rst formulated his behavioral archaeology steps of the life-
cycle, his underlying master-theory of human–materials relations was true to the favored
North American concept of that time, that material culture is an optimization of cultural
adaptation to the local ecological situation. Tringham’s mid 1970s–1980s iteration used
the use-life cycle to elaborate on a Marxist theory of the social relations of production
and social inequality (Figure 1). In the 1990s, both Michael Schiffer and Ruth Tringham
transformed their interest in use-lives into a project about life-histories, in which the
path to becoming archaeological was complicated by historical contingency and a
recognition that there was more than economics and ecology at the heart of human
intentionality. They each did this differently: Schiffer turned to historically documented
topics and data about technology and science (Gifford-Gonzalez 2011); Tringham
turned to feminist and multiscalar interpretations of prehistoric people, things, events,
and places (Tringham 1994, 2012).
We were certainly not alone in our interest in use-lives and life-histories. Currently
there is an enormous body of archaeological literature globally that encompasses in
one way or another the investigation of how things become archaeological. It means
that archaeologists are by now well trained to think and work very hard at squeezing
information about life-histories out of materials and connecting histories to histories.
But, how does this help the media archaeologist?
How Buildings Die (or not)
One of the best ways to demonstrate the potential value of the concept of use-lives/
life-histories for media archaeologists is through the example of buildings. We are more
aware of the life-history of buildings from our own local observations of the world around
us. Moreover, a few books and articles actually tackle the topic explicitly. Stewart Brand
in his brilliant book How Buildings Learn (1994) and its accompanying TV series1 are
wonderful examples of such works, and very relevant to media archaeology studies. In
modern industrial countries, when an architect and/or builder builds a building, does
he or she ever think how long the building is expected to last? Well, in San Francisco
special reinforcement is supposed to protect from earthquake destruction. There is extra
protection from re in the wooden buildings. There are codes to follow. But in general,
there is no mention of how long the building should last. Brand’s book points out that,
in general, modern architects build for the immediate visual effect without thought of
1. The TV series has been uploaded to YouTube by the author. His YouTube channel is https://www.
youtube.com/channel/UCjBdRnkOB5P85yki3rAvGUw
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31Media Archaeologies
how long the building is expected to last and how it will be used. He points to the many
cases of disastrous and expensive results that such an attitude has had on buildings’
lifespan and durability.
At a smaller scale, domestic houses in Western society are generally not planned for
obsolescence, unlike cars and computer hardware. Houses continue changing owner-
ship, changing purpose, and being remodeled and ‘hacked’ as their users change dur-
ing their and the buildings’ lives. Observations of the life-histories of buildings, whether
archaeological (McGuire and Schiffer 1983; Stevanovic 1997) or modern (Alexander
1979; Brand 1994) show that the buildings that have the longest lifespan are those in
which the designers have taken into consideration the changing lives of its present and
future users by making the building modiable to adjust for such transformations. Such
builders—few amongst modern architects, but many in global small-scale societies
of past and present—are thinking about the longue durée of their buildings and their
Figure 1.
Investigating the intensication of production in an archaeological context through the
concept of use-lives (after Tringham 1990, g. 16.11).
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organic evolution. As long as such buildings are maintained (i.e. kept weather-tight) they
will last almost indenitely. But once a building is abandoned (and the reason for this
is of crucial interest), its structure and “skin” will quickly deteriorate and collapse, and
disappear, nally to become archaeological, under the ground or under another building.
In large urban centers there seems to be no cultural rule or even discussion on how
we should know when a house should “die”, or even when it is truly “dead” (DeSilvey
2012). But as archaeologists, we often come across examples of where this is not the
case. In the 9000-year old site of Çatalhöyük, it seems that the life-span of a house was
dependent on its residents, who would maintain their mudbrick houses by annual re-
plastering for a number of years until it was decided to ceremonially “close” the house,
and replace it with a new one built on the old one’s wall stubs. In Building 3 at this site,
we studied the building history of what was probably a 60-year house, and noticed that
the living area of the building became smaller towards the end of its life; the answer
to the question why—was this the result of a collapsing wall, or because the number
of residents decreased?—remained ambiguous (Tringham and Stevanovic 2012). But
archaeologists can live happily with ambiguity, and so should media archaeologists.
There was no ambiguity, however, concerning the closure and abandonment of this
house, which was an intentional ritualized event.
The investigation of decay and abandonment (and its rich archaeological literature, of
which just some examples include Cameron and Tomka 1993; Colwell-Chanthaphonh
and Ferguson 2006; DeSilvey 2006, 2012), whether of houses, elds, or movable
objects—why and how this happens—is of crucial interest to archaeologists hoping to
understand the paths of human history and prehistory, and should also be so to media
archaeologists.
Life-Histories of Digital Objects
A digital simulacrum of this same Çatalhöyük East Mound was built in the virtual world
of Second Life. None of the complexities of life-histories of houses could be expressed
in the awkward building codes of Second Life, however, but we (especially Colleen Mor-
gan, who was a prime mover on the project) learned many things about moving through
Neolithic space. Okapi Island (Tringham n.d. 1), as it was called, was created in 2006, and
was elaborated with buildings to give Second Life visitors an impression of being on the
Neolithic mound. Okapi Island had an interesting life-history, as we became more adept at
building, creating events and machinimas, and using the island for teaching. But we were
renters, and as such were at the mercy of our landowners—Linden Labs. As you can read
in Colleen Morgan’s Middle Savagery blog (Morgan 2010), in 2010 they doubled the rent
of Second Life land for educators (there was no rent control in Second Life). 2 Between
2010, when we received the eviction notice, and January 2012, when we informed Linden
Labs that we would not be continuing to pay the rent and unceremoniously abandoned
Okapi Island, there was a period in which the structures we had built began to fall apart,
through vandalism, lack of maintenance, and our obvious lack of presence. Immediately
after January 2012, Okapi Island disappeared from Second Life; after 5 years of active
2. For more on Opaki Island, see posts tagged “Second Life” at https://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/
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33Media Archaeologies
life, Okapi Island itself had become archaeological. In this sense, although we agree
with much of what he writes, we actually do not follow Harrison’s denition of archaeol-
ogy—specically “archaeology of virtual settlements, dened here as interactive synthetic
environments in which users are sensually immersed and which respond to user input”
(Harrison 2009, 75). For us, this denition loses the very power of the word “archaeology”
that shows that even something supported and created by cyber-infrastructure, such as
Linden Labs Second Life, can decay, be abandoned, and lose meaning and even visibility.
We did not port/migrate Okapi Island to another world such as OpenSimulator; we let
Okapi Island go. The site needed a lot of maintenance to keep it alive. Maintenance in this
case meant an active presence of us archaeologists to welcome visitors, to create the
feeling of an inhabited place (Figure 2). There are many sad places in Second Life that are
empty of live residents, only with non-playing actors. So we tend to think that it would not
have lasted long without the people motivated to keep it alive and “busy” (maybe Colleen
Morgan disagrees). Linden Labs may have just accelerated a process that was already
in motion (sort of like the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii…). Even so, we did send an
appeal to Linden Labs in October 2010, but never heard back from them.
In the end, Okapi Island, like any archaeological site, could never be resuscitated to
its “dynamic” interactive state. While it may still persist in some form in their backup
tapes and drives, Okapi Island has been razed from Second Life. As a digital object its
interactivity is completely dead. Fragments of its active time could be grasped from its
video documentation (Tringham n.d. 2); its static visual imagery from the few screenshot
photos and some documentation of the textures and models used.
While searching in 2014 in Erik Champion’s Playing with the Past (2011) for web-based
virtual cultural environments that could act as models for a game, Dead Women Do Tell
Tales, that was being developed about Çatalhöyük (Tringham n.d. 3; see also Tringham
2015), we found that at least half of his examples have disappeared by now, which seems
to be a common trend with games and other web-based interfaces in general. It’s not
surprising—according to the Library of Congress, the average lifespan of a webpage is
only 100 days. Many of the disappeared, like Okapi Island, can be seen as tempting frag-
ments displayed through video documentation on YouTube or Vimeo (e.g. Leavy n.d.).
Previously, in 1995–1998 we developed another game-like “afterlife” of an archaeo-
logical excavation project (Opovo) in Serbia, called The Chimera Web. In this case, the
demise was the result of technological changes in the software (Macromedia Director)
and incompatible upgrades to the computer system (Macintosh). Unlike the games
mentioned above, we did not document the working model by video, although there
are screenshots (Figure 3). All of the source content that was used, however, is safely
stored in our personal archives; all, that is, except for the original design and storyboard-
ing that was created using Eastgate’s Storyspace, which did not keep up with the later
development of MacOSX and we did not keep a personal watch on this. So by the time
we came to revisit the Chimera Web Storyspace document with a view to resuscitating
it from oblivion, it was too late. We had not even documented with screenshots the
Storyspace web of hypertext links! But we cannot let this project disappear just yet.
Maybe we will recycle its archived content in a new format. So perhaps Chimera Web
is not quite dead (archaeological)—just resting, as Monty Python would have it.
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Figure 2.
Okapi Island in Second Life: (left) crowded with visitors in 2008; (right) sad and empty in 2011 (screenshots by Ruth Tringham).
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35Media Archaeologies
Figure 3.
The Chimera Web (1995): (left) main portal; (right) re story portal (screenshots by Ruth Tringham).
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36 Forum
There are many other such projects on personal hard drives around the world. Just
recently, Erik Champion (n.d.) blogged about porting his 2005 model of the Mayan city
of Palenque (which we believe sleeps/rests on his personal hard drive) to an updated
version of Unreal Tournament engine (Unreal Development Kit). But will we ever see it
without having to go to Perth, Australia?
There are lessons buried in these archaeological musings on life-histories to help
answer such questions as to why digital objects often have such short life-spans, how
they become archaeological, and what (if anything) should be done to prolong their
lives. We know that the fastest way for a tool, a building, or a whole street to become
archaeological is for it to be abandoned because it is not used, or because it is unus-
able; as mentioned above, it is important to investigate or think about the reason. As
we see with buildings, for something to avoid the demise of becoming archaeological,
it needs to be sustainable (preferably from the beginning of its life-history) by being in
constant use, by continuously existing in the minds of its community of users, and by
being able to be changed (or be modied) to respond to the changes of its users. The
decision of whether to meet the challenges of these sustainability factors, or deciding
not to, will determine whether something will fall into disuse, abandonment, metaphorical
or physical burial in the morass of communal forgetfulness, and ultimately the demise
of disappearance without hope of resuscitation.
We are deliberately being abstruse here in dening what that “something” is, because
these rules apply, we believe, not only to cultural heritage in its many forms, but also
to digital objects as well (Richards 2002). In fact some of the most helpful discussions
and guidelines on digital sustainability have been published by the Archaeological Data
Services under the direction of Julian Richards. In addition to the many valuable best
practice recommendations to ensure the longevity of digital archived source content,
one of Julian Richards’s most interesting recommendations is that archaeologists should
plan to encourage the accessibility, usability, and reusability of their digital objects by a
broad audience (Richards n.d.).
The downside of all these recommendations for securing the longevity of digital con-
tent and avoiding its archaeological demise is that the accumulation of digital content
is being done very fast and not everyone who produces and reuses it has the patience,
skill, or technology to prepare it for long-term preservation.
Michael Ashley (2010) has assessed the problem that digital content (memories) are
at high risk of becoming archaeological unless radically easier methods for producers
to follow and more robust media for the productions to be housed in are provided.
Fortunately, our practices in content production and curation are getting better, and
the costs for high quality storage are dropping exponentially (Figure 4). This points to a
better near future for curated, valuable digital heritage.
Both Julian Richards (2002) and Michael Ashley (2010) recommend that the solution
is to recognize that not all digital content needs to be more than ephemeral; some (a
lot) can be allowed to become archaeological, since there is redundancy of representa-
tion and—following what we have said earlier—if the content is not used it will become
archaeological by a path of gradual attrition. It’s a signal-to-noise problem. Along with
the US Library of Congress (n.d.) recommendations and those of the Digital Curation
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Figure 4.
Hard drive cost per gigabyte 1980–2015 (Komorowski n.d., used by permission of the author).
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Centre (n.d.), they suggest a life-cycle for “born-archival” digital objects in which different
versions of media are created for different purposes and with different life expectancies.
Returning to Schiffer, we can slightly reorder his life-cycle to work for media archaeology
by moving preservation to the front of the workow queue—preserve (durable, lossless le
formats), maintain (xity check, embed metadata and archive), curate (select, and if needed,
destroy), recycle (generate representations for access), reuse (remix, regenerate), conserve
(append and enrich), repeat. For example: a “rich” archived version with high resolution
and detailed, embedded metadata according to core standards is expected to last and
be meaningful for the long-term; it acts as the “master-source” from which other versions
can be created, to be repurposable in other formats, and with any dynamic interactivity
preserved intact. From this version “lighter” copies—representations with meaningful,
embedded metadata—are created for dissemination to a broader public via web-based,
mobile, and cloud-based platforms. Like the user interfaces on which they occur in differ-
ent genres (websites, games, on-line journals, mobile apps), their life expectancy is short
(Figure 5). With maintenance, such “light” interfaces and their media may remain accessible
and usable, but they have a lower priority for long-term curation than the master-source
content; they are more ephemeral and can be replaced, even resuscitated, as long as the
master-source content is intact. The trick here is to encourage the enriching of the source
content through interaction with the lighter-weight representations.
Thus media archaeologists can turn their thoughts to digital objects that have become
forgotten in the mists of time, to study their version history (if any), user activity, author/
creator life histories, modier histories, user histories, user reviews, and hardware and
software problems/complaints (and their solutions, if there are any), all as aspects
that create the life history of a digital object that will shed light on why and how they
might have become archaeological. While doing this, media archaeologists will see,
as archaeologists have done with non-digital objects, why some digital objects have a
longer life-expectancy than others.
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tives in Archaeology, edited by R. M. Van Dyke and
R. Bernbeck, 41–75. Denver: University Press of
Colorado.
____. n.d. 1. “Okapi Island in Second Life.” Available
online: http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tring-
ham/Okapi_Island.html
____. n.d. 2. “A tour of Okapi Island.” Available online:
http://vimeo.com/88005214
____. n.d. 3. “Dead Women Do Tell Tales.” Available
online: http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tring-
ham/Dead_Women_Do_Tell_Tales.html
____. and M. Stevanovic, eds. 2012. Last House on
the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük,
Turkey. Çatalhöyük Volume 11. Los Angeles: Cot-
sen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA.
US Library of Congress. n.d. “Sustainability of Digital
Formats: Formats, Evaluation Factors, and Rela-
tionships.” Available online: http://www.digital-
preservation.gov/formats/intro/format_eval_rel.
shtml
Author biography
Ruth Tringham is Professor of the Graduate School (Anthropology) at the University of California,
Berkeley, USA. Address for correspondence: Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley, 232 Kroeber
Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA. Email: tringham@berkeley.edu
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41Media Archaeologies
Michael Ashley is Chief Executive Ofcer at the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), a non-prot
company afliated with UC Berkeley that creates and leverages data management technologies for the
preservation and sharing of cultural heritage. Address for correspondence: Center for Digital Archaeology,
900 Larkspur Landing Cir. Ste 209, Larkspur, CA 94939, USA. Email: michael@codi.org
Symmetrical Media Archaeology:
Boundary and Context
n Greg Bailey
University of Bristol, UK
greg.bailey@bristol.ac.uk
The idea of archaeology—understood as material/discursive practice (Graves-Brown
et al. 2013, 13), or the sites, artefacts, and data that constitute the matter of archaeol-
ogy (e.g. Childe 1929; Wheeler 1954)—as somehow existing beyond or separate from
media—which here is understood as a tool or platform of communication, hybridized or
networked technologies (McQuail 2000), or vectors of knowledge or meaning (Foucault
1972; Shortland 1993)—is unrealistic. That is, the distinction between archaeology and
media, if institutionally legitimate and operationally convenient, is arbitrary. Whether
regarded as stuff, reecting instrument or transformative praxis (Matthews 2009), as
both message carrier and historical/cultural artefact, archaeology pre-exists as trans-
mitter and transmission.
Figure 1.
Audio-cassette tape tangle, Bristol.
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42 Forum
While this dichotomy reects cultural traditions and institutional habit (Bal 2002; Becher
1989) rather than any philosophical boundary or material reality (Barad 2007), a wider
discourse within a still emergent practice of media archaeology might provide differ-
ent insight into our present inchoate moment of technological and social evolution.
Furthermore, these intimately bound, interacting spheres of society and technology—the
co-manufacture of people and things—are traditionally supposed as the very substance of
archaeology (Childe1929). So, in a newer discipline, or perhaps, cluster of sub-disciplines
or theoretical dispositions, currently inhabited by media scholars, cultural theorists, social
scientists, historians of cinema and lm, fellow-travelling steam-punk enthusiasts, and
other thinkers, what might archaeology—as publically and institutionally constituted, and
once (now famously) dened as restricted to “digging through foundations of demolished
factories, boarding houses and dumps” (Huhtamo and Parrika 2011, 3)—bring to a
discussion of media archaeology?
If many of those studying the detritus of our communication age look to rubbish tip,
recycling centre, or, like myself, to front garden or pavement for abandoned cathode-ray
tube television (CRTV), video cassette-player, magnetic ferrous-oxide tape, relict record-
ing apparatus, or grounded aerial—in other words, look to much the same evidence (and
take much the same photograph)—how might archaeological media archaeology differ?
And how do these different constituencies in turn recycle their digital images of analogue
processors, or otherwise engage with the fabric or materiality of media-stuff? How, or
indeed does, a specically archaeological encounter with technology or technological
debris differ from that of Variantologist, social scientist, photographer, or performance
artist? For that matter, aside from, on the one hand, the well-worn metaphor for strati-
ed, subterranean knowledge, and, on the other, muddy eld practice, what might be
thought archaeological at all? And if, as David Clarke famously suggested and everyone
else has repeated, “archaeology is what archaeologists do” (Clarke 1973, 6), what is
it that we are supposed to do? Is there a peculiarly archaeological perspective, a way
of addressing things with an archaeological gaze or transformative touch? Or again, is
archaeology simply a fashion of measuring and categorizing? However, rather than routine
or gesture, a performance of quantifying and sorting, or reading, writing, and talking,
or ways of going-about-things as habitus (Bourdieu 1977), perhaps it is a considera-
tion of context as epistemology rather than any one culturally reafrming methodology
that best characterizes the practice of archaeology (Harrison 2011). This founding idea
of the archaeological context (Daniel 1943; Drewett 1999; Barker 2005)—proximity in
space and time—is both banal and profound but generally not a preoccupation for most
current scholars of media archaeology.
Jussi Parikka has recently considered media or their constituent fossil elements as
latent actors extending through deep geological time. This “elemental media condition”
(Bishop and Parikka 2013) of the “Anthrobscene” (Parikka 2015), with its emphasis on
the necessary precondition for media with an implication of folded or nested time, falls
outside usual archaeological parameters—those of material traces of hominin activity
tracked and tidied into an orderly temporal procession. Nevertheless, if forensically and
chronologically pedestrian, archaeology is able to trace, and argue from, detail (however
partial) of the technological presence of genus Homo throughout the Pleistocene and for
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43Media Archaeologies
nearly two million years. While an interest in historical, economic, and industrial interaction
is shared with other media scholars, it is a making and enacting of material as media in
an evolving longue durée—be this communication by chipped stone or microchip—that
preoccupies much archaeological and anthropological discourse (Barrett 1994; Gell 1998;
Gamble 2007, 277–280). With this intellectual predisposition a researcher might look for
the collective agency of tool and toolmaker in a cultural ecology, rather than a prelapsarian
potential for media. Indeed, recent archaeological thinking might nd it difcult to isolate
artefact/medium, maker, and social context (e.g. Renfrew 1986, 146).
So if, with mattock, sieve, and microscope, one might glimpse the biography of a
long-absent toolmaker, or in handling an expertly knapped int tool haptically present-the-
past, it is the evolutionary arms race of techno-social (or socio-technological) innovation,
and concomitant communication at distance, that is surely the archaeological meta-
narrative. Whether pushed by environmental or climactic change or pulled by increasing
social complexity, the ecological dance of adaptive technology, human communities,
and biosphere (Childe 1952; Fisher et al. 2009, 251–331) is a familiar archaeological
tale. Accordingly, we might suppose that in the study of human affairs, archaeological
antennae are especially tuned to analyse and contrast the runaway effects of accelerat-
ing cycles of novelty, consumption, and waste (Bradley 1990; Rathje 2001). And as for
media, the message signalled with each transaction, coded as metaphor, metonym, or
Figure 2.
Shattered remote TV control.
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44 Forum
synecdoche (Hodder 1993; Tilley 1999), with exchanges of gifts and goods, whether
promising afliation or warning of aggression (Sahlins 1963, 294–297; Mauss 1966), is
material comment. In this way, Bronze Age pots posing as textiles or metalwork (Sofaer
et al. 2013, 476–477), Aboriginal “stone” adzes chipped from post-contact bottle-glass
(Harrison 2003), or French and Crimean War cannon resurrected as London street
furniture (Evans 2015), continue to talk back as ironic, empowering, or disempower-
ing skeuomorphs (another familiar archaeological trope, e.g. Sherratt 1997, 381–382,
431–456). And if we posit that a thing is never just a thing and that the cultural heft
of those shiny messengers—iPhone or hand-axe—remains rather the same, this is a
matter of argument. For us self-identifying media archaeologists, however, this is an
argument clearly worth having.
But, for archaeologists in the eld—or on the pavement or at the recycling centre—there
is not just a time, but also a place for every thing. If we ask why things change we also
ask how they arrived just here, and among these other things? This means to say, the
archaeological privileges context and the nd-spot as snapshot of a unique moment
when some thing happened that could have been otherwise (Piccini pers. comm. 2015).
If this spatio-temporal idea of context marks an episode of loss or abandonment at one
(supposed) end of a cycle of production, it is this point at which archaeologists typi-
cally engage with their material. Accordingly, appropriate methodologies are routinely
Figure 3.
Computer keyboard on pavement.
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45Media Archaeologies
calculated to extrapolate an historical scene, or even cultural hinterland, from what is,
rather than what should or could be, there. This reverse engineering, arguing from the
material particular to a generalized, abstract construct, which the material infers, might
seem unduly perverse when the culture (itself an abstract concept) and time are our
own. However, as the argument of archaeologies of the contemporary past runs, in
making “the familiar unfamiliar by defamiliarising taken for granteds” (Buchli and Lucas
2001, 13), the researcher can at least attempt to isolate herself from cultural bias and
latter-day assumptions of value, acceptance and rejection, totem and taboo (Freud
2001 [1913]). And perhaps this attitude, at once a bricoleur’s intimacy with the object-
as-encountered and the required distance of an involved yet sceptical anthropologist,
is usefully appropriate to contemporary media-technology studies.
It was in light of all this that in 2011 I looked for—but did not go out of my way to nd—
abandoned media stuff. Or, I should say, inasmuch as in the middle of the day I stumbled
across an unspooled audiocassette tape (the iconic 3.81-mm wide C90) promiscuously
unwound across a busy Bristol pavement, derelict media stuff rst found me. As media-
worker and archaeologist I had an existing interest, but taken unawares (in my opinion the
best state in which to approach research material) I had no methodology. Stretched as
Figure 4.
Face (screen) down TV on street pavement.
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it was in the middle of a busy thoroughfare this magnetic oxide tape, evidence of recent
physical play/display—pulling the tape from the cassette to its full extent must have
been a deliberate effort that suggested an exaggerated throwing or arm-length tugging
action—could not have been there very long and would soon have been swept away by
street-cleaner’s brush or general footfall.
Like all of the street media stuff I would nd, the unwound tape/spool assemblage was in
a transitional state, its public presence momentary, and its material integrity fragile. Formal
archaeological recording, with meticulous cross-referenced measurement, grid-layout, and
context sheet was neither possible nor, I now believe, necessary. As with any archaeologi-
cal work, recording methods and the manner and degree of intervention appropriate to
the site and the circumstances of the nd had to be decided, and in this case, as is not
unusual, on the spot. Accordingly, a series of pictures of the nd-site were taken with an
iPhone 4, an equally iconic media artefact that helped make the redundancy of several
technologies, including the audiocassette, more-or-less complete. However, fortunately
for my research, all smart-phones, including the iPhone series, now record “Exchange-
able Image File” (EXIF) data. Among other technical information—focal-length of lens,
exposure with ISO, shutter speed, and so on—this protocol embeds in every jpeg le the
record of the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) and other location data obtained
from cell-phone mast triangulation, and the date and time at which the picture was taken
Figure 5.
Tape-drive mechanism and brick wall.
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47Media Archaeologies
(Bobbitt 2009; Jiebo et al. 2011). The matrix of each digital smart-phone picture already
contains its own stratigraphy of interrogable data. Together with simple pen-and-paper
note-taking—my impressions of the site and initial characterization of the nd and associ-
ated surface scatter—the location, date, and time of each media object stamped into its
iPhone likeness meant that enough data to map a useful archaeological survey was thus
effortlessly obtained. However, if what I considered an appropriate degree of recording
was both to hand and uncomplicated, having begun, I immediately ran into more serious
and complex questions of representation, denition, and ontology.
I strive to be reexive, both as media practitioner and archaeologist. In this case,
attempting to factor my own arrival at a nd spot to capture a snapshot of some unique
event, I had to contextualize, or at least consider, my own presence and the possible
effects of any intervention. The problem that confronted me was how to measure any
such action (of measurement) as against archaeological practice and what and where
the object in question actually was. First, this self-imposed dilemma concerned scale;
that is, the bespoke reference markers, or objects of known size: trowel, paintbrush,
person, or pencil, one of which is usually included in every “proper” archaeological
photograph. Although, as well as a pen, I do often carry a standard set of the smaller
photographic reference scales with me, for several reasons it seemed inappropriate to
use these in the context of found media. To mitigate their absence and for comparison
of scale, there were already items of known or calculable size—kerbstones, paving
slabs, manhole covers and the like—in the frame of most of the several hundred street
photographs I was to make. But, more signicantly for me, rather than badging sites
of ruined media as archaeology by coyly deploying this or that methodological trope,
or in inserting a totemic but intrusive archaeological object into a scene of abjection to
stake this or that institutional or epistemological claim, I would look to discover what
and where archaeology might be (Holtorf and Piccini 2009, 9–30; Harrison 2011). As,
at this stage, I neither knew what I was looking for, nor quite what I was looking at, this
was a key, if hastily improvised, decision.
The potential of my embryonic methodology of wayfaring and casual indeterminacy
was borne on me with my second nd, which arrived signed, dated, and clearly labelled.
Remarkably, this “highly condential” pitching document, originating from a well-known
independent production company, introduced characters and plotted themes for a puta-
tive TV series in which the dramatis personæ were archaeologists and the setting that of
marine archaeology. As the undoubtedly rejected document—whose sub-text spoke of
the globalization and commoditization of twenty-rst century “public service” television
(Bailey 2014)—was abandoned at a council rubbish collection point, it self-dened as
archaeological street media (Bailey 2012). After this extraordinary encounter (during
which, breaking my own improvised rule, I removed the object for further study), and
almost as mysteriously, between June 2012 and August 2014, I came across sixteen
CRT TV sets cast out on the street and all within short walking distance of my home
in north London. Most, but not all, of these were put outside residential houses at or
near the pavement threshold, having no doubt been expelled from their former posi-
tion in domestic life following London’s digital switchover in April 2012. Among other
street nds in this two-year period were: a second tangle of unwound audio-cassette
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tape (also material evidence of physical display in public space); now obsolete VHS
videotapes—usually boxed family collections tidily placed at or near refuse collec-
tion points; two VHS recorders; DVDs or CDs, at or near the brink of obsolescence
and found singly on pavement or road where they had evidently been thrown or spun
as Frisbee-like projectiles; one DVD video-game whose theme was ancient Egypt; a
single 8-mm lm spool seen in a builder’s skip; two TV roof aerials (possibly the result
of strong winds rather than purposeful or playful deposition); one (non-smart) mobile
phone; three music-centres with separate speakers; one (boom-box) radio/cassette
player; two seemingly complete desk-top computers; three computer keyboards; one
small computer screen; one public phone-booth, with completely dismantled wiring;
parts of earphones; and a great many phone, computer, and headphone cables and
other scatters of wiring, plugs, and printed circuit parts. Apart from the majority of TVs
and the boxes of VHS tapes, which had clearly been put out for collection, and several
items seen in or immediately adjacent to builders’ skips, the remaining objects had all
been deposited or illegally dumped in a public place or thoroughfare. If not all were minor
crime scenes, each of these episodes of rejection and abandonment was the result of
a decision or series of decisions reecting changing relationships of people to media
Figure 6.
Street TV and cardboard packaging (various).
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49Media Archaeologies
stuff or media platforms made, pronounced, or believed to be, redundant. Their state
and status now changed; presumably all of these once-valued things had previously
been charged with different techno-social signicance, often operating simultaneously
and at different scales: industrial, commercial, institutional, household, and individual.
In recording these rapidly vanishing events my sampling strategy was simple. These
were all things I came across in the normal course of events as I went about my daily
business. They were not sought out, and, as stated, they were all recorded on the same
chip of the same iPhone 4. Here I come to the nub. If the title of Jussi Parikka’s landmark
book asked, “What is media archaeology?” (2012), I now ask where is media archaeol-
ogy? How do we contextualize media archaeology? In the case of my modest collection of
media images of media carriers, transmitters, and receivers it—the media object—seems
to be here, there, and everywhere. The prototype abject object has in almost all cases
vanished to be redistributed, recycled, or dumped (Maxwell and Miller 2013, 697–710). Its
hardware, the constituent metals and plastics, might be reconstituted, even reincarnated
as part of yet another media instrument. Or, it might be dismembered, buried in landll
site, or fragmented, separated away in sewage-farm or washed out to sea via street drain.
Whatever their fate as physical object-concept, with my archaeological attention they now
persist as images dispersed across media and potentially redistributed via photo-sharing
groups and webpages, in mobile-phone or computer RAM, in storage drives and memory
sticks, or somewhere/everywhere in bits, bytes, and nibbles at a Utah or San Antonio
memory farm. Or, they still exist as indeterminate yet imminent trace, distributed sometime
Figure 7.
Waste optical cabling with coffee cups.
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around local, regional, or worldwide virtual networks. Inasmuch as each hyper-real object
still exists as a discrete thing, it is as recollection (fragmented memory to be recalled by
nger swipe or mouse-click), as simulacrum, or repetition of its originary concept: its own
virtual computer-aided design (CAD). Rather than materiality or immateriality, this hybrid
symmetry (Witmore 2006, 2007; Webmoor 2012)—tracing an idea of form and function
from a computer’s virtual drawing board to material realization, to memories of itself scat-
tered in virtual space-time—might be thought pivotal to the matter of media archaeology.
So what to consider? What is real? After particle physicist and theorist Karen Barad
(2007), I would say this all depends on where we decide to x the parameters of our experi-
ment, book-chapter, media work, or excavation. Where we choose to draw boundaries
to incorporate observer, observed stuff, and the mechanisms of measurement/recording
to make an “agential cut in reality” (Barad 2007, 326–337), might then become media
archaeology assemblage. And if critical voices protest, asking how this effortless recording
of disregarded, mass-produced debris can possibly be archaeology, which criteria say
it is not? If lacking chthonic metaphor or established methodology, does this mean that
archaeologists (of all people) ignore stuff that surrounds us hidden in plain sight? Surely,
while method and technique are means to an end, it is not necessarily a recognizably
archaeological performance or the routine application of archaeological methodology to
mute material that transforms it, but the situation and intent of worker and work that allow
it to speak; that communicate archaeologies of media.
Figure 8.
Small computer screen with reections.
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51Media Archaeologies
Therefore, this paper, now circulated in a forum on media archaeology in an archaeo-
logical journal creates an archaeological cut in reality.
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Tilley, C. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Webmoor, T. 2012. “Symmetry, STS, Archaeology.”
In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of
the Contemporary World, edited by P. M. Graves-
Brown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini, 105–120.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wheeler, M. 1954. Archaeology from the Earth.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Witmore, C. 2006. “Vision Media, Noise and the Per-
colation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the
Mediation of the Material World.” Journal of Mate-
rial Culture 11(3): 267–292.
____. 2007. “Symmetrical Archaeology: excerpts
from a manifesto.” World Archaeology 39(4):
546–562.
Greg J. Bailey is a PhD candidate in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, UK.
Address for correspondence: Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43
Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UU, UK. Email: greg.bailey@bristol.ac.uk
The Sex Pistols’ Guitar Tuner: Material
Culture and Mythology
n Paul Graves-Brown
University College London, UK
p.graves-brown@ucl.ac.uk
Would Johnny Rotten beam, or blush with embarrassment, to learn that
grafti he scrawled on a bedroom wall in 1977 are being assessed for their
archaeological and cultural signicance? In the scholarly journal Antiquity?
By academics who see the wall as an “historic site”? Really?
(The Times 22 November, 2011)
THE WHO, THE ROLLING STONES and Black Sabbath recorded in
the basement of Number 4, and Donovan cut his debut in Number
9. In Number 20, a young Elton John worked as a teaboy, and some
archaeologists consider the grafti that The Sex Pistols left behind on
the upper oor of Number 6 as important a nd as the cave paintings at
Lascaux. (Armstrong, 2014)
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53Media Archaeologies
Thus has a piece of research by myself and John Schoeld (Graves-Brown and Schoeld
2011) inadvertently become part of the “culture of deception” and media mythology
surrounding the Sex Pistols. This brief essay is an attempt to contribute to “the never
ending search for the truth behind the Sex Pistols” (McLaren 2006, 5), by suggesting
that material culture and our transactions with it constitute a dialectical challenge to
myth and misinformation. As Barthes (1993 [1957]) says, there is a tendency to natu-
ralize what is historically contingent, to prefer what we might like to believe or what we
are told to believe over what the actual evidence might tell us. In the case of the Sex
Pistols, one primary myth is their lack of musical competence; that their output was
a form of anti-music. As Malcolm McLaren told the Sunday Times in 1977: “Christ, if
people bought the records for the music, this thing would have died a death long ago.”
Similarly, guitarist Steve Jones had remarked “Actually, we’re not into music. We’re into
chaos” (Spencer 1976).
The media myth of an anti-music suits a narrative which pits punk against the musical
virtuosity of 1970s progressive rock, as a “year zero” or return to “roots” for a music
which had been “corrupted” by the middle class. The only problem with this myth is
that the buildings at 6 Denmark Street and the people and artefacts assembled there
between 1975 and 1977 constitute a direct dialectical challenge to the view that the
Sex Pistols were simply “into chaos”. Indeed, it has been claimed that “If The Beatles
had Abbey Road and George Martin, then the Pistols have Denmark Street and Dave
Goodman” (Ray Morrisey quoted in Strongman 2007a, 119).
“Punk’s Lascaux”
Whilst in December 2011, the media concentrated on the idea that the upper room in a
building to the rear of 6 Denmark Street was “punk’s Lascaux”, the more revolutionary
evidence lay in the building itself, and particularly its ground oor. At some time in the
late 1960s, this room was converted into a soundproofed rehearsal room by the group
Badnger and their manager Bill Collins. When McLaren’s Glitterbest bought the lease
(for £600 and an electric piano that didn’t belong to them—Matovina 2000; Strongman
2007b) from Collins in 1975, they found a “box of goodies”, a rehearsal space equipped
with a basic Electro Voice PA system, and “a few mics and a bit of soundproong”
(Goodman 2006, 22). One of the key points about the Sex Pistols, then, is that they
intensively rehearsed at 6 Denmark Street for around two-and-a-half years until their
dissolution in January 1978.
Moreover, “I made a real effort to get Steve’s guitar in tune for once. I was aided by
this monster of a strobe tuner […] that had been left behind by the previous occupants
of their Denmark Street base” (Goodman, 2006, 60). The late Dave Goodman, engineer
and rst producer to the Pistols, had initially encountered them when he provided the
PA for their rst gig at the Nashville on 23 March, 1976. He appeared “in the Nashville’s
backstage room […] raving about how good the band were (back when ‘good’ was the
last word we expected to be hurled at the band)” (McLaren 2006, 4), and continued
to be their sound engineer and demo producer for the next two years. His (uncredited)
version of “I Wanna Be Me” was on the B side of “Anarchy in the UK” (1976), his produc-
tion of “No Fun” was the B side of “Pretty Vacant” (1977), and many of his recordings
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can be heard on the album Spunk, originally released as a bootleg just before Never
Mind the Bollocks in 1977.
The “monster of a strobe tuner” in question was a Peterson Model 400 or 420 (Figure 1);
rst introduced in 1967, this was and remains one of the most accurate tuners available
and was widely used by rock bands in the 1970s. According to the company’s website,
the strobe tuner began to be a common sight on stage and in the recording
studio. Many will recall rst seeing the mysterious ickering dials behind
such luminaries as the Grateful Dead, The Who, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa,
Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young et al. (Peterson, n.d.)
Why did the Pistols, anti-musicians, use a state-of-the-art guitar tuner? Dave Good-
man remarks: “I understand that discordancy and sheer volume can provoke feelings
of aggression, but to me, if the Pistols were too out of tune, they would sound sad”
(Goodman 2006, 60). One might add that during the recording sessions at Denmark
Street, Decibel (Stoke Newington), and Riverside Studios (Chiswick), and at the later
sessions at Wessex Sound for the Never Mind the Bollocks album, the Pistols, and in
particular Steve Jones, fully embraced studio technology:
I suggested he should try some overdubs to strengthen the tracks.
“What’s an overdub?” asked Steve innocently.
“You know, you can put another guitar over the top of the original.”
“Oh, sounds great,” he said…. (Goodman 2006, 31)
Reputedly, one of the tracks on Never Mind the Bollocks has in excess of 10 guitar
overdubs.
Figure 1.
Peterson Model 400 stroboscopic tuner (copyright Peterson Electro-Musical
Products—licenced for all uses under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0).
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55Media Archaeologies
Témoignage
The late Jacques Derrida (pers. comm.—EHESS seminar 1992) made much of the term
“témoignage”, which in French conveniently means both evidence and testimony. In the
Rodney King case, he pointed out, the jury ignored the evidence of their own eyes to
acquit the policemen seen beating King in a bystander’s video. But as archaeologists, I
believe, we must attend to the evidence of our eyes and (in the case of aural archaeology)
our ears. One of the most prevalent mythic media tropes of punk is the conation of the
punk ethos with the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978–1979 and the inevitable equation of
Lydon’s stage role with Olivier’s Richard III. Here it is quite simple to demonstrate from
a mountain of evidence that the rst wave of punk began c. 1975 and was more of less
over with the dissolution of the Pistols in January 1978, well before the “rubbish piled up
in the streets”. Similarly, the fact that initially the Pistols were not particularly competent
is conated with the myth that they remained so, a myth that gains traction from the fact
that John Richie, alias John Beverley, alias Sid Vicious, was not a competent musician.
This is demonstrated by the fact that, as Steve Jones later recalled: “He played his farty
old bass part and we just let him do it. When he left I dubbed another part on, leaving Sid’s
down low. I think it might be barely audible on the track” (quoted in Lydon 1993, 200).
The truth, if that is the right word, is summed up by the late Tony Wilson:
Malcolm wanted […] to create the Bay City Rollers of outrage. He wanted
a band that couldn’t play […] and would be number one just cause [sic]
they were disgusting. In fact, they became number one because they were
fantastic. Culturally […] musically, even. (quoted in Nolan 2001, 26)
But where is the témoignage? In this, as historical archaeologists, we are confronted
with the perennial tension between what people say and what is (see Schiffer 2000).
For example, Matlock (2006, 64) recalls that the windows of the rehearsal room “had
been bricked up as part of the soundproong”, yet as can be seen from Figure 2 this is
clearly not the case, as the building retains its original nineteenth-century windows (see
Graves-Brown and Schoeld 2011). What is needed, then, is to sift a whole variety of
témoignage—testimony and evidence—and anyone who believes that contemporary
archaeology is frivolous or futile might reect here on how many of the principal sources
of testimony in this story (Bill Collins, Malcolm McLaren, Dave Goodman, Tony Wilson, Sid
Vicious) are already dead. The resulting collage consists of written and verbal testimony,
photographs, lm/video, documentary sources, and the physical structures and artefacts
available for interrogation.
With respect to the rehearsal room, which in a way is the key locus in the musical
history of the Pistols (genuinely their Abbey Road), we have the room as it exists today
(Figure 2) and its inferred history (Graves-Brown and Schoeld 2011). From the photo-
graphs of Bob Gruen and Janette Beckman taken in 1976 and 1977 respectively, we
can see the Pistols rehearsing and from lm/video taken in 1973 we can see Badnger
rehearsing in the same space. From this we can conrm that there was some form
of soundproong consisting of black panels of an unknown material held in place by
wooden battens. The images do not show the window side of the room but we may
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guess, contra Matlock, that this soundproong extended over the windows, leading
him to believe that they were “bricked up”.
In photos and lm we can see microphones and hear them being used, so clearly
some form of PA was available (although the actual PA is not visible) and here we can
probably accept Goodman’s testimony; he did, after all, make his living hiring out PA
systems. We can see what instruments and ampliers the Sex Pistols used and this is
corroborated by the documentary sources, e.g. the white Gibson Les Paul guitar and the
Fender Twin Reverb amplier which both, seemingly, belonged to Sylvain Sylvain of the
New York Dolls (Strongman 2007b). For those who like to claim that it must have been
session musicians, such as Chris Spedding, who played on the Pistols’ recordings, we
have the footage of their performance on Tony Wilson’s Granada TV show So It Goes,
from 28 August, 1976, where they play a very competent live version of “Anarchy in the
UK”—no miming here, à la Top of the Pops (Nolan 2001).
Finally, we have the sound recordings made over a period of ve to eight days begin-
ning 13 July, 1976, whose provenance in Denmark Street is established by a number
of documentary sources, including the sleeve notes of Spunk. Here we can hear what
many believe to be the “authentic” sound of the Sex Pistols, the sound that was heard
at the mythic Lesser Free Trade Hall gig in Manchester on 4 June, 1976 (Nolan 2001).
This is not the sound of incompetents; Matlock on bass forms a tight rhythm section
with Paul Cook, and Steve Jones’s new-found passion for overdubbing is ubiquitous.
Stylistically, the music combines elements of “Krautrock”, dub reggae, and the staples
of British blues rock of the early 1970s, particularly, perhaps, The Who and Pete Town-
shend, whom Steve Jones sought to emulate (Nolan 2001).
Figure 2.
The former rehearsal room at 6 Denmark Street, in 2010 (photograph by author).
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57Media Archaeologies
No Fun?
If it seems I am labouring the point, I would argue that the Sex Pistols are one of the
most prominent, but mythologized, cultural phenomena of the last 50 years, with their
inuence still somewhat debateable. In the history of popular music perhaps only the
Beatles and Elvis Presley have attracted the same welter of apocrypha. If we can use
the evidence of material culture (within which I include sound recordings, images, etc.)
to get to at least some of what really happened, this seems a worthwhile exercise. Of
course this does not mean that we can arrive at a denitive account. The Manchester
Lesser Free Trade Hall concert of 4 June, 1976 is a case in point; the number of people
who claim to have been there far exceeds the building’s capacity and possibly reects
some confusion due to there being a second gig at the Free Trade Hall six weeks later.
But beyond the limited photographic evidence available and some documentation, it will
never be possible to say, denitively, who was there. Yet to accept that we cannot offer
a totalizing account of events is not to accept that we can say nothing with authority.
And in this context, the great value of material evidence, as Adorno (1973 [1966]) rec-
ognized, is that it cannot be explained away and is not as evanescent as the memories
of those who were, or were not, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.
The history of the Sex Pistols was/is a product of the media, the press, and televi-
sion. But by applying an archaeological sensibility to the témoignage—material and
testimony, witnesses and evidence—we can bring to light telling ironies that burst the
bubble of myth. Whilst Lydon professed to hate the Beatles (and claimed liking them as
a reason for sacking Glen Matlock), the Denmark Street rehearsal space was inherited
from the rst band to sign to the Beatles’ Apple label. Having rejected the talents of
Dave Goodman, the Pistols then recruited Chris Thomas as their producer. Not only
had Thomas previously produced records for Badnger, but he had learned his trade
as an engineer at Abbey Road, working with the Beatles. The truth, where we can nd
it, is stranger than ction.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. 1973 [1966]. Negative Dialectics. Trans-
lated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press.
Armstrong, L. 2014. “Is Denmark Street, London’s
‘Music Alley’, Under Threat?” Mojo 13 June. Avail-
able online: http://www.mojo4music.com/15049/
denmark-street-londons-music-alley-threat/
Barthes, R. 1993 [1957] Mythologies. Translated by
A. Lavers. London: Vintage.
Goodman, D. 2006. My Amazing Adventures with
the Sex Pistols. Liverpool, UK: Bluecoat Press.
Graves-Brown, P. and J. Schoeld, 2011. “The Filth
and the Fury: 6 Denmark Street (London) and the
Sex Pistols.” Antiquity 85: 1385–1401. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00062128
Lydon, J. 1993. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No
Dogs. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Matlock, G. 2006. I was a Teenage Sex Pistol. Lon-
don: Reynolds & Hearn.
Matovina, D. 2000. Without You: The Tragic Story of
Badnger. San Mateo, CA: Frances Glover.
McLaren, M. 2006. “Foreword.” In My Amazing
Adventures with the Sex Pistols, by D. Goodman.
Liverpool, UK: Bluecoat Press.
Nolan, D. 2001. I Swear I Was There: Sex Pistols and
the Shape of Rock. Lanchester, UK: Milo Books.
Schiffer, M. B. 2000. “Indigenous Theories, Scientic
Theories and Product Histories.” In Matter, Mate-
riality and Modern Culture, edited by P. Graves-
Brown, 72–96. London: Routledge.
Peterson. n.d. “Peterson Tuner History.” Available
online: http://www.petersontuners.com/index.
cfm?category=26
Spencer, N. 1976. “Don’t Look Over your Shoulder
but the Sex Pistols are Coming.” New Musical
Express 21 February: 31.
Strongman, P. 2007a. Pretty Vacant: A History of
Punk. London: Orion.
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____. 2007b. (director) Chaos! Ex-Pistols’ Secret
History: The Dave Goodman Story (DVD). London:
Universal.
The Times. 2011. “Anarchy in the DIY: Would it be
in the True Spirit of Punk to Preserve Johnny Rot-
ten’s Wall of Grafti?” 22 November. Available
online: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/
leaders/article3233868.ece
Paul Graves-Brown is an Honorary Research Associate at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. Address for
correspondence: 88 Trallwm Road, Llwynhendy, Llanelli SA14 9ES, UK. Email: p.graves-brown@ucl.ac.uk
Kinetic Architecture and Aerial Rides:
Towards a Media Archaeology of the
Revolving Restaurant View
n Synne Tollerud Bull
University of Oslo, Norway
s.t.bull@media.uio.no
Ever since the erection of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and its overwhelming public success,
cities have continued to incorporate various types of kinetic observation structures into
their urban tissue, serving as an inuential visual medium for the masses. In my media-
archeological project, of which this text is a part, I explore how the experience and current
innovation of these structures relate to the new imaging technologies that shape our
contemporary media culture. In this text I will be treating the revolving restaurant as an
optical device, where the attributes of elevated view combined with mechanical motion
evoke a cinematic experience. In order to describe the relationship to cinema that such
a view inhabits, I have turned to what I call cinéma trouvé—a cinematic experience of
sites or places outside the traditional cinematic apparatus.
The artist duo Bull.Miletic (2011) have written about the genealogy of the revolving
restaurant view as a panoramic desire starting from the Italian veduta, the Claude glass,
and the picturesque gardens of the early eighteenth century. By tracing the origins of this
vision machine through the development of immersive imaging practices such as the
panorama and diorama, and the coming of modernism with urbanization, ferro-vitreous
architecture, and the development of the railway and tourism, the revolving restaurant
experience is rmly situated within New Film History’s media-archeological context
(Elsaesser 2004). Bull.Miletic examine the disparate and far-ung links between the
revolving panoramic view and what Tom Gunning (2012) has called “the technological
image”, understood as an expanding arsenal of technological devices (from nineteenth-
century philosophical toys to the cinema to video and digital media). My short comment
here is thus intended as a contribution to an existing media-archaeological discourse
in which the development of moving image media are seen in a larger cultural context.
The specic experience enabled by kinetic architecture and mechanical rides appears
early in cinema as part of “the cinema of attractions” in the form of non-narrative
phantom rides and exhibitions such as Hale’s tours (Gunning 1986). In his Walter
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59Media Archaeologies
Benjamin-inuenced account of the changes brought to society by the invention of the
railway, Wolfgang Schivelbush (1986) claims that “panoramic perception, in contrast to
traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects:
the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him
through the world” (Schivelbush 1986, 64, emphasis in original). Relying on related
accounts such as “cinema by other means” (discussed in Levi 2012), “the body as a
site of spatio-sensory perception” (in Bruno 2002), “the mobilized and virtual gaze”, and
“the virtual window” (Friedberg 1993, 2006), among others, this line of thought leads
to my concept of “readymade cinema” or cinéma trouvé, a cinematic experience pro-
duced by an observation machine in which the spectator simultaneously travels through
physical space and his or her own memory of conventional cinema. The concept of
cinéma trouvé is a useful media archeological heuristic device, as it generates new and
unconventional ways of thinking through issues of embodiment and materiality across
mediated and physical experience. Below, I will jump-cut further along the aerial view
to include what I, after the lm scholar and media archeologist Pavle Levi (2012, 77),
would call the cine-dream of kinetic architecture found in the wake of aviation’s golden
age and leading up to Cold War heterotopias.
Bel Geddes’s Aerial Designs
Norman Bel Geddes’s model for the Aërial Restaurant, a three-oor circular construction
that was to make one full revolution every thirty minutes, was designed for the 1933
Century of Progress Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair (Figure 1).
What was supposed to be the world’s rst revolving restaurant was never realized due
to structural and economic problems, but the mobile aerialized spectator was nally
reinstated in Geddes’s Futurama a few years later, drawing on the same basic principles.
Geddes’s Futurama model of the “world of tomorrow” at the 1939 New York’s World’s
Fair demonstrated how the transformation of the city into a distant object of visual
consumption had an ideologically recuperative effect, and how the miniature or model
works on the same principle. As Mark Dorrian has noted, its “usefulness as urban plan-
ning’s most potent tool of public persuasion endures through precisely such powers of
sublimation” (Dorrian 2007, 6). In the model of Le Corbusier’s La ville radieuse, we see
the hand of the architect as a god-like liberator of urban space. At the same time, the
vertical abstraction does away with history and compresses space into dened territory.
Based on 119 aerial photographs, and presented as part of the automobile giant General
Motor’s Highways and Horizons exhibit in the tremendously popular Transportation Zone,
Bel Geddes’s “number one hit show” (Figure 2) enchanted a nation struggling after the
Great Depression and longing for prosperity and progress (Morshed 2004, 74).1
For Bel Geddes and his contemporaries, new breakthroughs in aviation technology
and the idea of traversing aerial space had a signicant impact on the imagination of
future civilizations. As Morshed remarks:
1. For a general discussion on the Futurama, see Bush (1979), Marchand (1992), and Hauss-Fitton
(1994).
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Solitary in his monoplane, the aviator was the modernist trope par
excellence representing a privileged view of the earth and was a catalyst for
new models of aesthetic experimentation in literature, science ction, and
the arts during aviation’s golden age. (Morshed 2004, 79)
Prior to the Futurama, a number of Bel Geddes’s designs engendered his fascination
with aerial ascension and mechanical motion. Within a couple of years after the historic
event of Lindbergh’s ight over the Atlantic in 1927, Bel Geddes had conceived of an
aerialized architecture, “a V-winged leviathan aerial vessel with a wingspan of 528 feet and
sleeping accommodations for 606 persons” (Morshed 2004, 85). This design marked a
signicant shift, as Paul Virilio (1997) has pointed out, tilting the concept of architecture
out of its age-old gravitational axis. Similarly to the train ride, the airplane ight offered
mechanical thrust through previously unimagined perspectives of space-time, dissolving
the grounded identity of objects and subjects. As James Gibson has noted:
Figure 1.
Norman Bel Geddes, Model of Aërial Restaurant, 1929 (courtesy of Harry Ransom
Center, The University of Texas at Austin).
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61Media Archaeologies
Seeing the world at a traveling point of observation, over a long enough
time for a sufciently extended set of paths, begins to be perceiving the
world at all points of observation, as if one could be everywhere at once.
To be everywhere at once with nothing hidden is to be all-seeing, like God.
(Gibson 1979, 197)
The all-seeing God-like view is also the cinematic view. Of “city symphonies” such as
Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Gunning remarks: “The street
remains an essential image […], but the lmmaker rises above its one-way logic, employing
cuts that move without friction, even with collisions. The camera remains disembodied,
aerial, transcendent” (Gunning 2011, 70). The lm camera’s ability to see the world with
an altogether different perspective from that of the human eye is in itself a kind of aerial
view: “An exclusive realm detached from earthbound mortals” (Morshed 2004, 94).
Tati’s Playtime
In his acclaimed lm Playtime (1967), Jacques Tati’s camera offers a dystopic no-place,
rather than an aerial overview; “a glistening antiseptic environment” has become what
is left of the aerial promise (Ockman 2000, 178). As if Bel Geddes’s Aerial Liner Number
4 crash-landed at Orly, the traveler’s continued journey now depends on the articiality
of the multiple glass surfaces in the unidentiable airport terminal. The location of the
lm, according to Ockman, is “set outside normal space-time relations […]. It initiates
the viewer into an ‘other’ order, a time of aesthetic play, cinematic time—playtime”
Figure 2.
Norman Bel Geddes, Futurama, New York World’s Fair, 1939 (courtesy of Harry
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin).
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(Ockman 2000, 178). The background for Tati’s vision is clear, Ockman reminds us:
“Between 1954 and 1974, 24 percent of the buildable surface of the city was subject
to demolition and redevelopment” (Ockman 2000, 83). A process started with Hauss-
mann about a hundred years earlier, this violence of urban space’s creation begins with
an aerial view; as Walter Benjamin reects: “Haussmann’s urbanistic ideal was one of
views in perspective down long street-vistas” (Benjamin 1997 [1935], 173), and with the
Haussmannization of Paris, the citizens “began to become conscious of the inhuman
character of the great city” (Benjamin 1997 [1935], 174). And equally, an aerial view will
be its only remedy, commoditized through Ferris wheels, outlook towers, and eventually,
revolving restaurants. “The violence of the urbanism ‘on the ground’”, as Dorrian states,
“would be sublimated into the quasi-pastoral spectacle of the ‘urban landscape’” (Dorrian
2007, 6). As Ockman concludes, the relation of lm and architecture “is a paradigm of
the relation between physical experience and the advancing forces of dematerialization
and virtualization” (Ockman 2000, 93). The motion of the revolving restaurant adds to
the dissolving-of-reality effect, making the external scenery less real, more cinematic,
and, most importantly, relentlessly more ideal.
Cold War Heterotopias
The continuation on this media archeological journey takes me to the multi-media
architectural practice of the Space Age architects Charles and Ray Eames. Their works
and attitude towards architecture and spaces of information serve to illustrate how the
politics of visual media and information strategies in post-World War Two USA created
spaces of heterotopias on a global scale.2
The Eameses’ contribution to the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow brought
signicant attention to the backdrop of Cold War strategies. Their multi-screen installation
Glimpses of the USA provided over 2200 still and moving images separated onto seven
gigantic 20-×-30-ft screens. Suspended from the roof of Buckminster Fuller’s massive
250-ft diameter dome, the visual effect overpowered any previous multi-screen experi-
ence hitherto constructed. Here, the aerial shots we know from the city symphonies are
repeated. The ying all-seeing camera, now from as high as outer space, starts up with
star constellations and planets. Spread across the seven screens followed aerial shots of
cities and landscape before closing in on details such as milk bottles, newspapers, and
eventually the intimate private sphere of the family breakfast and the startup of everyday
life. As Beatriz Colomina (2008) has noted, the Glimpses installation emphasized the
domestic and personal “good life” in combination with aerial views and outer space voyage.
Domestic life became “suspended within an entirely new spatial system—a system that
was the product of esoteric scientic-military research but that had entered the everyday
public imagination with the launching of Sputnik in 1957” (Colomina 2008, 81).
2. I retain here the concept of heterotopia elaborated by Michel Foucault, as a concept of human
geography. According to Foucault (in a 1967 text for a lecture that was published later without his
approval), heterotopia describes places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions:
“Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location
in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reect and speak
about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias” (Foucault 1986, 24).
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63Media Archaeologies
On the agenda for the exhibition in Moscow was an attempt to soften the arms race
and tame the space race of the Cold War into a dialog of domestic life and a competition
in kitchen appliances. However, as Colomina notes, the nal outcome of the gigantic
seven-screen installation was “that of an extraordinarily powerful viewing technology, a
hyper-viewing mechanism, which is hard to imagine outside the very space program the
exhibition was trying to downplay.” As such, Colomina continues, “this extreme mode
of viewing goes beyond the old fantasy of the eye in the sky” (Colomina 2008, 81). The
Glimpses installation showed the good life of domestic America, but “without ghettos,
poverty, domestic violence or depression” (Colomina 2008, 84). The Situation Room in
the White House, where multiple screens are set up to bring in information from all over
the world, may have inspired the multi-screen design. The Eameses were preoccupied
with the organization of information, and Glimpses was “organized around a strict logic
of information transmission […] where the central principle is that of compression. […]
The space of the multi-screen lm, like the space of the computer, compresses physi-
cal space” (Colomina 2008, 85). As Colomina insightfully observes, for the Eameses
“architecture is all about the space of information”. We no longer need concern ourselves
with “space” but rather with “structure” or, more precisely, with time. “Structure, for the
Eamseses is organization in time” (Colomina 2008, 89). Propelled by the same spatial
regime, Bel Geddes’s revolutionary restaurant design was re-born at Seattle’s World Fair
in 1962 as the Space Cage (Figure 3)—the initial name of the Space Needle.
Nowhere is the architecture as information, as structure in time, and as such a cinematic
experience, more evident than in the revolving restaurant. Growing out of the same Cold
War mentality, the very beginning of the information age, the gently rotating overview
reassured the audiences of their mediated existence. As with the 360-degree-cinemas
(and the painted and moving panoramas before that), the concept was a complex mix-
ture of the clarity of overview and a sensory overload. As one commentator observes,
the Space Needle
became a ying saucer, or halo in the sky, the symbol of the 1962 World’s
Fair. It t the fair’s theme of a cheery Space Age tomorrow, defying cold war
anxiety over nuclear annihilation. (Egan 2012)
The moving image absorbed and projected back the existence of modernity and
became part of every aspect of life, turning architectural design into micro temporalities.
The status of architecture, Colomina concludes, is transformed into an enclosure of
information, “a space we now occupy continuously without thinking” (Colomina 2008,
91). These spaces can be classied as heterotopias in the way they operate through
perceptual modes, placing the subject out of joint between immersion, abstraction, and
different dimensions of time.
Concluding Thoughts
I have argued that the elevation in combination with mechanical motion set the revolv-
ing architecture apart from normative architectural experience and transgressed into a
cinematic elsewhere. An archaeology of the revolving restaurant sends us further back in
history, to the multiplicity of early attractions and the historical quest for total immersion. At
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the same time as arousing complex feelings of overview and vertigo, power and dizziness,
control and confusion, these elevated perpetual motion machines can tell us something
about our relationship to moving images historically and today. The 135-m-high London
Eye (re)launched the interest in urban observation wheels in 2000 and was soon followed
by an unprecedented boost in urban wheels globally.
3
In parallel to this circle-centric
development, other types of aerial rides such as the recently-installed Emirates Air Line
(2012), a cable-car crossing the Thames by the Millennium Dome, and Oslo’s own Sneak
Peak (2012), a free-standing glass “elevator to nowhere”, also contribute to this trend. In
addition, the emerging technologies of commercial space rides and high-altitude balloon-
ing promise to offer its passengers “the unexpected emotional reaction and unparalleled
perspective-shift that comes from seeing our planet suspended in space” (World View n.d).
Alongside the apparent boom in aerial rides in the physical world, digital-cinema and
new aerial-imaging technologies have prompted scholarly discussions on what has
3. A short list would include, but not be limited to: the Star of Nanchang, China (2006, 160 m); the
Singapore Flyer (2008, 165m); the High Roller, Las Vegas (2014, 168 m); the New York Wheel (under
construction, 192 m); the Beijing Great Wheel (planned, 208 m); the Dubai Eye (under construction,
210 m); and Moscow View (planned, 220m).
Figure 3.
Century 21 Exposition (Seattle, Washington), design for the Space Needle, cross-
section of restaurant. Architectural drawing by Seymour, acrylic or gouache on board, 1962,
68 × 64 cm (courtesy of University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections Division.
UW18955z).
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65Media Archaeologies
emerged as a new visual paradigm. Scholars such as Farocki (2012), Steyerl (2012),
Elseasser (2013), and Dorrian and Pousin (2013), to name a few, have pointed to the
increasing importance of aerial views prompted by new technologies of surveillance,
tracking, and targeting such as Google Maps, drones (Weizman 2015) and satellites.
Others (Brown 2013; Morgan 2015; Gunning forthcoming) have called for a more sys-
tematic study of camera movement impelled by the spatial conguration in digital cinema.
According to Erkki Huhtamo, media archaeology shows us how “the new is ‘dressed
up’ in formulas that may be hundreds of years old, while the old may provide ‘molds’
for cultural innovations and reorientations” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011, 25). As camera
movement and aerial views emerge from older forms of cinema back into focus in digital
cinema, the observation rides of the physical world correspondingly receive a boost of
technological innovation. It is the resonance of these two spatial congurations that I am
concerned with and that I am exploring in my media archeological project of the aerial
view in motion. The revolving restaurant does not only show us a history of mass media
and the way we are severely conditioned by our non-human machines (Kittler 1999; Ernst
2010); With this preliminary presentation I also hope to have shown how the view from
a revolving restaurant can offer a nuanced media-archeological alteration of thought.
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____. 2012. “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New
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Fragile Storage, Digital Futures
n Grant Bollmer
University of Sydney, Australia
grant.bollmer@sydney.edu.au
Data storage is a fragile thing; it is physical and in need of care, or else it breaks. Yet
data are often thought to be both ephemeral and everlasting, categories for which a kind
of physical fragility would seem to make little sense. Assumedly, data are both too fast
and too slow to be fragile. This perception has long animated illusions of the digital as
a uid, ideal world divorced from the everyday dirt and matter of daily life. It produces
dreams of an everlasting cloud of digital documentation, accessible everywhere yet
located nowhere in particular.
Anyone attuned to the material culture of technology knows that these narratives are
false, even if they produce everyday ways of acting with technology. Examples of the
materiality of digital media breaking through these fantasies abound. For instance, when
Pixar went to produce the DVD release of Toy Story (dir. Lasseter 1995), they found that
around a fth of the lm’s original les were corrupted as their disk storage had failed. The
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67Media Archaeologies
2010 DVD release of Toy Story, as a result, is based on a digital transcode of a celluloid
print, all because of the materiality of data storage and its fragility. In spite of its being “born-
digital” as one of the rst major digital animation spectacles of twentieth century cinema,
the archival endurance of Toy Story exists only because of analog media (Ebiri 2014).
Celluloid may scratch and burn. Our experience of lm has included not only the
indexicality of the photograph projected in serial but also the indexicality of that which
has touched, scratched, and modied the lmstrip itself. Ironically, digital prints of lm
seem to have greater permanence because they lack these visible signs of age. Every
viewing of a digital lm appears new and unblemished. Yet these beliefs about digital lm
require the forgetting of the materiality of storage media and the ever-changing formats
of audio-visual data.
Data storage is fragile, and this is partially because there has rarely been attention paid
to the practical reality of digital storage as something that has direct effects on our ability to
record and understand our history and our present. We cannot abide these ctions about
the abundance and permanence of data while hard drives fail, magnetic tapes degrade,
and information corrupts. I propose an alliance structured around the fragility of data
storage, an alliance between media archaeology, the archaeological analysis of material
culture, and the digital humanities. This alliance would be devoted towards understanding
the materiality of hardware and the performativity of software, accounting for the past,
present, and future of born-digital cultural artifacts that have no original medium beyond
the computer. It would examine the conditions for “data” to become an object made vis-
ible through software; it would acknowledge the material specicity of hardware designed
to process and transmit data that is—for the most part—inaccessible to direct human
knowledge; it would admit the different forms of experience structured around software
and data, experiences that include multiple kinds of human and machine “perception”;
and it would use this knowledge to preserve cultural objects that exist primarily or entirely
as data, as artifacts that rely on proprietary software formats, as things that can only be
used in conjunction with technologies planned for obsolescence, on operating systems
no longer supported, on magnetic storage media that may only have a lifespan of less
than a decade.
This would require embracing the interdisciplinary, or even antidisciplinary, implications
provoked by the use of the term “archaeology” in “media archaeology”, which descends
from Foucault’s invocation of the discipline in his Archaeology of Knowledge:
There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent
monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the
past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through
the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a
little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the
intrinsic description of the monument. (Foucault 1972, 7)
Here, archaeology is an anonymous history, full of objects but devoid of people, char-
acterized by ruptures and discontinuity rather than a grand teleology. These objects are
nonetheless caught in a web of forces that shapes the possibility of their very existence.
Foucault’s archaeology challenges the assumptions that have guided history since
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the nineteenth century; namely, of a guiding rationality or spirit that makes the world
a reection of human will or desire. Thus, archaeology rids history of “the twin gures
of anthropology and humanism” (Foucault 1972, 12). This reguration of history is ulti-
mately political and oriented towards the present, to “free the history of thought from its
subjection to transcendence” (Foucault 1972, 203) and open up immanent possibilities
beyond totalizing narratives repeated as historical fact.
Media archaeologists have taken Foucault’s provocations in a number of ways.
Siegfried Zielinski, who has perhaps most closely adhered to Foucault’s archaeologi-
cal project, denes media archaeology as a means “to dig out secret paths in history,
which might help us to nd our way into the future” (Zielinski 1996). Zielinski’s version
of media archaeology, in his studies of the “deep time” of media and in his “variantolo-
gies”, uses the past to nd moments that recur in the present, with differences both
subtle and signicant, locating different routes for contemporary media and the arts than
those hewn by media industry. Jussi Parikka, likewise, has suggested that much of the
popularity of media archaeology has come from the use of technology’s past to write
“counter-histories to the mainstream media history” (Parikka 2012, 6), providing present
alternatives to common narratives of technological progress and the “newness” of new
media. This, however, sometimes cuts a bit closer to the genealogies of Foucault’s later
work than to his theorization of archaeology, providing different accounts of historical
descent rather than celebrating discontinuity and the anonymous autonomy of objects
and documents. Some media archaeologists have suggested a completely different pur-
pose for this historical investigation of media. Erkki Huhtamo, for instance, has proposed
that media archaeology “corrects our understanding of the past by excavating lacunas in
shared knowledge” (Huhtamo 2013, xviii). Here, media archaeology is the uncovering of
truth through sources and archives that may have been long inaccessible or forgotten.
“But blueprints and diagrams, regardless of whether they control printing presses
or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown called the body”,
claims Friedrich Kittler (1999, xl). I want to follow Kittler here, stressing not alternative or
more accurate historical narratives, but the agency of technology to produce knowledge,
bodies, and possible futures. The documents of the technological, from schematics to
software, encode and produce whatever it is we may know about ourselves. Media
provide our historical a priori, in that the ability of media to inscribe and store information
materially determines what we know in our present about our history. Thus, Kittler claims,
what “remains of people is what media can store and communicate” (Kittler 1999, xl).
This is not a pure, nihilistic anti-humanism, as some of Kittler’s detractors imply. “Writ-
ing” and “storage” have vastly broad denitions that can include performance and ritual,
what some of those writing after Kittler refer to as “cultural techniques” (Winthrop-Young
2013), even returning to what Marcel Mauss (1992 [1934]) called “body techniques”.
What we know about our past is limited to what can be written down and stored—and,
in this sense, media are rituals that materially perform cultural relations.
Foucault’s archaeological “excavation” is one that examines how a specic object—be
it Man or madness or the teaching of medicine—came to be taken as an object, in and
of itself, as something independent and veriable. It is about the material relations and
regularities that enable a “thing” to come into existence as a thing. Following this, the
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69Media Archaeologies
key function of media is to inscribe reality, to produce objects of knowledge that can
be studied, known, and transmitted. This is what Foucault means when he uses the
term “archive”. The archive is the system of regularities that determines objects and
what can be said of them. As the philosopher of science Karen Barad suggests, sup-
plementing Foucault with Judith Butler and Niels Bohr, technological apparatuses “are
discursive practices […] understood as specic material recongurings through which
‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ are produced” (Barad 2007, 148). The technical methods we
use to inscribe reality dene the limits of objects, the limits of subjects, and the relations
through which both are constituted. Archaeology, in Foucault’s sense, is to demonstrate
how these objects are produced as one way of materially organizing knowledge, a way
not guided by any overarching historical line, but that reveals the contingencies in the
grouping of words and things.
What I want to take from media archaeology is less its emphasis on alternative histori-
cal narratives than the attention given to technological means of inscribing information,
the attention to—to use a rough literal translation of Kittler’s (1990) Aufschreibesysteme
1800/1900—systems for writing things down. To return to the Toy Story example with
which I began, this requires us to ask not only about the specicity of a medium to record
specic forms of information and not others—a concern that sometimes motivates Kit-
tler—but also the physical capacity of storage media to endure over time. While they
age and degrade (and burn) to varying degrees, the persistence of paper, of celluloid, of
acetate, demonstrates how we have come to grasp these media as objects with specic
material constraints and specic requirements for their preservation. But grasping the
temporality of an inscription can be quite difcult when we introduce digital storage.
With digital data, it is neither clear that we know how to preserve our inscriptions nor
that we know what we have inscribed. Part of this is because of the inability to grasp the
relationship between software, data, processing hardware, and storage media. As Kittler
himself notoriously stated, “there is no software”, there are only voltage differences. Any
“software” merely obscures the materiality of computational processing (Kittler 2013,
219–229). Yet what we experience when we encounter digital information is inherently
processed by software, which depends on operating systems that are themselves distinct
from, yet integrated with, hardware (Chun 2011, 3). Every occasion a program is run is
different; what is performed on the screen and interacted with by a human user is unique
each and every time. The underlying data are constantly rewritten and modied, in countless
versions that are multiplied repeatedly (Kirschenbaum 2008). And when we start thinking
about the role the internet plays in this entire apparatus, the spatial distribution of server
farms, network infrastructure, and the various mechanisms that manage stored data are
essential in maintaining the everyday experience of our (still contemporary) digital past.
We can speak, for instance, of an archaeology of Second Life or LambdaMOO. I men-
tion these examples because one can still log in to these virtual worlds and nd “people”
represented by avatars, though we also nd vast amounts of online space seemingly
uninhabited. Much of these virtual worlds are anonymous ruins of a time that has already
passed. One can interact with digital objects left behind, and, while we have excellent
ethnographies of these spaces (e.g. Boellstorff 2008), we can subject them to a kind
of “archaeological” analysis in which all we have are the traces produced by those who
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occupied these spaces and have long vanished from them. There are ofcial heritage
sites in Second Life, which come with debates over preservation and collective memory
specic to the “virtual” possibilities afforded digital places and objects (Harrison 2009).
As it is in the “actual” world, virtual spaces have a unique cultural heritage that can only
be revealed through the archaeology of the world and its virtual objects.
But stressing the materiality of media demands another dimension to this analysis:
the infrastructure, the servers, and the software. How did the different versions of these
virtual worlds—as software and processing data that represent objects and people,
running on a distributed set of computers and servers across the globe—materi-
ally enable the encoding of specic bodies, specic experiences, specic memories?
Undertaking an archaeology of a virtual world can point to how online space became
a “thing” that is nonetheless different and discontinuous with the present (and perhaps
even discontinuous with present versions of the same virtual world). What goes by the
name “Second Life” or “LambdaMOO” is in no way consistent. To undertake a media
archaeology of these virtual worlds would involve looking at the software itself, how it
produces “space” online, and how it relates to the physical distribution of servers across
the planet. What forms of processing go on to “make” what is experienced by human
users? What technical specicities allow (or prohibit) different kinds of practices? How
do these “worlds” exist in spite of these technological differences over time? How are
they made distinct and separate from other “worlds” ofine?
And, given these questions, how do we preserve these spaces for the future—and what
do different methods of preservation do to that which is preserved? Previous versions of
Second Life have already vanished. It is impossible to access Second Life without using
one of the two most recent versions of its software, which means that its own history
erodes and vanishes as technological progress moves “forward”. And what happens
when the company that runs Second Life, Linden Labs, shuts down? What other virtual
worlds have been lost forever, before they became objects of scholarly attention? How
will we come to know the history of computers, as software development marches on,
as outdated le formats cease operation, as computers themselves break down and
stop working? What should we do when the task is to preserve not simply a series of
digital documents, but an entire apparatus that involves countless devices distributed
across the world, organized through software designed for specic computers that may
no longer exist? How do we preserve an “object” that has unclear boundaries?
Data storage is fragile, and it needs our care. And here is where the digital humanities
are a necessary addition to the alliance between material culture and media archaeology,
along with the desire to produce alternative narratives about media history central to the
media archaeological project. The digital humanities are often organized around questions
of the digital preservation of and access to humanistic documents, for research and for
historical memory. We do not know what is currently being inscribed that will provide the
alternative narratives for our collective future. But we cannot let some data—because
it may seem irrelevant or, worse, non-monetized—simply vanish because we have not
paid enough attention to the medium in which it has been stored.
This doesn’t mean that we should merely conserve for conservation’s sake. It means that
conservation efforts nonetheless need to pay explicit attention to technical materiality. As is
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71Media Archaeologies
clear from a report by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine
(2010), there are countless unique problems that result from merely accessing digital data
from just a few years ago. Like any other part of the archaeological record, physical storage
devices may degrade or be otherwise damaged. Thus, “digital evidence is almost always
partial or incomplete” and there is “no direct access to data without mediation through
complex instrumentation or layers of interpretative software” (Kirschenbaum et al. 2010,
6). This general problem is not unique to the digital. But digital storage adds additional,
specic complications. Copying or opening an archival le may modify or overwrite it
based merely on what the software is designed to do, effectively corrupting the archive.
Formats change, rendering original data unreadable. Hard drives go bad unless they are
in use, and even then they only last around a decade or so, at best, before they start to
fail. The energy required to maintain archives of digital information, likewise, is staggering.
The problems go on and on.
Even though, as media archaeology tells us, the archive limits and determines our objects,
our knowledge, and our bodies, we should be sure that the future of this archive is not
also limited because of our own inability to acknowledge the material specicity of digital
technology. The fragility of digital storage must be accounted for at a technical level, in
which we do not uncritically celebrate the power of digital devices to store information, but
we address their limitations for the inscription of the present. The inscriptions of communi-
cation media are the ghosts we leave behind. But, with digital media, unless we account
for the fragility of storage and the specicity of the digital, the ghosts will perish as well.
Our current fascination with the haunting of media would reveal itself to be a desire for a
lost past of spiritualism, as the fragility of digital storage has exorcised our demons, nally.
References
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Surveying New Sites: Landscapes and
Archaeologies of the Internet
n R. J. Wilson
University of Chichester, UK
r.wilson@chi.ac.uk
Whilst archaeology has been revolutionized by computational applications, the devel-
opment of digital technology, and the growth of the internet, the contributions of the
discipline to the study of this new media have been largely explored from beyond the
subject area (see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). A distinct area of enquiry termed “media
archaeologies” has emerged within communication and cultural studies (see Parikka
2007; 2012). Media archaeology has taken as its core concerns the material and immate-
rial relationships between society, technology, and the media (Elsaesser 2004); drawing
upon Foucault’s (1972) “archaeology of knowledge”, the metaphor of excavation has
featured prominently as a guiding intellectual principle to describe how these analysts
uncover the layers of accumulated media and technological practices (Ernst 2005). The
actual engagement of disciplinary archaeology within this movement has been reduced
to a series of convenient illustrations for practice rather than constituting a practice of
examination in itself. However, a subject concerned with process, stratigraphy, and
change across time and space should not be not demoted through its concern with the
material world (after Graves-Brown 2009; Harrison 2009, 2010). Rather, it constitutes a
highly signicant means of understanding the place and function of digital technologies
(after Harrison 2011). This contribution of archaeology to the realm of this new media
environment can be demonstrated in the application of another mode of study which
analyzes the interface between human/technological interactions: critical code studies
(Marino 2006; Wardrip-Fruin 2009).
Media archaeologies and archaeologies of the media
The development of “critical code studies” stems from a concern within the humanities
that the assessment of digital or computational models was based upon a premise that
the medium was entirely objective (Kittler 1995). The use of programming and coding
languages such as HTML, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and PHP had appeared to be so
prevalent in structuring and supporting the digital world that a critical engagement with
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73Media Archaeologies
these areas was largely absent (see Sample and Vee 2012; Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson
2015). The development of critical code studies emerged from a recognition that these
tools can be examined on the basis of how they interact with and frame knowledge and
experience within society (Marino 2006). Indeed, one may now speak of the “hermeneu
-
tics” of computer languages, as analysts have described the metaphors, relationships,
and allusions present within computer codes (Fuller 2008). Critical code studies also
bears similarities with the studies from literary scholars during the early 1990s who
applied post-structuralist theories to the study of the internet (Ulmer 1989; Poster 1990;
Landow 1992). These studies drew attention to how elements of the internet’s structure,
especially hyperlinks, operated in close association with theories of the structure of
language (Bolter 2001; Mehler 2006). Therefore, the approach of critical code studies,
which encompasses a variety of methods from the social sciences and humanities, is
founded upon the application of a hermeneutical understanding of the codes and com-
mands that facilitate the new media environment (after Latour 1996, 217).
For archaeology, this area of research reveals how an approach concerned with the
arrangement of material in space and time can serve as a critical mode of inquiry to
assess the digital landscape. As a distinct subject, archaeology from its emergence as
a modern discipline has been focused upon the retrieval of past contexts to understand
the formation of sites (see Thomas 2004). Rather than merely serving as a metaphor, this
specic type of enquiry can be applied to examine the use and function of coding and
programming languages. An archaeological process can reveal the layers through which
information has accumulated and has been disseminated. Code offers an important
arena for the archaeologist, with its own particular objects and structures, its emphasis
on layering and chronology, the circulation of types and forms, the forming and shaping
of societies and the interdependency of actors, objects, and agency. Code offers a new
site for archaeological eldwork.
The tools for the digital archaeologist operate on the same premise as they do for
the archaeologist in the eld: to reveal and to understand past and present formation
processes. For the digital archaeologist this can be undertaken by analysing the source
codes for the website. In most browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and
Firefox, the HTML source codes can be accessed by selecting F12 on the keyboard, or
“View>Source” or “View>Page Source” on the toolbar. Examining these codes reveals
the particular characteristics of the website. For example, a common opening on a
website is the following code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
This code indicates to the browser that the webpage is written in HTML 4.01, a version
of the markup language that was rst published in 1999. Subsequent developments
have sought to standardize and improve HTML, with programmatic languages such as
XHTML, PHP, or Javascript contributing to the advancement of dynamic, interactive
websites. An important part of this process was the use of Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS) which have websites, as information on presentation is “cascaded” through a
website from external les. Therefore, if the coding of websites reveals the processes
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74 Forum
by which these sites have been constructed, then by exposing these codes the digital
archaeologists can then begin to excavate the formation of online sites and landscapes.
Excavating the Site of Stonehenge
To demonstrate the potential of this approach the presence of the physical site of Stone-
henge within the digital landscape can be studied. Applying a survey of the spaces,
places, and objects of this online environment reveals a considerable presence across
the most popular search engines: in January 2015, over 16 million results were listed
for “stonehenge” on Google and over 2 million results listed on Yahoo! and Microsoft’s
Bing. The application of an archaeological technique can begin with this initial result
as the search engines themselves reveal how sites are prominent in this landscape.
The source code for Google’s results page has the line of code, “http://schema.org/
SearchResultsPage”. This reference to “schema.org” indicates the presence of a shared
system of extracting data from websites which is used by all major search engines and
was developed in tandem by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! (Schema.org 2015). This
technique works by the use of markup data on webpages which details the information
on those sites for the search engines. Website developers can use these terms to ensure
their site is optimized for prominent placing in the results of searches. A presence within
the digital landscape is enabled through the formation of specic structures in the cod-
ing and markup language of particular sites. The markup elements and tags involved in
this process identify value, signicance, and notable features:
• Itemscope
• Itemtype
• Itemid
• Itemprop
Through the common cultural attributes of Schema.org the sites within the online
landscape nd expression (after Tilley 1994). In this manner, cultural identiers exist
within this environment as a means of drawing together similar types and attitudes
(Hodder 1982). This “cultural package”, therefore, provides a mode of communication
across a range of sites, providing a demonstration of how single sites interact within a
wider whole (Layton and Ucko 1996). This shared attribute ensures that the rst two
results in all search engines for the term ‘stonehenge” are English Heritage (2015) and
Wikipedia (2015). The experience of the environment is thereby structured through this
specic orientation of these locales.
These sites can be explored through a further examination of the coding. For example,
looking at the source codes for Wikipedia, whilst nominally this research tool is “open-
source” and “user-generated”, the page for Stonehenge has been classied as ‘semi-
protected”. This can be observed in the coding line, “{{pp-semi-indef}}{{pp-move-indef}}”
(Wikipedia 2015). This guards the site from potentially unwanted edits or additions that
do not meet regulations and requirements. Such a status is awarded to Wikipedia sites
that are regarded as signicant so that any potential disruption might cause offence. As
such, the protection afforded to the virtual site mirrors the means by which the monument
is physically protected under the operation of the scheduling system in Britain for sites of
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75Media Archaeologies
national signicance (Bender 1993; Bender and Aitken 1998). Viewing the source code as
an excavated site, detailing the formation processes that have occurred, enables an assess-
ment of the changes both at this locale and in the wider landscape that have occurred:
[[Archaeology|Archaeologists]] believe it was built anywhere from 3000
BC to 2000 BC. [[Radiocarbon dating]] in 2008 suggested that the rst
stones were raised between 2400 and 2200 BC,<ref name=“news.bbc.
co.uk”>{{cite news|o-authors=Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright|title=Dig
pinpoints Stonehenge origins |publisher=BBC|date=21 September
2008|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7625145.stm|accessdate=22
September 2008|rst=James|last=Morgan}}</ref> whilst another theory
suggests that [[bluestone]]s may have been raised at the site as early
as 3000 BC.<ref name=“Guardian”/><ref name=“Independent”/><ref
name=“BBC News”/>
(Wikipedia 2015)
By examining the interjections made in the text and the dates associated with them,
the layers of code reveal the individuals who have altered the appearance of the site
as well as how changes within the research and academic environment have shaped
practices at this one location in the online landscape (after Thomas 1993).
A similar process can be observed with the English Heritage site. An assessment of
the spaces, places, and objects of its coding reveals the presence of cultural forces that
shape practices and habits within this site and thereby the formation processes (see
Schiffer 1983). For example, the use of stylesheets within the English Heritage website
ensures a greater degree of homogeny within this space:
rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“/static/css/style.css”><link
rel=“stylesheet”
(English Heritage 2015)
In this manner, all objects and items within this site are rendered into this one particular
cultural identity. The diversity of the site is thereby limited and expression is conned to this
singular vision. The formation processes of this locale, therefore, do not share the same
connections within the wider landscape as the Wikipedia (2015) page and the points of
connection to the external environment are organized and placed at specic junctures:
<li><a class=“facebook” target=“_blank” title=“View our Facebook page”
href=“http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/facebook”></a></li>
<li><a class=“twitter” target=“_blank” title=“View our Twitter feed”
href=“http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/twitter” id=“A1”></a></li>
(English Heritage 2015)
A distinct culture can be observed to have emerged here which controls expression
within this space. This culture can be assessed for its traits, ideals, and practices through
the coding of the site. Essentially, this demonstrates the ideas, values, and culture that
have created and formed this particular sense of place; the site is ordered upon the
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76 Forum
principle of ownership, driven by a capitalist model of consumption. In this manner, this
site’s formation processes reveal how objects and images are formed as a mode of
conspicuous display. For example, the appearance of one particular section of coding,
“#scrollerBoxForHighlightGallery img” (English Heritage 2015), enables the display of
a slideshow of images to ensure all aspects of Stonehenge are presented on the site.
The formation processes demonstrate a focus towards consumption with the prominent
appearance of the HTML elements enabling the function of “booking” and providing
functions to “buy”. Through examining the layers of coding, the stratigraphy of the site
indicates how objects are embedded at particular spaces to ensure their prominence
as an object of ownership. The culture that has structured the site is evidenced in the
insertion into the code of an object referred to as “doubleclick.net”:
document.write(“<iframesrc=“https://3684123.s.doubleclick.net/activityi
(English Heritage 2015)
The presence of “Doubleclick” on the site provides further evidence of the site’s struc-
turing principle of consumerism (Google n.d.). This is a subsidiary of the search engine
Google and it tracks the interaction of the user with the site as a means of directing future
advertising across a range of other sites that also use “Doubleclick”. The English Heritage
(2015) site is thereby connected across the virtual landscape with other sites which also
possess the same function. The appearance of this particular part of the code is dated
on the site as being part of this online locale from October 2013, a period when plans
for the new visitor centre at the physical Stonehenge were revealed. The use of a cultural
inuence from Google is also apparent in the appearance in the site’s stratigraphy:
var google_remarketing_only = true;
[…]
i[“GoogleAnalyticsObject”]
(English Heritage 2015; square brackets in last line in original)
The remarketing tag and the use of Google Analytics provide user-tracking data to
enable the development of more accurate advertising campaigns as well as usable sta-
tistics on visitor interactions with the site. Therefore, following Berger (1972), the extra
functional signicance of this code is to heighten the commercial value of that which it
represents. The connections with the wider environment are centred upon consumption
and the sense of place that is developed through the coding of this online locale is one
of possession. The character of the site is revealed in this analysis through archaeology
serving not as a metaphor, but using the practice of the discipline to understand the
formation and use of online spaces.
Conclusions
Within recent scholarship, the mantle of “archaeology” has been deployed by an ever-
growing eld of media specialists who apply the term to illustrate the practice of revealing
or uncovering techno-social change. However, the value of an archaeological approach
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77Media Archaeologies
to the study of digital media or online applications is more than a convenient simile. The
subject’s distinctive agenda of understanding process through the study of time, objects,
and space can be applied to the analysis of modern media ecologies. This demonstration
of value is not achieved through a radical reorientation of the discipline but by a reuse of
existing ideas and approaches. Within this framework, archaeology and archaeologists
can take a critical perspective to the spaces, places, and objects of the online landscape.
This analysis can be functional, disruptive, humorous, or dissonant, but it remains a mode
of engagement which is archaeological in practice not merely in conception.
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Archaeologies of Electronic Waste
n Sy Taffel
Massey University, New Zealand
S.A.Taffel@massey.ac.nz
Media Studies and New Materialisms
Examining the material impacts and legacies associated with the technological infra-
structure required for there to be digital media largely falls outside of conventional
approaches to media studies, which have primarily focused upon questions surrounding
representation, ideology, and identity; that is to say, questions of how the content of
mediated communications affect audiences and how the political economy of the culture
industries introduce systemic biases into media content. Particularly within the British
university system, the brand of cultural materialism derived from Raymond Williams was
foundational, and alongside Williams’s (1973) renement of the base/superstructure
dynamic of early Marxist economic determinism, to account for ways that cultural activ-
ity and communication itself constituted a material phenomenon which could not be
dismissed as mere superstructural detail, came an unequivocal rejection of technological
determinism as advanced through the works of Marshall McLuhan, with the statement
that “we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms” (Williams 2003 [1974],
133). This form of social constructivism remained dominant within media studies until
the late twentieth century, when the rapid rate of technological change associated with
the widespread adoption of personal computers and the internet seemed to produce
sociocultural shifts which evidenced precisely the changes in scale, pace, and pattern
which McLuhan (1994, 8) argued were the primary effects of any medium.
Whilst noting the prescience of these observations does not equate to support for
McLuhanite positions which proclaim the necessarily decentralizing effects of electrical
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79Media Archaeologies
technology or that electrical technologies herald a return to sensory harmony within
a global village, they have led many within media and cultural studies to re-evaluate
questions surrounding technological determinism, materiality, and mediation, follow-
ing Friedrich Kittler’s declaration at the outset of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter that
“media determine our situation” (Kittler 1999, xxxix). Consequently, recent years have
seen the development of numerous methods and practices within media studies which
have pursued various materially-inected approaches to the eld. These methods,
which resonate with broader movements within humanities and social science research
towards non-representational theory (Thrift 2008; Dewsbury 2010) and new materialism
(Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Parikka 2012a), include media
ecologies (Fuller 2005; Goddard 2011; Taffel 2013), software studies (Thrift and French
2002; Mackenzie 2006; Fuller 2008; Kitchin and Dodge 2011), and hardware studies
(Cubitt et al. 2011; Gabrys 2011; Parikka 2011a; Maxwell and Miller 2012; Taffel 2012).
Closely linked to these materialist approaches to media, we nd media archaeology,
whose genealogy contains two related lineages of scholarship.
Analogue Wastes and Zombie Media
The rst strand, exemplied by authors such as Erkki Huhtamo (1999) and Thomas
Elsaesser (1990, 2004), largely focuses upon non-teleological models of technocultural
discourse, contending that:
[Media archaeology] emphasizes cyclical rather than chronological
development and recurrence rather than unique invention. In doing so, it
runs counter to the customary way of thinking about technoculture in terms
of a constant progress proceeding from one technological breakthrough to
another and making earlier machines and applications obsolete along the
way. (Huhtamo 2011, 67)
This version of media archaeology draws heavily upon Michel Foucault’s (1972)
The Archaeology of Knowledge in its focus upon discursive practices, discontinu-
ity, and cyclicality rather than a teleological march towards technological perfection.
Consequently, these media archaeologies present a counterpoint to the cyberutopian
discourses common to popular technology-focused media such as Gizmodo or Wired,
and academic commentators such as Clay Shirky (2009) and Pierre Lévy (1999), where,
as in the marketing and advertising of contemporary software and hardware platforms,
technological innovation is typically presented as transformative, revolutionary, and lead-
ing society towards progress and prosperity. By excavating forgotten technologies of the
past which preceded and pre-empted contemporaneous developments in numerous
ways, these media archaeologists seek to undermine the metanarrative of technologi-
cal progress, instead drawing attention to the “deep time” (Zielinski 2006) and cyclical
patterns of technological development which see forms surfacing and resurfacing at
different times, in differing places.
As regards waste and toxicity, a historical antecedent to the human impact of microelec-
tronics manufacture is the impact of substances such as lead in previous technological
assemblages. A century ago, in 1914, “18 percent of American battery workers had
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80 Forum
lead poisoning” (Penrose 2003, 3). Whereas the relatively recent focus on media waste,
and e-waste in particular, may suggest a historically novel situation, the externalization
of deleterious health impacts onto workers associated with technological production
and disposal is a phenomenon with links back (at least) as far as the industrial revolu-
tion. Whilst the globalized spatial elements, and current volumes of e-waste may be
(relatively) unique, the fact that impoverished workers and nonhumans have effectively
been poisoned whilst creating technologies whose usage and benets accrue to other,
economically privileged actors is a dynamic which long pre-dates the digital revolution
and can be argued to be a consequence of the tendency within capitalist enterprise to
generate negative externalities whose costs are borne by social and ecological systems.
Situating the issue of media waste in this way thus presents a potent antidote to claims
that harms relating to media waste are merely a eeting contemporary phenomenon, or
an apolitical design issue to be overcome by the juggernaut of technological progress.
The second strand of scholarship surrounding the term “media archaeology” is associ-
ated with German media theory, and the works of Kittler (1999, 2010) and Wolfgang Ernst
(2012), the latter of whose works have been brought to Anglophone attention through
the work of the Finnish media archaeologist Jussi Parikka (2011b, 2012b, 2013). Whilst
Ernst’s and Kittler’s particular perspectives upon media archaeology feature signicant
departures from one another, there is a collective concern with the materiality of media
technologies, alongside claims that the material constitution of media affect culture in
ways which have been traditionally downplayed by media studies’ focus upon content.
The practice of media archaeology in these cases turns from excavating forgotten tech-
nological histories and uncovering the deep time relations of media, towards conceptual-
izing technology itself as an archive, which in contemporary digital forms is reliant upon
a series of temporal dynamics and processes within computational hardware such as
RAM timings and latency, CPU/GPU clock speeds, networked packet switching, and
Ethernet trafc routing. As Parikka surmises:
Media archaeologists have started to look at time-critical processes inside
the machines and in the circuits of contemporary technology. Media
archaeology goes under the hood, so to speak, and extends the idea of
an archive into actual machines and circuits […] this new kind of media
archaeologist moves from historical time to machine time.
(Parikka 2012b: 83 emphases in original)
This denotes a posthumanist move away from a temporal perspective dominated by
human experience and perception, to one which recognizes not only the multiple forms
of machine-based temporality which are critical to the functioning of digital assemblages
and digital cultures, but also the complex manner by which such temporalities have
always fed back into and been constitutive factors in human comprehensions of time.
Such a perspective, which mandates that human and cultural knowledge have always
been meshworks of nature of culture, thereby corroborates the types of technologi-
cal determinisms we nd in the works of Kittler and of Bernard Stiegler (1998, 2011),
which are centrally concerned with the complex and nonlinear ways that the rhythms
of technics affect culture and social structures.
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81Media Archaeologies
With regards to e-waste, one example of pertinent work in this area is the circuit-
bending practices of media artist Garnet Hertz. Circuit bending is the modication of
circuits within (primarily) low voltage microelectronics, usually audio-based devices
such as guitar fx pedals or toy instruments, which is achieved by connecting otherwise
discrete locations within the device with a jumper wire, thus altering the signal ow in
a chance-based way which can produce interesting and unforeseen sounds which are
then employed within experimental electronica and noise-based musical forms (Ghazala
2004). By exploring the creative affordances of what would otherwise be classied as
toxic waste, circuit bending explores the intersection of planned obsolescence (London
1932), the materiality of media technologies, and e-waste through artistic practice, and
Hertz challenges the conception that media “die” once discarded. This concern with
material transformations which emphasize temporal relations that undermine and prob-
lematize xed points of death or origin presents a useful connection to contemporary
themes within the eld of archaeology. Hertz and Parikka (2012, 430) explore how digital
technologies have a life after obsolescence through the ways that media “decays, rots,
reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected.” These various ways
of resurrecting discarded and supposedly obsolete technologies are termed “zombie
media” by Hertz and Parikka, drawing a distinction with Bruce Sterling’s (1995) Dead
Media Project, whose similar focus on forgotten technologies instead emphasizes the
nitude of their status.
Drawing attention to the manner by which discarded media technologies decay, break
down, and circulate as ows within ecosystems thus connects this variant of media
archaeology to media ecology, which has a similar focus upon materiality, cyclicality, and
nonlinear relations within media assemblages. Ecology as the study of ows of energy
and matter through multiscalar systems here stresses the material processes which
manifest as consequences of planned obsolescence and e-waste recycling, such as
highlighting the way that the process of burning the plastic casings of wires – carried
out to retrieve the valuable copper contained within – releases hazardous materials
including dioxins and furans, and the types of damage that these organically persistent
substances wreak upon humans and other biotic systems. Circulation and cyclicality are
central here, and thus from an ecological perspective the very notion of waste becomes
an oxymoron: materials and energy re-circulate within ecological systems, even if the
specic modes of circulation are toxic or cancerous to living systems. Focusing upon
cyclicality, process, and ow in this manner demarcates a departure from the approach
championed by object-orientated ontology (Harman 2010; Bogost 2012; Morton 2013),
for whom a focus on becoming and transformation requires subjugation to objects.
The breadth of methodological practice within media archaeology arguably runs the
risk of appearing incoherent. From deep-time approaches to histories of technology,
through to approaching technology as an archive, tracing the life-cycle of specic mate-
rials used within microelectronics, and the artistic approaches exemplied by circuit
bending, we see a diverse array of modes of scholarship which are broadly interested in
critical approaches to the material culture of mediation. What connects these disparate
methods is a concern with understanding the way that technocultural systems evolve
over time in ways which defy linear narratives of progress.
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82 Forum
The multiplicity of methods found within media archaeology can be understood within
the context of media and cultural studies’ development as a eld interested in synthesiz-
ing disparate disciplinary practices surrounding the media. Media and cultural studies
have long included methodological practices such as empirically-led approaches to
political economy, qualitative audience research, critical/theoretical approaches, dis-
cursive analyses, textual analyses, and experimental modes of practice-as-research.
What media archaeology and associated forms of materialist media scholarship bring
to the table is combining this interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism with an
attentiveness to material culture in ways which resemble elements of the longstanding
relationship between archaeology and materiality.
From Media Archaeologies to Archaeologies of Media
An additional archaeological approach that is pertinent to discussions surrounding
e-waste is the archaeology of the contemporary past (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Harrison
and Schoeld 2009, 2010; Holtorf and Piccini 2011; Graves-Brown et al. 2013), which
seeks to mobilize the apparent contradiction between the past and present in order to
explore material cultures of the present from a position which
emphasizes archaeology not only as a creative act in the present—a
process of assembling and reassembling—but as a discipline which is
concerned explicitly with the present itself. This present is not xed or
inevitable, but is still in the process of becoming; it is active and ripe with
potential. (Harrison 2011, 12)
Thematically, two key aims advanced by these archaeologists have been the crea-
tion of a sense of alienation from material culture which resembles the Brechtian notion
of verfremsdungeffekt, making “the familiar unfamiliar and ironically by defamiliarising
taken for granteds, making what is too well known almost less known” (Buchli and
Lucas 2001, 13), and an explicit focus on subaltern groups whose histories tend to be
concealed by hegemonic discourses.
Both these notions can be productively employed when thinking about e-waste.
Reconceptualizing microelectronics devices as toxic trash with a pathologically short
use-time rather than the sleek and shiny objects of desire which we see in advertising
campaigns, storefronts, and in our daily lives immediately removes us from our habitual
engagement with these technologies. Perceiving digital technology as toxic waste thus
can be understood as a way of making familiar media technologies estranged from our
typical intra-actions with them, and by doing so, compelling us to pose questions about
the sustainability of technological consumption within neoliberal consumer culture. Rather
than viewing these devices as sealed and seamless objects of consumption and desire,
we see the array of materials which constitute their anatomy, and begin to move towards
understanding the ecology of material relations which surrounds what happens when
our digital devices break down and interface in harmful ways with ecological systems.
The practice of uncovering relationships between subaltern groups and digital tech-
nology is equally relevant when focussed upon e-waste. The manual “recycling” and
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83Media Archaeologies
recovery processes enacted in locations within China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ghana
bring together our high-tech products with deeply impoverished people, whose health
and futures (alongside those of many of the nonhuman actants within those geographi-
cal zones) are seriously compromised through their material encounters with our digital
detritus. These individuals often earn around $1.50 per day (Roman and Puckett 2002,
2) whilst conducting work whose numerous harms are not understood by the labourers
themselves, and who often lack any formal education and are often children (Basel Action
Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 2002, 26). Considering the deleterious impacts
of technological consumption upon subaltern groups far removed from the privileged
spaces of the attention economy (Beller 2006) connects high-tech global capitalism
with enduring legacies of colonialism (Cubitt 2014), and points towards the geopoliti-
cal challenges faced in meaningfully altering these systems. Equally, drawing attention
towards the inequitable impacts of e-waste upon subaltern groups further undermines
the association between digital technologies and a smart, green, and sustainable future.
As Jonathan Crary (2013, 88) has recently outlined, amongst many contemporary social
movements there is the cyberutopian misconception that Facebook, Apple, and Google
are useful platforms with which to ght to mitigate climate change, promote egalitarian
social inequality, and leave the short-term econocentricism of neoliberal consumer capi-
talism. Highlighting the ways that the infrastructure required for digital media platforms
is entangled with the exploitative practices of globalized neoliberalism delineates that
current iterations of digital technologies are part of contemporary geopolitical problems,
rather than a panacea for them.
This is not to say that these technologies cannot be integral in addressing some of
these issues, playing the pharmacological role of both poison and cure as outlined by
Stiegler (2010), but that the misguided belief in the abilities of the allegedly “virtual”
technologies of “cognitive capitalism”, which are supposedly fuelled by “immaterial
labour” and thus transcend material inequalities, poverty, and suffering, is exposed as
a chimera by paying attention to the materiality of digital architectures. The emphasis
upon investigating the political and ethical stakes of material culture, using the artefacts
of the (contemporary) past as the means of entering a dialogue about the present which
is designed to affect the future, is common to both media archaeologies and archae-
ologies of the media. The example of e-waste foregrounds precisely why such work is
crucial if we wish to understand and address urgent issues pertaining to sustainability,
social justice, and technoculture.
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86 Forum
Excavating Atari: Where the Media was
the Archaeology
n Andrew Reinhard
American Numismatic Society, USA
areinhard@numismatics.org
“Archaeogaming” is a neologism I made up and rst published on my eponymous blog1
on 9 June, 2013, as I began to think seriously about the intersection of archaeology and
video games (Reinhard 2013). I am both a “classically trained” archaeologist specializing
in ancient Greek pottery, and have also been a lifelong gamer with over 30 years of experi-
ence on rst-generation consoles, MS-DOS computers, and the original Macintosh. I had
originally thought of Archaeogaming as a framework around studying how archaeology
and archaeologists are portrayed by game developers, and how they are received by
gamers. I was also curious to see how (or even if) I could apply real-world archaeological
methods to virtual spaces, studying the material culture of the immaterial.
Exactly two days after launching the blog, I learned that the Canadian entertainment
company Fuel had been granted permission to excavate the “Atari Burial Ground” in
Alamogordo, New Mexico (Orland 2013). All of a sudden my ideas on video-game
archaeology had been turned upside-down. Here was the chance to perform a real-
world excavation on video games dumped in a landll in 1983. It would be the rst dig
of its kind.
To briey summarize the story, in 1982 Atari purchased the rights to turn the lm E.T.
(dir. Spielberg 1982) into a video game, having been successful with the adaptation of
Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Spielberg 1981). Atari asked their wunderkind developer
Howard Scott Warshaw to create the game in ve weeks in order to meet the Christmas
demand. The game opped and history (perhaps unfairly so) granted it the notoriety of
being the worst video game of all time. In 1983, Atari decided to dump the unsold car-
tridges, trucking them two hours from its El Paso, Texas warehouse to the Alamogordo
landll where a special, 30-foot deep trench (or cell) had been dug to receive the games.
The games were reportedly crushed and deposited under cement over which refuse
continued to be piled for the next 10–15 years. The Alamogordo Daily News and the
New York Times both carried stories on the day of the dumping, but in the pre-Internet
era, these were lost to time (McQuiddy 1983; New York Times 1983). Years later, the
dumping of E.T. became an urban legend hotly debated in chatrooms and forums. When
the news of the planned excavation was announced in the spring of 2013, the Internet
renewed the debate over whether or not the dumping had occurred, and if it had, what
was really underground.
I immediately wrote to Fuel to ask them how they planned to conduct the excavation,
and if archaeologists would be involved. I assumed that Fuel would treat this as a proper
1. http://archaeogaming.com/
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87Media Archaeologies
dig with the Atari material as artifacts in an assemblage of potentially millions of games.
I did not ask to be the archaeologist on-site, but instead was hoping to y out for a few
days to record what was happening and to document the dig for the blog.
A reply nally came a few months later from a producer at Fuel who then put me in
touch with Lightbox Entertainment, the (now defunct) content developer for original pro-
gramming for Xbox Live. I was asked how I would conduct the excavation. I consulted
with my friend and colleague Richard Rothaus, who owns his own Cultural Resource
Management (CRM) rm, Trefoil Cultural and Environmental, for assistance, and we
were able to pitch the dig plan. We were happy to give some free consulting to the
documentary lmmakers from Lightbox Entertainment, and were surprised when they
asked us to come out and be an integral part of the project. When asked to put my
team of archaeologists together, I chose Richard, and also Bill Caraher of the University
of North Dakota, who had done eldwork in Greece and Cyprus, but who had begun
to study the archaeology of the contemporary past, or, as he put it, of “late capitalism”,
specializing in the mancamps of the Bakken Oil Patch, temporary settlements by migrant
workers drawn to North Dakota’s oil boom. Bill brought Bret Weber, a UND sociology
professor, to observe and document the nature of the human and media presence
surrounding what would become a global event. I also invited Lindsay Eaves, a gamer
and archaeologist who had been a part of National Geographic’s Rising Star expedition
and who specialized in removing, cleaning, and assembling human remains. I brought
Eaves in because we did not know what the condition of the artifacts would be, and
needed her expertise in removing, cleaning, and assembling destroyed cartridges. On
the day of the dig, Eaves took ill and was hospitalized, so we were without her talents.
The team had only a few weeks to plan for the excavation, and we needed to create a
methodology and workow, plus a shopping list of gear for the lm company to buy for
us in town: buckets, tarps, tables, shovels, plastic bags, markers, and more. We were
paired with a video game historian, Raiford Guins of SUNY Stony Brook, who would
interpret what we found (if we were to nd anything). We agreed that all Atari material was
to be understood as being artifacts (without ironic quotation marks), material evidence
of 1980s consumer culture that ultimately became rubbish. We knew that we would
probably nd something Atari-related, but it was a question of whether the dump would
contain only E.T. games or other titles; if there would be hardware; and if the material
was in a state of destruction or decomposition. We were also curious—as the lmmak-
ers and general public were—to see if the urban legend was true (even though it had
been documented in 1983). Would there be cement? Would the games be crushed or
playable? What was the extent of the deposit?
None of us had excavated a landll before, but that inexperience is common among
most archaeologists. We studied the work of the renowned archaeologist and garbolo-
gist William Rathje (Rathje and Murphy 2001). Although this excavation accelerated
the timeline, I wanted to treat it as if we were conducting a salvage excavation through
a massive pottery dump. The goal was to identify where we thought the heart of the
assemblage would be and dig a cross-section through it to expose as much material
as possible for documentation. When asked how long I thought it would take to exca-
vate the “Atari Tomb”, I thought maybe two or three weeks non-stop. We were given
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three days: one to excavate the overburden, the top layers of soil and trash; one to
excavate the “Atari level”; and a third day to document what had been recovered. The
city, Microsoft, and others had paid tens of thousands of dollars to hire city workers
and to pay local and state safety and environmental ofcials, plus to cover the costs of
equipment rental and a eet of dump-trucks. A three-week excavation might have cost
close to one million dollars to complete.
As we developed our plan, Richard was prepared to use a jackhammer to punch
through the concrete cap (if it existed), and then we wanted to have a bucket brigade
of volunteers to begin to ferry ve-gallon buckets of Atari material up to tables for sort-
ing, counting, and photography. We wanted to keep diagnostic artifacts for future study
not just from an archaeological perspective, but also from an environmental standpoint:
what happens to video game e-waste when it is buried in the desert for 30 years? The
games were artifacts, but were also garbage.
We had wanted to conduct remote sensing over the surface of the landll to discover
where the Atari material lay, but instead, Joe Lewandowski, the manager of the landll in
the 1980s, had completed an astonishing feat of amateur photogrammetry, pinpointing
the location of the Atari cell with old pictures of the area. On 24 April, 2014, Joe and
some of the city’s workers, along with Richard and Bill, used a bucket auger to sink
30-ft-deep test holes, searching for anything with a date in the early 1980s—or better
yet, Atari games. New Mexico had given permission to drill 20 test holes, but luckily the
Atari material was found after drilling only a few.
25 April saw the removal of tons of earth and trash by massive excavation machinery
operated by a city worker. At rst we were kept outside of a perimeter fence for safety,
but were ultimately granted access to photograph the stratigraphy of trash, a parfait of
dirt and junk, and to examine the garbage being removed. We had originally wanted
to dig a 1:3 stepped trench, but the matrix was too unstable for anything but a very
deep hole. No one was permitted by the New Mexico safety personnel to go below
ground-level for fear of being trapped or injured under collapsing walls. Near the end
of the day, the digger had nearly maximized its depth of 30 ft, and we decided to quit
until the following morning.
The archaeology team met that evening to revise our work plan considering the fact
that we would not be allowed into the trench, and that there would be no bucket bri-
gade. We decided to ask the digger driver to dump piles of earth and trash at the side
of the trench for us to examine (Figure 1). We would take bucket cores for more ne
analysis, recording to video, still photographs, notebooks, and MP3 audio (Figure 2).
If we found anything, we would carry it in buckets to the sorting tables for additional
study, ultimately bagging it for the nal day.
After about four hours of additional digging on 26 April, the Atari level was reached,
and bucket-load after bucket-load of games were retrieved and then dumped for us to
review (Figure 3). Rothaus found the rst Atari game, an E.T. cartridge still in the box with
its instruction manual and a coupon for Raiders of the Lost Ark. I walked it up with lm
director Zak Penn to show the crowd of a few hundred gamers and residents, and then
the team began to work in earnest, attempting to get through as much of the Atari deposit
possible in the time we had. Over the course of the afternoon, a sandstorm blew in—the
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89Media Archaeologies
Figure 1.
Richard Rothaus (l) and Andrew Reinhard (r) record the contents of a ve-gallon
bucket core (image courtesy of the Punk Archaeology Collective).
Figure 2.
Richard Rothaus examines a pile of Atari material (image courtesy of the Punk
Archaeology Collective).
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ercest of the year—and ultimately forced us to abandon the dig, shutting the machinery
down. We turned to focus on collecting examples of the more than 40 different game titles
recovered (Figure 4). City workers were tasked with collecting anything Atari and putting it
into trash bags that were then loaded into a tractor trailer for transport to a garage within
the city’s Department of Public Works (Figure 5). All of the games were from the same
deposit and context, but we only scratched the surface of what was there.
The archaeologists spent the nal day cataloguing games and hardware (Figure 6).
Atari 2600 consoles and controllers were part of the excavated rubbish, and we noticed
that the cables to the controllers had been snipped before burial. We also inventoried
over 40 separate game titles for the Atari 2600 and 5200 systems—much, much more
than what we’d expected to nd, thinking it would be mostly E.T. Many of the games
were still in their boxes, unsold, and there were also multiple examples of cardboard
boxes containing six copies each of the same game, packed for big box stores such as
Walmart and Target. Mixed in with the new merchandise were games agged as customer
returns. The El Paso warehouse had dumped a lot more than anyone had expected,
going against Atari’s corporate claim that it had buried only returned or broken stock.
In all, just over 1300 games were recovered. Of these, we boxed several for the city
to distribute to museums for conservation, preservation, and display. The city then
attempted to sell the balance of what was recovered on eBay in order to raise money
for the historical society. The rst auctions brought prices upwards of $700 for boxed
Figure 3.
Raiford Guins surveys a bucket-load of Atari material from the digger (image courtesy
of the Punk Archaeology Collective).
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91Media Archaeologies
Figure 4.
Ms. Pac Man appears out of the excavation rubble (image courtesy of the Punk
Archaeology Collective).
Figure 5.
Richard Rothaus records piles of excavated games prior to sorting and photography
(image courtesy of the Punk Archaeology Collective).
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E.T. games. Some of the buyers approached me via the blog to anonymously answer
questions about why they bought the artifacts. The Smithsonian Institution purchased
a copy for its collection. We have asked Joe Lewandowski for a list of the buyers so
that we can conduct additional interviews to determine the nature of collecting these
video games. As Caraher pointed out to us, our being on-site during the excavation
validated the project and turned it from being just a media stunt into something imbued
with historic and scientic meaning.
Parikka wrote that
media archaeology needs to insist both on the material nature of its
enterprise—that media are always articulated in material, also in non-
narrative frameworks whether technical media such as phonographs, or
algorithmic such as databases and software networks—and that the work
of assembling temporal mediations takes place in an increasingly varied and
distributed network of institutions, practices and technological platforms.
(Parikka 2010)
I believe our project ts within all of these frameworks and networks. Ours was a
hands-on enterprise informed by both newsmedia and Web culture, driven by the
public interest in proving or debunking an urban legend, initiated with photography and
memory, and conducted under a global eye of television and Internet media as well as
by networks of gamers, historians, pop culture mavens, and archaeologists via social
Figure 6.
Andrew Reinhard documents some of the signicant nds from the excavation (image
courtesy of the Punk Archaeology Collective).
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93Media Archaeologies
media. We trended globally on Twitter and Facebook for a day, and were lampooned
on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and in the Onion satirical newspaper. We initiated a
public dialogue on what archaeology is, and what it could be. We tried (and failed) to
get the games to play on-site via consoles and TVs brought for testing purposes. And
after the dig was over, we began to publish for general readers about why we did what
we did in the desert, in the Atlantic, Archaeology magazine, and elsewhere, getting
further attention in Harper’s and across the blogosphere. This is archaeology, media
archaeology, and public archaeology all in one.
Erkki Huhtamo dened “media archaeology” as “a particular way of studying media
as a historically attuned enterprise” that involves researchers “‘excavating’ forgotten
media–cultural phenomena that have been left outside the canonized narratives about
media culture and history” (Huhtamo 2010, 203). For us, that media archaeology was
quite real and done without any framework of theory. Instead, we took a straightfor-
ward CRM archaeological approach to the very real excavation of the games, (almost)
forgotten media–cultural phenomena. This excavation falls right at the border of what is
perceived to be archaeology. As we continue to identify future projects that examine the
archaeology of the recent past, perhaps the Atari Dump Site will serve as an example
of what became the norm in how we understand consumer culture and a culture of
planned obsolescence and electronic waste.
As “dirt” archaeologists, perhaps we have taken the rst step in contributing a new
(or adapted) set of methods to understanding and documenting media technology.
The project begs for further examination as our eld methods are pulled apart and
scrutinized with the hope of creating something better and more useful to the materi-
als being excavated and published, which is exactly what I hoped to do in creating the
sub-discipline of archaeogaming one year prior to digging Atari.
References
Huhtamo, E. 2010. “Natural Magic: A Short Cultural
History of Moving Images.” In The Routledge
Companion to Film History, edited by W. Guynn,
3–15. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
McQuiddy, M. 1983. “City to Atari: ‘E.T.’ Trash Go
Home.” Alamogordo Daily News 27 September.
New York Times, 1983. “Atari Parts are Dumped.”
28 September. Available online: www.nytimes.
com/1983/09/28/business/atari-parts-are-
dumped.html
Orland, K. 2013. “Film Crew to Dig Up Atari Landll
Site, maybe Score 3.5 Million Copies of E.T.” Ars
Technica, 1 June. Available online: http://arstech-
nica.com/gaming/2013/06/01/lm-crew-to-dig-
up-atari-landll-site-maybe-score-3-5-million-
copies-of-e-t/
Purikka, J. 2010. “What is Media Archaeology?
– Beta Denition 0.8.” Cartographies of Media
Archaeology, 1 October. Available online: http://
mediacartographies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/
what-is-media-archaeology-beta.html
Rathje, W. and C. Murphy. 2001. Rubbish!: The
Archaeology of Garbage. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Reinhard, A. 2013. “What is Archaeogaming?”
Archaeogaming 9 June. Available online: http://
archaeogaming.com/2013/06/09/what-is-archae-
ogaming/
Andrew Reinhard is Director of Publications for the American Numismatic Society, and was formerly
Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Address for correspond-
ence: American Numismatic Society, 75 Varick Street, Floor 11, New York, NY 10013, USA. Email:
areinhard@numismatics.org
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94 Forum
Materializing Media Archaeologies: The
MAD-P Hard Drive Excavation
n Sara Perry
University of York, UK
sara.perry@york.ac.uk
n Colleen Morgan
University of York, UK
colleen.morgan@york.ac.uk
Archaeologists and antiquarians have been innovators, assemblers, critical interrogators,
and re-makers of media and media technologies for at least 500 years. Their outputs have
been drawn into broader programmes of social theorizing about modes of engagement,
and they are often pioneers in the application of new media. Their concern for the artefact—
the quintessential communication technology—testies to their deep-rooted implication
in making, theorizing, experimenting with, and deconstructing the complicated legacies
behind the media of humans from all periods of time, across all geographic spaces. More
recently, the eld of “media archaeology” has emerged, a multi-disciplinary academic
project that draws on the trope of excavation and on the Foucauldian discourse of the
archaeological to make enquiries into modern media phenomena.
Despite commonalities in subject, however, rarely do archaeologists or heritage spe-
cialists attempt to overtly insert themselves into the media archaeological discourse
(Pogacˇ ar 2014 is arguably one exception), and neither do media archaeologists typi-
cally reach out to archaeology for intellectual or methodological contributions to their
research endeavour (but see Mattern 2012, 2013; Nesselroth-Woyzbun 2013). Indeed,
the media-archaeological literature has explicitly distanced itself from archaeology:
Media archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a
discipline. When media archaeologists claim that they are “excavating”
media-cultural phenomena, the word should be understood in a specic
way. Industrial archaeology, for example, digs through the foundations of
demolished factories, boarding-houses, and dumps, revealing clues about
habits, lifestyles, economic and social stratications, and possibly deadly
diseases. Media archaeology rummages textual, visual, and auditory
archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive
and the material manifestations of culture. Its explorations move uidly
between disciplines […]. (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011)
Although Huhtamo and Parikka (2011) merely seek to establish a distinction in practice,
such a distinction stands as a misconceptualization of the nature of both archaeology and
the expertise of the archaeologist. It disregards the dynamic, poly-method, multi-sited
work that has long-characterized the eld (e.g. Shanks and McGuire 1996; Perry 2014).
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95Media Archaeologies
Moreover, it neglects the fact that archaeologists can be understood as the prototypical
media archaeologists—studying media (in their broad conception, as discursive and
material means to a plurality of different ends/processes), inventing and tinkering with
media to progress such studies, and skilfully deploying other media to circulate this
work. We look to the archaeological toolkit, then, for resources to address some of
the instabilities with the media-archaeological enterprise itself (see e.g. Goddard 2014
for a comprehensive critique). Similarly, archaeology’s concern for eldwork, situated
learning, and collaborative knowledge generation through teamwork, often including
collective practice over extended periods of time across multiple seasons, suggests a
way to further enhance media-archaeological research.
Yet archaeologists themselves are often unaware of the media-archaeology scholar-
ship and seemingly culpable of many of the same faults in their research designs and
interpretations. In particular, recent archaeological studies of contemporary material
culture (including contemporary media) repeatedly demonstrate methodologies that
are no more circumscribed than in media archaeology, with minimal duty of care for
accessible archives, few (if any) standardized recording procedures, and little evidence
of systematized analysis of all media components, comprising hardware (the mate-
rial culture of the media object), discursive content, interfaces, and—if digital—code.
This predicament removes a productive, uniquely archaeological mode of disciplining
materiality that provides transparency and comparability to the process of excavation.
Archaeologists have variously been involved in work that might broadly be conceived
as “media archaeology”, from virtual excavations (e.g. Reilly 1990; Getchell et al. 2010)
to literal excavations of dumps of media artefacts (e.g. Klein 2014; Reinhard 2014), to
studies of archaeology’s engagement with the media (e.g. Ismail and Finn 2001; Clack
and Brittain 2007; Schablitsky 2014), to surveys of the digital landscape of Silicon Val-
ley (Finn 2001). However, the number of projects that take the media artefact itself as
the site of study, and then subject it to robust excavation and documentary recording,
is negligible. Research that moves beyond these analyses—that extends outwards to
the physical media devices, interfaces, and computational code which house, enable,
and deploy the digital content—is virtually non-existent in archaeology. One of the few
such studies in the published literature is Moshenska’s (2014) excavation of a USB
stick uncovered during routine excavation work in London. The stick was shipped to a
conservator, then plugged into a computer to assess its content, which included a mix
of schoolwork, pornography, and music, probably belonging to a male school student.
As Moshenska writes:
I predict that in the near future we will, by necessity, look to the specialist
eld of digital data recovery for skills, analogies and analytical concepts
to borrow, just as we have already borrowed from elds such as forensic
science and performance art […]. Archaeologists studying the digital world
will need to draw on these [librarianship, archiving] elds of expertise,
as well as the experience and abilities of computer scientists and data
recovery experts, if we want to even begin to make sense of this vast and
intricate body of knowledge (Moshenska 2014, 259).
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Indeed, these peripheral elds have already taken the lead with respect to rigorous
digital data archaeologies, including methodologies for excavating electronic “traces” from
social media sites (e.g. Akoumianakis et al. 2012). We argue, however, that archaeolo-
gists and media archaeologists are well suited for this sort of (digital) media theorizing
and practice in the future. What is missing, still, is a robust research process and an
adapted methodological toolkit.
Accordingly, we introduce here a larger, ongoing effort—MAD-P, or the Media Archaeol-
ogy Drive Project—to enunciate a formal procedure for the excavation of media objects
(see our posts on the anthropological blog Savage Minds for a fuller description of the
project1). Using a discarded hard drive as our inaugural site of study (Figure 1), we tease
out the connections between Foucauldian media archaeologies and archaeological
practice as understood by archaeologists. In so doing, we demonstrate the promise of
an “archaeological media archaeology”, wherein the process of enquiry and interpreta-
tive outcomes trigger critical examination of both elds of practice, and heighten our
capacity to think meaningfully about the past, present, and future.
MAD-P Background and Methodology
There are several key questions that prompt the excavation of a hard drive. Is an archaeo-
logical eldwork methodology useful for understanding the contents and structure of a
hard drive? Can archaeological methodology be adapted in a way that is useful for media
archaeologists? What does the archaeological investigation of a hard drive tell us that a
1. http://savageminds.org/2014/09/03/what-archaeologists-do/
Figure 1.
40GB Samsung Hard Drive model SP0411C, recovered from the University of York’s
Department of Archaeology (MAD-P Image #1535; photograph by Colleen Morgan).
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97Media Archaeologies
more historiographical approach cannot? Can the excavation of a hard drive build on the
previous work of contemporary archaeologists that productively makes the familiar unfa-
miliar (Buchli and Lucas 2001)? While Kirschenbaum (2008) produced a grammatology
of the hard drive, can archaeological techniques bring a broad discussion of technology
into focus through materiality? To address these questions we designed a program of
research that involved excavating a hard disk drive. By discussing the methodology that
we employed, we show how formalized archaeological investigation through documenta-
tion can be productive when applied to media archaeology projects.
Hard drives have been used to store diverse data since their introduction by IBM in
1956. Since that time, hard drives have become progressively smaller and less expensive.
Even as they become pervasive in daily life, they are not visible until they stop function-
ing, sometimes resulting in a catastrophic loss of data. The term “Data Archaeology”
has been created to characterize the attempt both to recover data after the failure of
a hard drive and to investigate extant and obsolete data formats (e.g. Brachman et al.
1993; Finn 2003). Similarly, the term “Digital Archaeology” is used both to characterize
the investigation of old, out-of-date websites, and the growing body of digital practices
in archaeology. Until recently there has been relatively little overlap between these elds
(Law and Morgan 2014; Pogacˇ ar 2014).
We identied several potential hard drive candidates for excavation. We selected a
40GB Samsung hard drive, made in South Korea in September 2004 and bought by the
archaeology department shortly after. Since the time of purchase, the history of ownership
of the hard drive has been lost. This was ideal, as MAD-P wanted to approach the hard
drive as an unfamiliar landscape; as Buchli and Lucas suggest, alienation from familiar
objects exposes the transgressiveness of archaeology, an “almost perverse exercise in
making familiar categorizations and spatial perceptions unfamiliar—a translation from
an everyday perceptual language into an archaeological one” (Buchli and Lucas 2001,
9). The drive had been rendered obsolete after a decade and had been discarded.
The excavation of this hard drive was modeled on the Museum of London Archaeol-
ogy Service (MoLAS) recording system. Each stratigraphic event was given a context
number, photographed, recorded in a standardized form, drawn by hand, and then
removed/excavated to reveal the next event. MAD-P employed a sampling strategy that
involved following folder structures of the hard drive, drilling “down” through the layers and
recording their contents. After the folder structure was explored, MAD-P commenced the
physical excavation of the hard drive, disassembling it piece by piece (Figure 2). As this
is an irreversible process, a departmental computer technician, Neil Gevaux, attempted
to back up the hard drive to preserve any data, yet permissions on the drive prevented
the storage of some material. After consideration, MAD-P decided to proceed, as this
irreversible process more closely reected the affordances of archaeological methodol-
ogy as a destructive investigation. Each component of the excavated drive was labeled
and stored for further analysis, and a report detailing our strategy was posted on Savage
Minds.2 A future repository for both the excavation material and the archive has not yet
been determined, but they are currently in storage at the University of York.
2. http://savageminds.org/2014/09/30/what-it-means-to-excavate-a-hard-drive/
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Discussion
The formalized strategy employed during our MAD-P excavation led to several unexpected
problems and insights that may be productive for future research. First, the anchors of
archaeological investigation—temporality and spatial distribution—were slippery and
indistinct during the excavation. For example, the excavation of the user interface allowed
for some reconsideration of understanding the hard drive as a stratigraphic sequence.
Our method, “drilling down” through the folder structure of the user interface, mimicked
our expectations of archaeological excavation, by moving down or deeper into the folder
structure. Yet at “depth” the icon that represented the goal of our excavation might have
been temporally older or younger than the folder that contained it and our investigation
itself changed the time stamp to the day of excavation. Further complicating this excava-
tion was the concept of depth as applied to a user interface. To record depth, MAD-P
decided to use the “doubleclick” (DC) as a unit of measurement. This decision to measure
depth in DC added some coherence to the idea of folder stratigraphy, but it is untested
as a relative measure for evaluating the overall folder hierarchy and would require more
investigation. As noted in discussions of our process with colleagues, the legibility and
longevity of the DC as a unit of measurement is debatable. This adds to the complexity of
the apparent entanglement of the contents of the drive, the operating system, the computer
that framed our investigation, and the shifting temporality highlighted by the technology.
MAD-P also revealed the ambivalence of archaeological denitions of artefacts, con-
texts, sites, and sequences. During the investigation of both of the phases—the hard drive
and the user interface—we moved back and forth between our understanding of how
Figure 2.
Colleen disassembling the hard drive as part of Phase 1 of MAD-P (MAD-P Image
#1585; photograph by Sara Perry).
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99Media Archaeologies
to evaluate an artefact and how to record an archaeological site. The hard drive seemed
compact, relatively easy to reduce to its component parts, and was more like an artefact
than a site, whereas the user interface was more akin to a large landscape that must be
judiciously sampled. That this landscape was within an artefact recalled a popular fan-
tasy trope, that of a bag of holding, wherein a small exterior belied a vast inner capacity.
The destabilization of these denitions was an unexpected resistance to archaeological
investigation from these media, and now resonates through our subsequent archaeologi-
cal practice. This ambivalence can also count as one of the benets of the investigation.
Perhaps the most instructive aspect of MAD-P was the application of formal archaeo-
logical recording methods to an unorthodox subject of investigation. It has been dif-
cult to determine the extent of use of formal archaeological methods in contemporary
archaeology. One example is the 2001 investigation of the Francis Bacon Studio, during
which contexts were recorded and scientically bagged, precise provenience labelled
and archived, and elevations drawn of the bookshelves (O’Connor 2014, 132–134).
While the extensive and meticulous nature of this excavation may be due to the project
requirement to reconstruct the studio in a different location, O’Connor discussed “the
ease with which archaeological processes could be so readily applied in this unusual
context—the smooth conceptual shift required, and yet the strangeness and theatre
of archaeology as a discipline that the project revealed to me; archaeology as a perfor-
mance event” (O’Connor 2014, 132). Formalized investigation and recording practice
both structure and push this performance, while creating a documentary trail that can
be used to compare with and inform other investigations.
As previously stated, MAD-P used single-context recording in our investigation of the
hard drive. In this we employed forms modeled on the standard MoLAS system. These
included several prompts asking for “texture”, “inclusions”, and “execution”, that work
well for layers of dirt but can be difcult to translate to a user interface (Figure 3). What is
the texture of a le folder? Is a le folder a cut? Is it a feature? Can a le be considered a
deposit? Are there negative and positive features in digital technology? These prompts
required us to consider different material affordances of the hard drive, which proved to
be a productive decentering. Similarly, our efforts left us both unsettled and simultane-
ously inspirited by the continued usefulness of drawing in archaeological recording. In
addition to our formal scale drawing of each context on permatrace, a semi-transparent
tracing paper, the forms required a sketch of each context. Sketching icons was jarring,
and felt silly, but became immediately compelling. Drawing the object of your research
encourages a depth of involvement, forcing your attention on its complete visualization
and how it interacts with the surrounding context. The scale drawings on permatrace
allowed us to overlay the sheets to understand the relationships of the hard drive com-
ponents to one another (Figure 4).
Another affordance of the archaeological investigation was the separation of the com-
ponents of the hard drive into nds bags (Figure 5). This contrasted with the relative
ephemerality of the “nds” of the user interface investigation (folders and music les),
though they were contained on the platter of the hard drive. These user interface artefacts,
although not as apparently present or sortable into bags, were actually more omnipresent:
one “nd” during the investigation was a David Byrne song hidden under a generic label
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Figure 3.
Sara recording Phase 2 with MAD-P context sheets (MAD-P Image #1549; photograph
by Colleen Morgan).
Figure 4.
MAD-P Phase 2 contexts on permatrace (MAD-P Image #1548; photograph by Colleen
Morgan).
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101Media Archaeologies
in an unremarkable folder structure (Figure 6). The song, “Like Humans Do”, was included
in Windows XP to demonstrate the Windows Media Player, leading us to wonder: was it
the most ubiquitous song in the world?3
Finally, formalized recording strategies revealed a critical aw in our research design.
A Harris Matrix is a method to visually organize and present the stratigraphic sequence
of archaeological excavations. In the MAD-P Harris Matrix (Figure 7) there is nothing
to connect Phase I and Phase II of the excavations, because we did not excavate the
code that connects the hard drive with the user interface. This would have added con-
siderable depth and complexity to our analysis, and is a priority for future investigations.
MAD-P was conceived as a critical, creative exploration of the intersections between
media archaeology and archaeology, but it was also fun. Applying archaeological meth-
ods to a hard drive was the best kind of mischief: it encouraged us to recongure our
approach to research. This mode of critical play, growing out of a larger interdisciplinary
scholarship on “makers”, craft, DIY production, and participatory citizenship (e.g. Dis-
sanayake 1995; Gauntlett 2011), is part of a broader series of questions that we are
exploring around the relationship between doing, making, knowing, learning, and the
crafting of expertise.
Looking Towards the Future
The excavation of a hard drive revealed the utility of a recording strategy for media
archaeology projects. This strategy created a reproducible record that allowed a critical
review of our observations, de-centered our understanding of the spatial and temporal
relatedness of media, and required close observation through the illustration of the con-
texts of our project. Most importantly, it has offered us a documentary baseline against
3. We later learned that it instead may be the Nokia Tune, as explored by Jeff Thompson (n.d.).
Figure 5.
MAD-P artefacts in bags (MAD-P Image #1620; photograph by Colleen Morgan).
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Figure 6.
Screenshot of David Byrne music le.
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103Media Archaeologies
which future enquiries into media artefacts and other unorthodox sites of study might
be systematically compared.
We look ahead to honing the approach: developing methodical code excavation
practices, ofcially archiving our project outputs, and producing a conventionalized
contemporary archaeology recording sheet that might be deployed in a variety of
modern contexts. From our perspective, the productivity of such work should not be
underestimated in terms of its potential both to critique the past and to speculate about
possible futures. It makes obvious the individual material constituents of the artefacts,
their assemblages, the labour behind their composition, and their various manifesta-
tions in both computer code and in complex virtual, discursive, and physical spaces.
Accordingly, we invite archaeologists of all kinds to use formal investigation strategies to
structure their engagements, providing a record that can be used both for comparative
research and as a creative disruption to discourse.
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Sara Perry is Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Management, Department of Archaeology at the University
of York. Address for correspondence: Department of Archaeology, University of York, King’s Manor, York
YO1 7EP. Email: sara.perry@york.ac.uk
Colleen Morgan is the EUROTAST Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of York.
Address for correspondence: Department of Archaeology, University of York, King’s Manor, York YO1
7EP, UK. Email: colleen.morgan@york.ac.uk
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105Media Archaeologies
A Giant on the Shoulders of Dwarfs:
Archaeology and Recursion in Friedrich
Kittler’s Works
n Tania Hron
Humboldt Universität, Germany
tania@netzradio.de
n Sandrina Khaled
Humboldt Universität, Germany
sandrinkhaled@gmail.com
Das K el auf die Wiese,
da kam ein dicker Riese.
Dann ging der Riese weiter
und machte es zur Leiter.
Die Leiter ward zur Brück,
drauf ging der Ries’ zurück.
Die Brücke ward zum Kreise.
Drin schließt des Riesen Reise
Friedrich Kittler. Kindervers1
Asked about the position of media archaeology in his work, the late Friedrich Kittler
answered that what media archaeology and his own work had in common was “to stop
narrating the history of writing, computing, mathematics or music as linear history”. He
conceived his method as “recursive history”, where “the same issue is taken up again and
again but with different connotations and results” (interview in Armitage 2006, 32–33).2
Kittler is perceived as one of the founders of media archaeology. He inspired a mate-
rial turn through which technologies, media, and textuality uncover material-discursive
practice and hidden infrastructures. In what ways did the founding father undertake a
media archaeology, and how was that related to archaeology of media? Why was his
work such an inspiration to other scholars across the disciplines?
1. Unpublished verses c. 1965–1974 from the Nachlass of Friedrich Kittler at the Deutsches Literatur-
archiv Marbach (Handschriftenarchiv Kittler, DLA, Box 48, Folder 2). Translation: “The K fell on the
meadow,/a chubby giant came along./The giant he went on,/and turned the K into a ladder./The
ladder became a bridge,/on it the giant went back/The bridge became a circle./In it the giant’s journey
ends./ Friedrich Kittler. Children’s Verse”. A selection of Kittler’s early unpublished texts, to be edited by
the authors under the title Baggersee: Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlass, will be published by Wilhelm
Fink in autumn 2015.
2. Interview conducted in 2003.
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Kittler produced two works containing the word “archaeology” in the title. The rst—
“Archäologie der Psychologie des Dramas”—was probably written around 1976.
3
At that
time it was rejected by German studies, but later gained attention in a “tame” version
entitled “Carlos als Carlsschüler” (Kittler 1984). The “wild” version, dedicated to “the
Manes of Jim Morrison ‘Artiste Poète Compositeur 1943’’’, claims that “the discursive
event that bourgeois drama speaks in the language of psychology can only be deci-
phered by excavating the three superimposed layers of the derelict single-family house
erected by this very discourse” (Kittler 1991, 47, translated).
In contrast to the predominant methods of hermeneutics and Marxist literary analysis,
Kittler perceived literature as a control element related to the conditions of reproduction:
love, marriage, family. Literary forms and media display interaction and therefore have a
crucial impact on the transformation of the Middle European family system. Furthermore,
they themselves were transformed to propagate and multiply the nuclear family lifestyle:
bourgeois drama, romantic poetry, bildungsroman. According to Kittler, literary change
and social change run strictly in parallel. Control is executed in three layers: (1) propagation
of the bourgeois nuclear family as the only humane way of life (Enlightenment: Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing); (2) analysis of the internal relationships between family members resulting
in the emergence of a psychological knowledge of the “so-called man”, an analysis that
uncovers human beings in their controllability and as objects of study (Weimar Classicism:
Friedrich Schiller); and (3) discovery of early childhood and the absolutization of psychol-
ogy in the form of the phantasmagory of a universal mother (Allmutter), representing the
individual’s unconscious and replacing the father as the center of the family (Romanticism:
Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann).
Kittler excavated these three layers by correlating bourgeois drama with non-literary
texts and text from frivolous genres. In so doing, he coined the notion of “discoursive
connivance”. Moreover, his archaeology placed primary literature, secondary literature,
and his preferred theories side by side, dispensing annotations in favour of a list of speak-
ers. Thus, bourgeois drama is identied as a “semiotechnique” that fabricates human
beings (Kittler 1991, 79). As Kittler put it: “Literature is no ‘Owl of MINERVA’, but actively
takes part in the transportation and dispute of discourses” (Kittler 1991, 92, translated).
The concept of literary forms as nodes in a communication network is inspired by
the theory of graphs, as used in organizational sociology for analysis of communication
patterns with respect to power structure, team performance, and conict management.
4
Figure 1 shows Kittler’s analysis of the communication patterns in Gotthold Lessing’s
Emilia Galotti.
3. We quote from Kittler, 1991, 47–102. The typescript (DLA, Box 98, Folder 2) is undated. We conclude
it was written between 1974 and 1976. Our conclusion is based on an outline of an unrealized book,
Familienszenen. Die literarische Machart der Menschen 1770-1880 (DLA, Box 112, Folder 4), in which
this essay was to be the centerpiece. The assumed date is strengthened by notes about Emilia Galotti
and bourgeois drama on the back of two seminar preparations from 1974 (DLA, Box 34, Folder 1).
4. Kittler’s reference is Rolf Ziegler’s study Kommunikationsstruktur und Leistung sozialer Systeme,
(Ziegler 1968). There he might have discovered Claude Shannon’s and Warren Weaver’s The Math-
ematical Theory of Communication (1949); the bibliography includes Niklas Luhmann’s Folgen und
Funktionen formaler Organisation (1964) and Talcott Parsons’s writings. Ziegler briey mentions graph
theory’s venerable history, dating back to Leonhard Euler and its application in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
studies Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1947) and Anthropologie structurale (1958).
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Figure 1.
Kittler’s graphs of communication patterns in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (Box 34, Folder 1).
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108 Forum
The rst graph and its matrix determine the index of centrality of the dramatis perso-
nae. In order to clarify problems arising in the procedure of information transmission,
an index of centrality measures the group member’s degree of centrality with respect to
leadership over the messages transmitted within the network. The second graph and its
matrix display the circulation of the drama’s three main messages: (a) the encounter of
Emilia with wicked Hettore Gonzaga in the chapel, (b) the assassination of Emilia’s virtu-
ous ancé Count Appiani on behalf of Gonzaga’s chamberlain Marinelli, and (c) Emilia’s
and Appiani’s prospective conjugal life. The channels through which these messages
are transmitted are thus revealed.
The early Kittler created such graphs for most objects of his literary study. This topo-
logical approach aims to overcome the understanding of literature as bearer of meaning
in favour of an understanding of literature as communication network. From this point
of departure, literature can be identied as a node in the communication network of
discourses, institutions, and architectures. According to Kittler, Foucault stripped archae-
ology of its “proper” meaning, as he “was not digging in Orchomenus or Memphis” but
in libraries and archives (Kittler 1999, 7, translated). So did Kittler. His own archaeology
navigated through discourses and attempted to mathematize literary analysis, foregoing
excavation in favour of archaeological assemblage.
Kittler used the notion “archaeology” again in his late work. In a talk from the lecture
series Archäologie als Kulturwissenschaft (Archaeology as Cultural Studies), given at
Humboldt-University in 2002, he introduced his project of an “acoustic archaeology” (Kittler
2004, 260, translated). Two years later Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and a group of researchers
undertook a “sound-archaeological expedition” (Ernst 2004, 257). According to Kittler:
April 2004. […] Two singers, one woman, nine men on Gallo Lungo, the
larger Siren Island. […] Like the Sirens, our singers sat or stood on a
meadow—which reveals itself as such only ashore and not from the sea.
[…] The two sirens sang what their conductor requested. We heard, clear
and distinct, […] vowels radiating, but not the slightest trace of consonants.
(Kittler 2006a, 57–58, translated)
Kittler found evidence here that Odysseus had entered the island (Figure 2)—other-
wise he could not have heard the Sirens’ song. Sirens were meaningful to Kittler as they
represent the most crucial apparatus within his acoustic archaeology, further developing
Barry Powell’s thesis that the Greek vowel alphabet was invented to write down Homer’s
epos (Powell 1991). In archaic Greece, Sirens were unmarried young women (nymphs)
who performed kitharodic singing and dancing during ritual ceremonies in the service of
the gods. During their performances these actual women turned into daimonic creatures
affecting the audience. As ctional characters, the Sirens incorporate the lyrical choral
song. They represent the musikè téchne, an art that requires long-term training in singing,
as well as, subordinately, in reading and writing (Koller 1963, 46). While Homer’s verses
were preserved, only fragments of the Sirens’ songs survived. According to Kittler, it was
the Pythagoreans who lifted the curse of Odysseus’s lies in order to celebrate the Sirens
in the form of harmonia (the octave) as one of the rst formal principles of the Occident
(Kittler 2006a, 165).
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109Media Archaeologies
Figure 2.
Siren lands (photograph by Tania Hron, taken during Kittler’s excursion to Li Galli, the
Siren lands).
Figure 3.
Modules of Kittler’s synthesizer (photograph by Tania Hron).
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The recursive progression from singing sirens to signal processing became a central
motive in Kittler’s work (Figure 4) and the term Rekursion occurs in Kittler’s historical
investigations as well as in his computer studies. Recursion entered Kittler’s work via
his occupation with mathematics and computer programming. The term itself has
not been part of cultural studies for long, even though the mathematical practice, for
example in Fibonacci algorithms, is much older.5 In the mathematical sense, a recursion
is a procedure dened at least partially in terms of itself. The calculation of a recursion
is therefore a process in which the same operation is repeated, and the result of each
calculation must be used to nd the result of the next. A recursive function, basic to
computer science, requires an instruction that ends it. The recursive repetition does
not just reproduce but culminates in a previously dened variation (Krajewski 1998, 4;
Winkler 1999, 235; see also Kittler 2009).
Navigating through Kittler’s digital storage device with the Indexer,6 we encounter C
programs in which Kittler labeled the recursive functions with the comment Rekursion
(Kittler feared innite loops recursing without a programmed halt point). Kittler extensively
5. Recursion, as a mathematical term, was coined in the nineteenth century as “recurrens series”. For
further detail see Krajewski 1998, 2–5; Kittler, compute4.doc.
6. The Indexer is a digital tool for searching among the over 1.7 million les in the digital assets of
Kittler, stored at the DLA. The basic components of the Indexer combine several tools into an iden-
tication cascade (see the developers of the tool, Tabea Lurck: Enge and Kramski 2014, 57) The
search can be limited to specic terms, i.e. full text or letype. The results contain additional data
crucial for research. The Indexer is still in the beta-testing phase and not open to the public. It will be
accessible only inside the DLA. For further description see Enge and Kramski 2014.
Figure 4.
Screenshot of the Indexer, searching in full text for “Rekursion” reveals 117 pages of
entries, texts as well as source code (courtesy of the DLA Marbach).
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111Media Archaeologies
documented his graphic programming.7 Code is a text, belonging to the oeuvre of an
author like Kittler as much as his books and articles.8
Programming was a way of thinking for Kittler. With Assembler and C, he instructed
the machine to recursively generate graphical images such as surfaces, ferns (Figure
5), labyrinths, and fractals, as well as a self-programmed address book.9 The concept
of recursion entered Kittler’s texts when he started to think through the mathematics of
programming—and recursive functions.
Kittler’s main programming interest was algorithms, especially recursive algorithms, and
he identied them in contexts other than computer science or “graphical programming
7. Namely in a le called manual.doc.
8. Kittler wanted his his collected works to include not only his books and articles but also his thou-
sands of lines of C and Assembler. The collection consists of (1) Gesammelte Schriften (Collected
Writings), a series published by Wilhelm Fink under the editorship of Martin Stingelin (who has also
edited Nietzsche); (2) Stimmen (Voices), an internet platform for lectures, talks, and seminars in
audio, video, and text, edited by Moritz Hiller, Tania Hron and Sandrina Khaled; (3) “Programmier-
werk” (Programs), consisting of Kittler’s code and an internet-based application for running it on
an emulator of Kittler’s machine, edited by Peter Berz and Paul Feigelfeld; and (4) “Schaltungen”
(Curcuits), which presents the schematics of the synthesizer that Kittler built, edited by Sebastian
Döring and Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag. This analyses the actual modules of the synthesizer, because,
as Wolfgang Ernst puts it, media artefacts are different from vases: they cannot be understood by
being looked at, they must be analysed in their processing of input, their storage, and their transmis-
sions (Ernst 2011, 241). Döring and Sonntag have also undertaken a media archaeology of Kittler’s
schematics and circuitry in their project “Apparatus Operandi.” They allowed us to publish some of
their photographs, see Figure 6.
9. For how Pythagoreism and Barnsley’s Fern are connected in that “everything is number”, see Berz
2012.
Figure 5.
Barnsley Fern.
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in 32 Bit systems”,10 going from—as he apologetically put it—“Nur was schaltbar ist,
ist überhaupt” (Kittler 1993, 182: “Only that which is switchable, is at all”) to something
that could be summarized as “what is must be computable”.
As his graph-theoretical literary analysis shows, mathematical concepts played an
important role in Kittler’s interpretations of literature and, therefore, in his conceptions of
archaeology. In his famous 1985 habilitation work Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (later
published in English as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [Kittler 1990]), Kittler described the
rise of German poetry, beginning with Faust’s well-known sigh, as an effect of program-
ming: mothers program their children with the sweet sound of lullabies and with sound
exercises in order to teach reading and writing (Lautiermethode); the children, grown up,
search for the sound of the mother, the “mother’s mouth”, and transform it into poetry
that mothers-to-be—young women—read, and program into children themselves: “The
pedagogic movement took the curiosities and ephemera of contemporary technology
[…] and from them fashioned a functioning feedback-control system.” (Kittler, 1990, 49)
One might well describe this as a recursive procedure, but Kittler didn’t at this time.
Recursion appeared in his writing only after an intensive phase of programming and
study of information theory in the nineties.
In their commentary on the German translation of a collection of papers by Alan Turing,
Dotzler and Kittler remarked that Turing materialized mathematics and mathematized
matter by designing a universal discrete machine that used computable numbers to
replace any other machine (Dotzler and Kittler 1987). In his unnished project on music
and mathematics—from “Hellas” via “Roma Eterna” and “Hesperien” to “Turingzeit”11—
Kittler turned the wheel further, identifying programs that recall themselves in the history
of technologies, and then, in what he called, after Heidegger, “Seinsgeschichte”, or
history of being. Here, the term Rekursion served as a key concept that enabled Kittler
to demonstrate how mathematics and music, systems of notation, systems of thinking,
technological inventions and techniques, notions of sexuality and relations, gods and
arts, all have recursive character. In Kittler’s words: “For this new way of writing history
there is only one way, one name: recursion” (Kittler 2009, 245, translated in Winthrop-
Young 2015, 73). Recursion is a productive operational notion of a program recalling
itself (and sometimes getting caught in a loop or a Möbius strip) to describe a history
that neither focuses on the compilation of data nor searches only for the discontinuities.
It intends to describe the self-referential processes of technologies and ideas throughout
a manifold history of knowledge and science, without man as acting force (see Ofak
and von Hilgers 2010).
In the le “recursio.utf”,12 Kittler stated that the notion underlying his history of knowl-
edge was that all of European science and media derived from ancient Greek thinking,
10. The subtitle of the programming seminar for academics that Kittler taught at Humboldt University
from 1993 to 2011.
11. Kittler planned about nine books in the four volumes mentioned, and he only nished the rst two.
Fragments of the second volume were printed in Kittler 2012. More will be published in 2016 by
Wilhelm Fink (ed. Gerhard Scharbert).
12. “recursio.utf” is a le from Kittler’s computer containing the preface to a grant application for an
unrealized project named “Harmonia”, covering the history of harmony from Ancient Greece to modern
times.
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113Media Archaeologies
or more precisely, the medium of the Greek vowel alphabet. The history of music, math-
ematics, and sexuality cannot be explained by words like “progress” or “development”:
“The project transferred a concept from mathematics and computer science to the history
of knowledge: that of recursion” (Kittler recursio.utf, 1, translated; see also 2006b, 59).
The history of Europe—for Kittler, the world he could and wanted to describe—is “an
innite possibility of recalls, of recursions […]. A recursion is not literally a return but a
repetition under a different Vorzeichen” (arithmetic sign; Kittler, minne.lat).
Recursion as the key term for his historiography of Greek thought, techniques, and
knowledge legitimizes his narration; it is bound up with his personal life as well.13 Kittler
explained in Musik und Mathematik I(2):
our history of being [Seinsgeschichte] plays out in such recursions. It
returns to the alphabet in order to ground it ever more deeply: the two
Sirens turn into an octave, octaves into polyphony, polyphonies into
overtones, overtones into Fourier series—and so on to today’s signal
processing. (Kittler 2009, 80, translated)
And there we have entered the realm of media archaeology, grounding it in thorough
analysis of the unfolding of being.
According to Kittler, the computer itself is a recursion of the Greek alphabet, a single
notation system for letters, numbers, and tones. Every output is produced by binary
code: “for the second time in history, a universal medium of binary numbers is able
to encode, to transmit and to store whatever will happen, from writing or counting to
imaging and sounding” (Kittler 2006a, 24. translated).
While Kittler inspired a media archaeology, Kittler’s paper les, still smelling of ciga-
rettes, his synthesizer (Figure 6), computer, and digital les have themselves become
the object of media archaeology. Kittler’s media history in its focus on code, structures,
and technology has much inuenced media archaeological theories such as those of
Wolfgang Ernst or Jussi Parikka. While Kittler’s project was not archaeological or even
media archaeological in the strictest sense, the work is a highly signicant element
of these material-discursive networks. Simply put, they have something in common:
deconstructing and reconstructing from a material-oriented point of view to uncover
hidden infrastructures and technologies and studying media as a historical enterprise
that tends to haunt us in recursions.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the DLA (German Literature Archive) for its assistance.
The research was made possible by funding from the Hubert Burda Foundation.
13. Note the various evocations of an undened “Du” (You) in Musik und Mathematik, which contains
countless insertions of Kittler’s memories of vacation trips, music concerts, and private moments.
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Figure 6.
(top) Etching template sequencer board from Friedrich Kittler’s self-built synthesizer;
(bottom) circuit diagram of Kittler’s synthesizer from 1988 (photographs used by permission of
Sebastian Döring and Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag).
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115Media Archaeologies
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Tania Hron worked for and with Friedrich Kittler from 2004 until his death. From 2011 to 2014 she was
engaged at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach in archiving Kittler’s literary estate, a vast collection
of papers and digital storage devices such as oppy discs, CD-ROMs, old laser discs as well as several
hard drives. She is co-editor of the Collected Works of Friedrich Kittler. Address for correspondence:
Nachlass/Edition Friedrich Kittler, Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Geor-
genstraße 47, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Email: tania@netzradio.de
Sandrina Khaled worked with Friedrich Kittler in different research projects such as EUROPA, Auf-
schreibesysteme aus Codes, Medien und Künsten. As Assistant Professor to the Chair of Aesthetics
and History of Media she taught at Humboldt University from 1999 to 2007. She is co-editor of the Col-
lected Works of Friedrich Kittler. Address for correspondence: Nachlass/Edition Friedrich Kittler, Institut
für Kulturwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Georgenstraße 47, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
Email: sandrinkhaled@gmail.com
AnArcheology for AnArchives: Why Do
We Need—Especially for the Arts—A
Complementary Concept to the Archive?
n Siegfried Zielinski
Berlin University of the Arts, Germany
tutoren.zielinski@udk-berlin.de
n Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
We have read it ad nauseam, and Michel Foucault has spelled it out in all theoretical
brilliance with his collective singular archive: as the ideal totality of the formulations of
the conditions of our existence, as the ultimate happiness on earth,1 the archive serves
to organize mental and enforced orders in the shape of appropriate structures and to
preserve, with a tremendous amount of effort, the memory of past orders. Its rst and
foremost medium is language, especially in the shape of grammatically correct texts. This
is the type of mediation through which we learned both the art of critique and the linear
depiction of history. The classic archive is the externalization of historical consciousness,
thereby documenting a consciousness fundamentally tied to power.
The utterances, objects, and artefacts produced by artists and thinkers closely involved
with the arts are liable to end up in these archives. Once this happens, archivists, librar-
ians, and curators transform heterogeneous objects into structures to whom they are
and will remain profoundly alien.
The dismantling of Harald Szeemann’s working and thinking laboratory Fabbrica in the
Swiss village of Maggia for the archival and library-related purposes of the Californian Getty
Research Institute represents a special type of deconstruction. The extremely “individual
methodology” (Derieux 2007) with which Szeemann invented, developed, and arranged
his exhibitions and artistic objects, has been dissolved into the general and universal
1. An expression I owe to the German writer Heinrich Böll.
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order of a hygienically organized, representative cultural research archive (Figure 1). In
even more extreme fashion than Szeemann, Peter Weibel switches between theoreti-
cal and artistic production, the organization of museums and research undertakings,
installations, and books. This opaque material chaos is, under his own supervision, cur-
rently being transferred into neatly labelled transparent containers, gigantic le folders,
and digital storage systems (Figure 2). In the hands of museums and collectors, Dieter
Roth’s legacy of early generative art and his anarchic sub-archives, such as his chocolate
and mould museums as well as his equally obsessively compiled video diaries, have
turned into aesthetic arrangements, as if, from the very beginning, they had been cre-
ated with archival index cards in mind. (On occasion Roth himself ironically anticipated
this practice, for instance by exhibiting his art in Leitz folders.) Paradoxically, the 140
monitors on display at the 2013 Venice Biennale showing his daily life were only able to
exert a certain irritation when some of the screens malfunctioned and went black like the
square in Robert Fludd’s famous history of the micro- and macrocosm: et sic in innitum
(Figure 3)! Three hundred years before Kazimir Malevich, this boldly printed black square
weighing down on the paper and surrounded by four captions, refers to the innite depths
of (yet) unformed matter, the physical and sensual chaos.
To a certain extent it is up to artists and associated theorists to determine how effec-
tively we may oppose this alienating hegemony of order. Already in the 1960s, the young
Korean Nam June Paik, a student of Arnold Schoenberg’s in the US with a profound
knowledge of Zen philosophy, and whom I rank as one of the outstanding philosophers of
time and media artists, anticipated the will to order that would descend upon energetically
Figure 1.
AnArchive Fabbrica, Harald Szeemann, Feuilleton Süddeutsche Zeitung (photograph
by Siegfried Zielinski).
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Figure 2.
AnArchive Peter Weibel (photograph by MONO KROM 2010, used with permission).
Figure 3.
Robert Fludd’s graphical black square representing, for him, eternal and unlimited
unstructured matter (Fludd 1617, 27).
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119Media Archaeologies
rebellious Fluxus intermedia pioneers. In a 1963 interview he critically reected on the close
proximity between musicians, composers, and publishers. Citing the example of John
Cage, he addressed issues of historical consciousness and material utilization relevant
to our discussion:
Why do all musicians and music publishers believe that everything must
result in something of importance to the history of music? That’s crazy. I
told Cage: Destroy your manuscripts and tapes when you die! He thought
that was too dramatic. I think it’s a crime that Cage makes tapes at all.
Gottfried Michael König, his interviewer at the time, pursued the issue: “So your own
works are only intended for the moment? They have no signicance afterwards? Not
even for you? […] Your work only exists as long as it is being performed?” Nam June
Paik responded: “Yes, that is beautiful. When I die there’s nothing left. I am not produc-
ing a child” (quoted in König 1963: 32, 34).
Once they fall into the hands of curators, anarchic depots and legacies of artists (and
certain scientists), arranged in quod libet, arbitrarily structured atelier containers, tell dif-
ferent sub-stories (Figure 4). It still amounts to the narrative of the unique and ingenious
subject that preserves itself for the memory of others, or issues the order for preservation.
“We shall survive in the memories of others,”2 said Vilém Flusser, the cultural philosopher
from Prague, in an interview with Hungarian art theorists László Beke and Miklós Peternák
2. Also the title of a DVD with Flusser’s last interviews, produced by the Vilém Flusser Archiv at the
University of Arts Berlin in cooperation with the Center of Culture and Communication (C3) Budapest.
Figure 4.
Werner Nekes, lmmaker, collector, dealer, anarchaeologist in his garage and
laboratory in Muehlheim/Ruhr in Germany (photograph by MONO KROM 2012).
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shortly before his tragic accidental death. That is both wish and directive. Flusser composed
his letters for posterity; even when writing to his closest friends and relatives he used a
mechanical typewriter equipped with thin copy paper. Whatever responses he received he
rarely kept. When it came to posterity his own text was of primary importance: epistolary
communication as monological utterances dedicated to the archive.
A few years ago I discussed with the Viennese artist VALIE EXPORT the gigantic
dimensions of the extremely heterogeneous material she had accumulated in more than
ve decades of artistic production: Super 8-, 16-, and 35-mm lms, countless photos,
open reel videos, cassettes in all different formats, LPs, objects such as genital panic
trousers (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1968), installation materials, technical gadgets…
Exhibit it the way it is, I recommended, in sections, in this seeming disorder of a multifold
logic that serves only your particular interests as an artist, your idiosyncrasies (Figure 5).
The Archiv exhibition organized by the renowned Austrian Kunsthaus Bregenz, how-
ever, followed a diametrically opposed logic. The extremely heterogeneous biographic
fragments were squeezed into 150 identical or very similar standing and lying display
cases framed by white-lacquered wood, which appeared to subject all the material to
Figure 5.
Catologue title page for VALIE EXPORT’s big archive-exhibition in Bregenz (Austria),
October 2011 to January 2012.
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homogeneous uniformity. At the time I thought we were, unwillingly, witnessing how
already during her lifetime a protesting female artist was being transformed into a con-
formist historical gure. But during a public discussion VALIE EXPORT surprised me with
a very interesting alternative interpretation. To her, the arrangement of formally similar
frames with such different content recalled lm sequences (Irrgang, forthcoming). The
montage, the assembly of heterogeneous materials, moves to the forefront, allowing
the fantasy of the observer to play with particularities.
From the perspective of a logic of the manifold, but also in the tradition of the Nietzs-
chean genealogical thought praised by Foucault, the fruitless search for the one origin
is as meaningless as the denition of a future, which according to Emmanuel Levinas
always embodies that Other we cannot know. However, to work on the conceptualiza-
tion and further development of exciting utopian spaces of possibility does not neces-
sarily involve the abandoning of established archives. Nonetheless, I do want to make
a plea for effective complements, which could also involve unusual, thought-provoking
nomenclatures.
Archein (ἀρχεῖν) means “to begin”—but also: to be the rst, to lead something or
somebody. Archos stands for the origin, the beginning; but it also contains the leader.
In the wake of Derrida and Foucault it has been frequently emphasized that archeío(n)
refers to the space, the ofcial seat of the government as well as to its administrative
buildings. By placing the prex an in front of this construct, with its will to order and
claim to leadership, we semantically unhinge the latter. The result resembles the simple
opposition between collection (Sammlung) and cluster (Ansammlung). However, the
prex does not—as in German—serve to indicate a prior state; rather, as in Greek, it
implies a counterdraft. It gestures toward liberating the archive from the most important
institutional entanglements history has imposed in it. Anarchy—proclaimed the anarcho-
pacist and philosophical writer Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)—is the liberation of man
from the idols of the state, of the church, and of capital. The way I view the arts, there
is no reason for them to worship any of these idols, let alone all three.
In his recently published late Paris lectures, Michel Foucault makes use of an anarchic
pun. At the end of a critical passage about his own work as a historian he remarks that
he had a method in mind which makes no more use of power than is acceptable: “So
I will say that what I am proposing is rather a sort of anarcheology” (2014: 79).3 Con-
notations of anarchy, though politically up to date, would be socially inappropriate, so
he passed on them.
To me, anarchives are a complementary opposite and hence an effective alternative
to archive. I consciously refer to them in the plural (Giannetti 2012).4 Following a logic
3. The semantic proximity to the political contexts of anarchy from which this attractive word developed
does not preclude its commercial abuse. In 1999 the French media theorist and curator Ann-Marie
Duguet named her wide-ranging 1999 collection of artist DVDs Anarchive – Archives numérique sur
l’art contemporain. So far, editions of Michael Snow, Antonin Muntadas, and Thierry Kuntzel, among
others, have been published (see http://www.anarchive.net/). D’Anarchive is a label specializing
in predominantly black and white fashion. See also The Valaco Archive: http://valacoarchive.com/
an-archaeologue/
4. The entries on “Archive” and “Anarchive” were written by Moritz Hiller, who is currently writing his
PhD dissertation on Friedrich Kittler’s estate under Wolfgang Ernst and me.
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of plurality and wealth of variants, they are particularly suited to handle events and
movements; that is, time-based sensations. Just as the anarcheological sees itself rst
and foremost as an activity, anarchives are principally in an active mode. They do not,
however, lay claim to leadership. Nor do they claim to truthfully know where things come
from and where they may be headed to. The origin is and remains a trap. Anarchives
do not follow any external purpose; they indulge in waste and offer presents. Basically,
they are indebted to a single economy, that of friendship. And friendship, as Georges
Bataille would have it (1971), is characterized by an acute feeling of strangeness in the
world, which we occasionally share with others.
Artists and researchers need both: archives that collect, select, preserve, restore, and
sort in accordance with the logic of a (dispositive) whole, and the autonomous, resistant,
continually reactivated anarchives geared toward individual needs and work methods.
It is the utopia, the non-place, which in an ongoing process reshapes and reinterprets
the materials from which memories are made. Anarchives necessarily challenge, indeed
provoke, the archive: otherwise, they would be devoid of meaning. Caring for anarchives
may help prevent the many idiosyncratically designed particular collections from changing
into a rule-bound administrative apparatus. It may even enable us to celebrate the past
as a regained present. The artist and philosopher David Link is currently demonstrat-
ing with his Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts how this may be achieved (cf. Link,
forthcoming).5 The reconstruction of the missing parts of the source code for Turing
and Strachey’s love letter program and the restarting of this impossible communication
by means of a simulated hardware of the Manchester Ferranti Mark I garnered him the
prestigious Tony Sale Award of the British Computer Restoration Society.6
The philosophical director Jean-Luc Godard belongs to a select group of late twentieth-
century artists who not only had a discernible aesthetic impact but also collaborated in
the discourse about their artistic work. As a recording technology cinema itself exhibits
features of the archive, he noted in a book-length interview. It is “made from the same
raw material as History”; it is “the registrar of History” (Godard and Ishaghpour 2005, 83,
88). Yet in his own legacy, the Histoire(s) du cinéma (dir. 1988–1998), Godard steadfastly
pursues an alternate anarcheological path. “Cinema Truth … Factory of Dreams”:7 The
immense depot of one hundred years of cinematic history assembled from billions of
individual images, Godard declares, is a factory for the manufacture of emotions; an
implicit reminiscence of Ilya Ehrenburg’s Factory of Dreams (1931), but also of René
Fülöp-Miller’s legendary Fantasy Machine, which as scandalously early as 1931 linked the
commodity analysis of the cinema industry to psychoanalytic ideas. Godard as an analyst
of the dream factory or Fantasy Machine—that is a role he assumed with great passion
and knowledge even before the Histoire(s) du cinéma. Godard is the Aby Warburg of the
time-based image. The archives and vaults of the Paris Cinematheque and many other
5. One form of publishing this project is David Link’s forthcoming book with the same title.
6. See Ward 2012. The work was exhibited in 2010 in the Bristol Arnolni arts centre (cf. Giannetti
2014). In the essay “Künstlerische Anarchive - Herkünfte als Ressource für Zukünfte” (Zielinski 2015)
I discuss a few examples, like the huge containers of David Larcher, Werner Nekes, or Dieter Roth.
There will be an adaptation of this text in English (“Artistic Anarchives – Derivations [Herkünfte] as
Resources for Futures”) in Buckley and Conomos (forthcoming).
7. My translation of one of the text inserts used by Godard in the rst part of the lm.
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123Media Archaeologies
depots, his own immense collection of electronically stored lms and classical, modern,
and popular music, are assembled and condensed in eeting, minimal fragments, as if in
a magic ball of memory and incantation. In the course of this audio-visual reconstruction
of cinema history the lmmaker himself turns into an object of analysis: “I imagined […]
that, starting from this past, I could see my own once more, like a psychoanalysis of myself
and my space within the cinema” (Godard 1980, 22). And like a reminder, a phrase from
Le gai savoir—Godard’s explicit 1968 cinematographic homage to Nietzsche—thrusts
itself into the rst colliding image and sound combinations of the Histoire(s) du cinéma:
“Chance is structured like the subconscious.”
The result of this anarchaeological image and sound analysis is a Poetics of Relation
(a beautiful term borrowed from the philosophico-poetical tool box of Martinique poet-
philosopher Édouard Glissant). It is not a history that raises any claims to generalization—
Figure 6.
“cinemasurplus”: caption by David Larcher underneath this photograph taken in his
anarchivic depot in Kensington, London, 2012 (used with permission).
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which is precisely why it represents it so well. Godard’s anarchaeology of past presents
of the cinema is supremely idiosyncratic. It is both testament and manifest: a rm plea
for the production of one’s own history from the material surrounding the individual in
the midst of which he is able to move with competence. “Every eye mediates for itself”,
to quote a phrase from the beginning of the video lm, which is inserted like an appeal
into the rst part of the Histoire(s). The latter word, in turn, is decomposed into its syl-
lables and rhythmically rearranged: His toi toi toi re … History is your business! Recount
it according to your aesthetic abilities and your knowledge! Film turns history, a matter
of thought, into an extended thing whose temporal structure, too, may be worked on.
The Histoire(s) do not represent the history of lm. They turn it into a Heisenbergian
potentia—the wave function of lm history, as it were. In order to become the 1 objectied
history (Godard prefers to use the numeral designation) it has to pass through the act
of recording: “No recording, no measurement,” notes Nick Herbert in his proposal for
a “Really New ‘New Physics’”: “Only those interactions in nature that leave permanent
traces (records) count as measurements. […] Only record-making devices have the
power to turn multivalued possibilities in single-valued actualitis” (Herbert 1999, 102).
Figure 7.
“drumsort rustydusty-w” (caption and photograph by David Larcher 2012, used with
permission).
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125Media Archaeologies
At the beginning of parts 2A & 2B of his Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard writes the title
of the lm with a hideously squeaky felt marker onto a white carton of his production rm
Sonimage. Then the rst sentence—a slightly abridged Oscar Wilde quote—appears: “To
give an accurate description of what has never occurred is the proper occupation of the
historian.” That is the open secret of anarchives and anarcheological practice. Both insist
on the utopian potential within archaeology. As well, it refers to the search for a world not
identical to the one we experience(d). Essentially, this means to oppose the factual space
of past presents with—to use Winnicott’s term—a potential space and let both, however
tensely, approach each other. We know this from psychology and philosophy. Not only
is the freedom of the individual will compatible with the notion of a preordained world,
it inhabits it. One is unthinkable without the other. Organizzar il trasumanar (to organize
transgression)—with this beautiful paradox Pier Paolo Pasolini described the essential
dimensions of his work as poet, painter, and director. The free artistic will evolves from the
insight and the sentiment, that the factual, experienced world is limited and full of ruptures,
incompletion, and dissonance. It is one of the privileges of art to productively transform
the resulting suffering by means of the creative process. Creative energy amounts to the
ability to transgress the nitude of our existence into a more open pluriverse.
Bibliography
Blanchot, M. 1971. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard.
Buckley, B. and J. Conomos, eds. Forthcoming.
Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory. London:
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Derieux, F., ed. 2007. Harald Szeemann: Individual
Methodology. Zürich: JRP Ringier and Grenoble:
Le Magasin.
Fludd, R. 1617. Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et
Minoris, Metap(h)ysica, Physica atque Technica
Historia. Tomus Primus: de Macrocosmi Historia
in duos tractatus divisa. Oppenheim: Johann.-
Theod. de Bry.
Foucault, M. 2014. On the Government of the
Living: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1979-1980. Translated by G. Burchell. Basing-
stoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1057/9781137491824
Giannetti, C., ed. 2014. AnArchive(s) – eine minimale
Enzyklopädie zur Archäologie und Variantologie
der Künste und Medien. Köln: Verlag der Buch-
handlung Walther König und Edith-Russ-Haus für
Medienkunst Oldenburg.
Godard, J.-L. 1980. Introduction à une véritable his-
toire du cinéma. Volume 1. Paris: Albatros.
____.and Y. Ishaghpour. 2005. Cinema: The Archaeol-
ogy of Film and the Memory of a Century. Trans-
lated by J. Howe. Oxford: Berg.
Herbert, N. 1999. “Werner Alone Has Looked on
Reality Bare: Proposal for a Really New ‘New
Physics’.” In Ars Electronica: Facing the Future:
A Survey of Two Decades, edited by T. Druckrey
with Ars Electronica, 101–106. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. First published in 1990.
Irrgang, D., ed. Forthcoming. Forum zur Genealogie
des Mediendenkens. Volume 3: Siegfried Zielinski
im Gespräch mit Nils Roeller, Knut Ebeling, VALIE
EXPORT, Otto Roessler, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.
Berlin: Kadmos Publishers.
König, G. M. 1963. “Interview with Nam June Paik.”
Magnum 47: 32–34.
Link, D. Forthcoming. Archaeology of Algorithmic
Artefacts. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.
Ward, M. 2012. “Restoration Award for Love Let-
ter Writer.” BBC News, 12 October. Available
online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technol-
ogy-19922414
Zielinski, S. 2015 “Künstlerische Anarchive—Herkün-
fte als Ressource für Zukünfte.” In Am Rande der
Archive, edited by F. Schmieder and D. Weidner.
Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.
Siegfried Zielinski is Michel Foucault Chair at the European Graduate School, and Chair of Media
Theory, with a focus on Archaeology and Variantology of Media, in the Institute for Time Based Media
at the Berlin University of Arts. Address for correspondence: Universitat der Kunste Berlin, Institut fur
zeitbasierte Medien, Grunewaldstr 2-5, D-10823 Berlin, Germany. Email: zig7@udk-berlin.de
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126 Forum
Collective Re-Excavation and Lost
Media from the Last Century of British
Prehistoric Studies
n Jennifer Wexler
British Museum, London, UK
jwexler@britishmuseum.org
n Andrew Bevan
University College London, UK
a.bevan@ucl.ac.uk
n Chiara Bonacchi
University College London, UK
c.bonacchi@ucl.ac.uk
n Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert
University College London, UK
adi.keinan.09@ucl.ac.uk
n Daniel Pett
British Museum, London, UK
dpett@britishmuseum.org
n Neil Wilkin
British Museum, London, UK
nwilkin@britishmuseum.org
The archive is traumatic, testimony not to a successful encounter with the
past but to a […] “missed encounter with the real”—that is, an allegory of
the impossible bridging of a gap. (Ernst 2013, 114)
As we approach the “media” used to record and store archaeological data over the
last century or so, Huhtamo’s (2010) denition of media archaeology as a “historically-
attuned enterprise” that involves “excavating forgotten media-cultural phenomena”
certainly seems apt to describe the types of processes involved. How do we begin to
contemplate the thousands of forgotten archaeological archives hidden away in reposi-
tories (for example, see Figure 1) all over the world? These lost worlds where many
scholars have toiled away for years, trying to record every detail and bit of information
(Figure 2) available about rare and precious archaeological objects in an attempt to
bring order and understanding to an almost incomprehensible past seems now like a
most Sisyphean task.
The physical “media” of choice was often the index card, a type of heavy paper cut to
a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. Invented
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127Media Archaeologies
Figure 1.
Card Index storage at the British Museum (© J. Wexler CC-BY).
Figure 2.
Newspaper clipping from 1920 calling for public assistance in setting up the National
Bronze Age Implement Index (NBAI), by the British Association Committee.
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128 Forum
by Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, in the mid-1760s (Müller-Wille and
Scharf 2009), it is an Enlightenment tool for classifying the world that became ubiquitous
in museums and archives by the Victorian era of extensive collecting.
While stored in a xed, conventional order (Figure 3), often alphabetically, index cards
could be retrieved and shufed around at will to update and compare information at any
time. This employment of a at surface (a map, a list, a le, a census, the wall of a gal-
lery, a card index, a repertory), has, as Latour has pointed out, commonly enabled one
to “master” a question or to “dominate” a subject (1986, 19). The standardized index
card allowed for a “pliable combinability” of texts and objects, produced at a distance
from their point of origin, which could be assembled into new networks and relation-
ships (Bennett 2013, 39). This opened up new ways to compare and organize objects,
collections, and cultures (see Harrison 2014 for further discussion). For archaeological
archives, card indexes tended to be used to classify types of objects, which were then
led according to the typological and chronological information contained in the cards,
certainly in the hopes of “mastering” a time period or object type.
The cards and documents illustrated here come from the National Bronze Age Index
(NBAI) stored at the British Museum (BM), developed in 1913 as one of the rst cata-
logues to document British and European prehistory on a large scale. Known as the
“principal instrument of research in the British Bronze Age”, the main concept behind
the creation of the Index was the idea that by compiling a corpus of all Bronze Age
Figure 3.
Index cards at the Institute of Archaeology Archive, University of Oxford (© J. Wexler
CC-BY).
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129Media Archaeologies
metal objects found in the various museums and collections across the UK, it would be
possible for the rst time for researchers to study “the movements of peoples and trade
through the exhaustive study of the distributions of certain types of implements and
weapons used in the period”. This corpus took the form of an illustrated card catalogue
(employing 25 × 18 cm Globe-Wernicke Co. standard ling cards), with each index card
detailing object nd spots and types, alongside detailed line drawings and a wide range
of further information about the object’s context of discovery, illustrated below. For over
80 years, it represented the highest standards of Bronze Age object studies, eventually
containing around 30,000 double-sided cards, and was worked on by numerous well-
known prehistorians and former BM curators, most famously Christopher Hawkes in
the 1930s–1960s and Stuart Needham in the 1970s–1990s.
The amount of information contained on such cards could be extensive and intriguing.
Often we see a tension exhibited in these cards between systematization (Figure 4) and
free-form narrative (Figure 5), beautiful typological drawings and quick sketches (Figure
6), classication and creativity. The human hand, though, is always present in what we
see, bringing to mind Harris’s conception of an archive as
a crucible of human experience, a battleground for meaning and
signicance, a babel of stories, a place and a space for complex and ever-
shifting power-plays. Here one cannot keep one’s hands clean.
(Harris 2002, 85)
Figure 4.
Systemized National Bronze Age Index (NBAI) card elds (© Trustees of the British
Museum CC-BY).
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130 Forum
Figure 5.
One of the index card records with extensive narrative from the National Bronze Age
Index (NBAI) (© Trustees of the British Museum CC-BY).
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131Media Archaeologies
Figure 6.
Variations in Index card illustrations from sketches to measured typographic drawings (© Trustees of the British Museum CC-BY).
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132 Forum
Beyond recording typological data, often these cards contain additional information
(Figure 7) offering fascinating insights into the circumstances of the object’s discovery.
There is serendipity in the archives, as well. We have cards that record donations
by Queen Victoria (Figure 8) to the BM of a bronze axe found in Windsor Great Park in
1866. Another card (Figure 9) records an object discovered in 1808 at Osmington Hill,
Dorset whilst cutting a hill gure dedicated to King George III, who would often pass by
on his way to his seaside residence at Weymouth. In these cases, and many others, the
cards’ record of historical moments or connections to signicant personages seems to
eclipse their primary function as a record of archaeological artefacts.
The cards also begin to act as a sort of proxy for the objects themselves, an idea of
materiality. The records are descriptions of something material on a medium that is a
“material” itself, but in reality it is the information itself that is the historical artefact and
the main objects of study (Newman 2011, 9). Consequently, the record of the human
interaction (Figure 10) with these archives proves to be just as fascinating to study as
the information actually contained in the records, as contributors to the eld of history
of archaeology can certainly attest to (for example, see Murray 2014).
Figure 7.
“X” marks the spot. Detail of a NBAI card, showing the ndspot of a spearhead (©
Trustees of the British Museum CC-BY).
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133Media Archaeologies
Figure 8.
NBAI card recording the donation of a bronze palstave axe found in Windsor Park in
1866 and donated by Queen Victoria to the British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum
CC-BY).
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Figure 9.
NBAI card recording a anged axe “discovered in cutting out an equestrian gure of
the king” from Osmington Hill, Dorset (© Trustees of the British Museum CC-BY).
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135Media Archaeologies
Along with the connected archival material, the cards exhibit the curatorial practices
at the time of recording. Many have been altered numerous times as classication
schemes and recording procedures have changed over time, documenting not only the
basic archaeological information but also the history of shifting archaeological practices.
The Index varied between being a public reference collection to being a tool for private
research largely depending on the whims of the person and institutions in charge of it. This
is most obviously played out from 1955–1965, when the Index was loaned from the BM,
where it was publically accessible, to the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University under
the supervision of Professor Christopher Hawkes, the new Chair of European Archaeol-
ogy. The reasoning behind this move was that he had been in charge of the Index when
he was an Assistant Keeper in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the
BM and he was “wishing to supervise its re-classifying, indexing, and augmentation”.1
While Hawkes did greatly enhance the Index, it very much became his personal research
collection, kept away from both the public and other scholars, and which he used to
pursue his theories of Bronze Age metalwork chronologies (see Bradley 2013 for further
discussion). This is most visibly seen (Figure 11) in his reorganization of the entire Index
1. British Museum Bronze Age Index archive history le.
Figure 10.
Hawkes’s book recording “Bronze Research Expenses” in connection to his work on the
Index at the Institute of Archaeology’s Archive, University of Oxford (© J. Wexler CC-BY).
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136 Forum
according to his (unpublished) typological scheme, the particulars (Figure 12) of which
have only recently been rediscovered and catalogued at the Institute of Archaeology’s
archive. The Index became a public reference collection once again after being returned
to the BM in 1966, although it was not actively researched again until 1973 when Stuart
Needham took over its stewardship, and was largely abandoned by the 1990s.
Figure 11.
A box of index cards exhibiting Hawkes’s schematic reorganization of the Index from
1954–1965 (© J. Wexler CC-BY).
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137Media Archaeologies
Switching “Media” from Old to New
The multi-layered history of card indexes in archaeological studies is equally intriguing
to study and complicated to deal with. How can we approach or, indeed, “excavate”
these antiquated media sources to both draw meaning and data from these overlooked
archives as well as make them relevant to modern communities?
Index cards continue to act as “mobilization devices”, allowing access to informa-
tion and data about a physical object without actual interaction with this object in the
physical world (Latour 1986, 10). However, although indexes are a good example of a
type of mustering technology in which dispersed items of knowledge are codied and
brought into the centre for agonistic (e.g. academic, imperial, economic, nationalist)
arguments, in reality the politics of aggregation and dispersal often makes these indexes
largely inaccessible. The widespread notion that archives are, as Parikka (2013:1) states,
“slightly obsolete and abandoned places where usually the archivist or the caretaker
is someone swallowed up in the dusty corridors”, often hidden away from the public
is not completely false, unfortunately. In the case of the NBAI, for example, although it
has been moved around over the last hundred years, as mentioned previously, it has
remained for much of its existence in a largely inaccessible, off-site BM storage facility
where its visitors’ book records only six visitors over the course of 30 years (though
conspicuously this does include everyone who has ever written signicant books on
Figure 12.
Hawkes’s reworking of Late Bronze Age sword types, Institute of Archaeology’s
Archive, University of Oxford (© J. Wexler CC-BY).
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138 Forum
Bronze Age metalwork during that period). Even if this Index and others were more
accessible, specialist knowledge would still be needed to even begin to approach such
large behemoths of information. Wide-scale dispersal, therefore, has not been generally
possible but new forms of media and digital engagement perhaps now offer us innovative
inroads into some of these issues (for example, see Bonacchi 2012; Richardson 2013).
As part of the MicroPasts Project, the digitization of the entire Bronze Age Index has
been undertaken. This project is focused on demonstrating how the interplay between
reassessing archaeological archives and the employment of new technologies can
open up new avenues of research and public engagement. The MicroPasts project
employs an open-source crowd-sourcing platform (Figure 13) in order to solicit help
from members of the public, also known as “citizen scientists” or “citizen archaeolo-
gists”, to assist us with transcribing these cards (Bevan et al. 2014; Bonacchi, Pett and
Keinan-Schoonbaert 2014; Bonacchi, Pett, Keinan-Schoonbaert et al. 2014; Doherty
2014; Keinan-Schoonbaert 2014).2
Reecting the existing physical organization of the Index, pictured in Figure 1, each
“app” generally represents one “drawer” (e.g. Drawer A9: Palstaves) organized by object
type and geographical location, and each individual card in the drawer is scanned at
2. For the MicroPasts Project and the crowd-sourcing programme see http://micropasts.org and
http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org
Figure 13.
Crowd-sourcing platform for MicroPasts (http://micropasts.org), each new “app”
represents one “drawer” of index cards.
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139Media Archaeologies
a high resolution, available via our Flickr site3 and stored in three secure locations for
backup integrity. For each transcription app, the MicroPasts collaborators are prompted
to ll in a structured eld interface (Figure 14) based on the contents of the cards, and
the completed transcribed data is available for download from the project’s website
under an open license. These data will eventually be incorporated into the Portable
Antiquities Scheme’s database,
4
which on its own includes over one million objects
(of which over 15,000 are attributed to the Bronze Age) discovered by the public in
England and Wales, eventually making the NBAI records not only easily accessible to
the public but also creating possibly the largest national database of prehistoric metal
nds anywhere in the world.
In a way, we are attempting to fulll the original intentions of the creators of the NBAI
from the early twentieth century (Figure 2), by once again calling on the public’s help with
documenting and transcribing the archive as well as making the Index a fully renewed
publicly-accessible resource. Crowd-sourcing, therefore, can be seen as an act of
knowledge aggregation by the dispersed-many rather than the aggregated-few. These
processes can be connected to the concept of the “collaborative museum”, where the
museum can be viewed as a series of “anthropological assemblages mobilized through
existing and emerging scientic-administrative and public-civic apparatuses” creating
3. http://ickr.com/photos/micropasts
4. https://nds.org.uk
Figure 14.
MicroPasts’ interface for transcribing data from the digitized index card.
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140 Forum
new social actions and networks (Bennett 2013; Harrison 2014, 231). By changing the
medium of the Index via digital technologies, we are removing the institutional controls,
for better or worse, and distributing the agency of this data.
Why are people so intrigued to help with this project? While this is something we will
be looking at more closely in the future, perhaps it is because it removes the “remote-
ness” of the archives both symbolically and physically. By digitizing records formerly only
accessible to a few experts and museum staff, they are suddenly becoming democra-
tized, open-access resources for anyone to engage with, albeit with the existing but,
arguably, progressively shrinking, limits of a digital divide. It took a new infrastructure of
communicating realities—the impact of digital media—to put this critique of historical
discourse into media-archaeological terms and practice. In an age of renewed archival
fever, the re-aggregation and digital mustering of old archives, along with the virtual re-
aggregation of object collections via 3D proxies (Figure 15), is also a very popular act.
Co-production of archaeological data not only removes the traditional idea of “authority”
(Richardson 2013), opening up the possibilities for multi-vocal engagement with the
Figure 15.
A 3D model of a Bronze Age palstave shown in the MicroPasts WebGL 3D viewer
(©Trustees of the British Museum CC-BY).
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141Media Archaeologies
archival record; it gives people a sense of what archaeologists and archivists actually
do and the means to actively help them with their work. On the MicroPasts forum, one
of the users, for example stated:
Part of the appeal (of the transcriptions) for me is seeing how the original
authors put a little bit of themselves into their record cards, and obviously
took pride in analyzing and recording the artefacts. I’m just completing a
card now in which the patina is described as “Beautiful apple green”.
(curiouscraig42 2014)
This engagement and ongoing dialogue about the Index also create new archival records
of human interaction via social media (Twitter, Facebook), adding to our archival layer cake.
While this switch in media from a physical, paper format to a digital database for
archiving archaeological data not only makes this information increasingly Cartesian—e.g.
mathematical objects recorded using binary code—the forms in which data are stored
and in which they are presented become distinct entities, unlike their paper antecedent
(Ernst 2013, 83, 93, 115). Now the image on the screen is just a digital representation
or surrogate of the data encoded within, useful as a tool for further research and data
processing but far removed from its original format. With growing digital accessibil-
ity comes the increasing responsibility to preserve and update these digital archives
as well as the paper ones they represent, especially if we view the digital record as a
modern piece of material culture (Newman 2011, 9). Ultimately one type of media does
not completely replace the other, but greater utilization of digital media simply changes
and extends the terms of engagement, accessibility, and the ow of information from
antiquated archaeological archives to the community and back again.
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duction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology.”
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pia.431
Jennifer Wexler is Bronze Age Index Manager in the MicroPasts Project at the British Museum and an
honorary research associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Address for correspondence: Depart-
ment of Digital & Publishing, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, UK. Email:
jwexler@britishmuseum.org
Andrew Bevan is Professor of Spatial and Comparative Archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeol-
ogy. Address for correspondence: UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31–34 Gordon Square, London WC1H
0PY, UK. Email: a.bevan@ucl.ac.uk
Chiara Bonacchi is a Research Associate on the MicroPasts and MicroPasts Knowledge Exchanges
Projects at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Address for correspondence: UCL Institute of Archaeology,
31–34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK. Email: c.bonacchi@ucl.ac.uk
Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert is a digital curator at the British Library and an honorary research associate
at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Address for correspondence: UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31–34
Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK. Email: adi.keinan.09@ucl.ac.uk
Daniel Pett is the former ICT ofcer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme (nds.org.uk) and is now devel-
oping of creative digital projects at the British Museum. He is an Honorary Lecturer at the UCL Institute
of Archaeology. Address for correspondence: Department of Digital & Publishing, British Museum, Great
Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, UK.Email: dpett@britishmuseum.org
Neil Wilkin is Curator of the British and European Bronze Age collection at the British Museum. Address
for correspondence: Department of Britain, British Museum, Europe, and Prehistory, Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3DG, UK. Email: nwilkin@britishmuseum.org
© 2015 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD
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ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v2i1.27134
143Media Archaeologies
Hemerochronia, or, Take a Walk on the
Wild Side of Time: Sideline Snippets on
Media Archaeology
n Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
University of British Columbia, Canada
winthrop@mail.ubc.ca
Media archaeology presents the latest instalment in a 200-year sequence of illicit affairs
pursued by restless disciplines eager to escape their domestic connement. It is a lively
story with all the trappings of a 19th-century boulevard comedy and a touch of Jane Austen:
Many years ago—in fact, as far back as Austen’s gentry days—there was a
stately manor called The Humanities. At the time (and many years thereafter)
it was ruled over by a slightly Pompous Father known as History. Pompous
Father did not start out in this exalted position. He had pushed aside Dotty
Grandmother (a.k.a. Theology) and conned her to the basement; and
his subsequent rise to lordly status relied on a steady stream of primarily
German valets teaching him how to behave in more dignied fashion.
In time, Pompous Father came to be surrounded by a bevy of spritely
daughters and stepdaughters: all of them very bright and very ambitious,
and therefore very bored with life in the stuffy manor. One day a Handsome
Stranger called Archaeology arrived in the neighbourhood. He had potential
and was unattached; and since it is a truth universally acknowledged that
a young discipline in possession of cultural capital must be in want of
interdisciplinary collaboration, he set the sisters’ hearts autter. One after
the other, they proceeded to seduce him. The rst tryst involved Spinsterish
Daughter a.k.a. Philosophy, but it was such a blink-of-the-eye affair that
hardly anybody witnessed it. The second affair united Handsome Stranger
with Erratic Stepdaughter, whom we know as Psychoanalysis. It lasted a
bit longer, and though it was for the most part restricted to the exchange
of delicate metaphors, nearby villagers fondly remember it to this day. By
contrast, the third affair, with Liberated Daughter (a.k.a. Cultural Studies), was
a no-holds-barred, on-again-off-again romance that hit every hayloft in the
surrounding. Indeed, it went on for so long that it bracketed famous affair #4
with Francophone Cerebral Daughter (History of Ideas), a liaison which many
say affected Handsome Stranger more deeply than any other. And then there
was—or rather: is, since we’ve arrived in the present—the ongoing dalliance
with Scrappy Stepdaughter, whom we know as Media Studies.
If this were no more than a steamy chronicle of interdisciplinary elopements, things
would be easy. But in ways that anticipate the snippets to follow, matters become
complex and threaten to defy conventional plotlines. The affairs have been going on
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144 Forum
for two centuries, so it is doubtful whether Handsome Stranger was always one and
the same Handsome Stranger—maybe earlier trysts were carried out with his father
or grandfather? There are hints of incest, for it appears that Handsome Stranger and
Scrappy Stepdaughter are very closely related. To make matters worse, evidence is
mounting that Scrappy Stepdaughter is in fact the result of a hushed-up encounter
between Dotty Grandmother and a farmhand and therefore maybe the rightful owner
of the mansion. Anyway, in the end—well, we haven’t reached the end yet.
Knut Ebeling’s 767-page study Wilde Archäologien (2012) offers a slightly more exten-
sive and judicious account of these topsy-turvy affairs. Each sister receives her own
chapter and appropriate genitive designation: Kant and the archaeology of metaphysics;
Freud and the archaeology of the soul; Benjamin and the archaeology—he preferred
Urgeschichte—of modernity; Foucault and the archaeology of knowledge; Kittler and
the archaeology of media. If we superimpose Ebeling’s diachronic analysis on recent
synchronic studies, such as Jussi Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology? (2012), the
result is a crosshairs enabling us to target an important affect that ties together these
compound archaeologies. It is already present in Kant, the Spinsterish Daughter (and
equally spinsterish philosopher). In trying to give an account of the unfolding of Western
metaphysics, Kant resorted to archaeology to make the case that there cannot be a
history of metaphysics, since you cannot give an empirical account of the transcenden-
tal. History narrates, archaeology describes; history elaborates sequence, archaeology
traces structures; history revolves around the relationship between events and interpreta-
tions, archaeology centres on the relationship between conditions and unfoldings. Wild
archaeologies, then, are as much appropriations of archaeology as they are rejections
of historiography. It is the daughters’ rebellion against Pompous Father’s stuffy regime.
We are dealing with an affect against hemerochronia (from Greek hémeros for tame or
cultivated); that is, against the ongoing attempt to tame time and have it jump through
the hoops of established historiographical narratives.
No wild archaeology manifests this tendency more clearly and vociferously than media
archaeology. Scrappy Stepdaughter, especially when she puts on a German accent,
is Pompous Father’s most rebellious offspring. The effect appears in the three different
ways in which media archaeology is currently inected. There are no clear boundaries
between them; consider the following three inections areas of increased density in a
broad conceptual spectrum.
First, media archaeology is the excavation, resuscitation, and maybe even redemp-
tion of media dead, lost, poor, unwashed, forgotten, discarded, silenced, repressed,
or simply too inconspicuous to have been noticed before. We have plural narratives,
emphatically de-capitalized media histories from the bottom up and inside out, alterna-
tive micro-archaeologies, technological counter-histories, media uchronias—all taking
aim at the established capital-H Media Histories emanating from classrooms and cable
TV. But as rebellious as they may be, from a narratological point of view they are still
pretty conventional. The winners and losers change, the emplotments do not. Scrappy
Stepdaughter is redesigning her rooms, she has not yet deserted or levelled the mansion.
The radical implications of this media-archaeological inection emerge in Parikka’s
most recent work, which may be described as a descent into dust and debris. Dust, that
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145Media Archaeologies
amorphous substance of uncertain parentage accumulating in the corners and recesses
where nature and culture intersect, is a splendid signifer to highlight what happens when
media archaeology, going beyond the excavation of all the overlooked media, extends
into media geology. The line between the two disappears in its crossing: gray ecologies
of documents and artefacts merge with green ecologies of soil and stone. Yet these are
no longer only ecologies of mutually benecial interactions, but also of mutually harmful
entanglements. As Parikka emphasizes, our growing, multi-layered media structures are
discarding so much debris that it requires an archaeological approach. Media become
troublesome matter that needs to be dug through – much like the landlls targeted in
William Rathje’s garbology. There appears to be an intriguing chiasm at the heart of
the relationship between archaeology and media archaeology: while archaeologists are
increasingly treating their matter as media, media theorists are increasingly treating their
media as archaeological matter.
Media archaeology’s second inection is the technological update of Foucault’s archae-
ology of knowledge. Scrappy Stepdaughter and Handsome Stranger are replaying the
affair the latter had with Cerebral Daughter. Or, to provide the proper names, Kittler is
extending and—in every conceivable sense of the word—grounding Foucault. As is well
known, the key concept is the (in Foucault’s own assessment) “rather barbarous” historical
a priori, which Kittler and others updated into a technological a priori, but which is in any
case an archival a priori. As is equally well known, the term “archive” not only signies a
depository but also successive sets of ruling conditions that are both within history in as
far as they each on their own determine a nite regime of time, and without in as far as
they (1) defy attempts to weave together successive regimes into a continuous narrative,
and (2) raise the epistemological quandary of how one is to reect on the conditions that
determine such reection in the rst place. Foucault—this is a key attraction of his darkly
glamorous prose—is a great deal more eloquent when explaining what things are not than
what they are. Hence it is at times difcult to navigate his meandering negations; but the
key dynamic here is the distinction between the ongoing discontinuity associated with
archaeology and the changing continuity associated with history.
To be sure, Foucault’s wild archaeology does not simply turn time into space. It does
“not set out to treat as simultaneous what is given as successive. […] What it suspends is
the theme that succession is an absolute” (1972, 169). Very well. But it is at times difcult
to avoid the suspicion that these sophisticated elaborations, especially in the hands of
those pillaging Foucault’s toolbox, are haunted by temptations of immediacy. Could it be
that the appeal to archaeology is also driven by the—somewhat naive—perception that
monuments and ruins are immediate irruptions of the past into the present? That archaeol-
ogy therefore promises an absence of mediation, a liberating escape from the domestica-
tions of historiography?1 Freud’s fetish of the shovel (which is not a phallus but, really, is
1. Of course the opposite is just as true. The presence of the past in a decayed shape which the past
did not have in mind—call it the Ozymandias effect —allows for an equally decisive rupture (cf. Rieger
2014, 137). In this case, the termination of mediation is linked to the power of the present over the
past. Think, here, of power as described by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power as Survival. To para-
phrase: excavations are battles in and across time; and the supreme moment of power is at the end of
the battle: all the others are dead, I am alive.
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a shovel) is well known and encapsulated in his metaphoric praise of non-metaphorical
archaeological matter: Saxa loquuntur! (The stones speak!) The unconscious with its scars
from decades past is not subject to time: it is (and emanates) here and now. At the risk
of drawing the ire of past academic decades, I would argue that in this respect media
archaeology resembles the great trauma fetish of the 1990s (as well as the concurrent
body fetish). Trauma, for all its pain, still indicated some kind of direct contact, a time-
defying short-circuit that cuts through all mediation. Archaeology—at least a somewhat
amateurish conceptualization of archaeology—appears to promise something similar. It
is as if we never quite left the 1:1 universe of Heinrich Schliemann. He was, after all, an
accountant and businessman, for whom numbers translated as directly into money and
goods as Homer’s words into historical reality. Some layers of media archaeology—Kittler’s
“cleartext” obsession is the most agrant example—are still losing the battle against the
closely related temptations of immediacy and literalness. But this ahistorical construction
deprives archaeology of its own history. The archaeology Kant had in mind differed from
that which obsessed the hobby archaeologist Freud; and it had changed fundamentally
by the time Foucault appeared. Handsome Stranger wasn’t always that handsome; and
he wasn’t always a stranger.
The third, most radical instantiation, for which the work of Wolfgang Ernst may serve
as an example, consists of a further radicalization of the anti-hemerochronic impulse (see
especially Ernst 2012, 347–453; further see Winthrop-Young 2015). It effectively installs
media as their own archaeologists and thereby removes the human subject. Analogue
and digital media do not only allow for the time-axis manipulation of stored data; the
enacting performance—in bad Heideggerian English: the presentizing Vollzug— of past
media effectively undercuts the hemerochronic channelling of time that separates past
and present. The archaeology of media insists that the time of media is no longer history.
At this point (if not earlier), historians will interject that this view of their trade is no less
egregious a simplication than the corresponding romanticization of archaeology. Media
archaeologists seem to be behaving like rebellious teenagers who need their parents
to be boorish tyrants. Pompous Father, however, was never that pompous. Clearly,
historians have been willing to engage in alternate chronicities. Think of Fernand Brau-
del’s tripartite division of time into the environmental histoire immobile at the bottom of
history, the sluggish cycles of material culture in the middle, and frothy human events at
the top, or of Braudel’s non-linear update by Manuel DeLanda (1997). (And meanwhile
Dotty Grandmother in her basement is clamouring that all this, somehow, is already at
play in Thomas Aquinas with his temporal layers made up of God’s eternity, the aevum of
saints and angels, and the temporal existence of mere mortals.) But this media archae-
ology goes further. What we are dealing with is the perspective that time may dissolve
into a ash of strings and bursts in ways that recall the dissolution of space and matter
on the smallest subatomic scale. Time becomes a strange amorphous beast: folded,
intersected, and recursively processed; and the media archaeologist emerges as a time
whisperer in synch with the alien or untamed—the xeno- or agriochronic—noise of time.
“At its best,” Parikka writes, media archaeology establishes “a problematization and
a rethinking of such fundamental questions as what even counts as media” (Parikka
2012, 79). Exactly. And more: it raises the question of what counts as time, and to what
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147Media Archaeologies
extent time—literally and metaphorically—counts. Scrappy Stepdaughter leaves the
mansion to take a walk on the wild side of time.
Bibliography
DeLanda, M. 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History. New York: Zone Books.
Ebeling, K. 2012. Wilde Archäologien 1: Theorien
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Ernst, W. 2012. Gleichursprünglichkeit. Zeitwesen
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Cambridge: Polity.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young teaches in the German and Scandinavian sections of the Department
of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. Address for
correspondence: Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver Campus 222–1873, East Mall Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1. Email: winthrop@
mail.ubc.ca
