Radical media archaeology (its epistemology, aesthetics and case studies)

Abstract

Media Archaeology is both a method and an aesthetics of approaching technical objects. Within a broad range of such academic and artistic practices, radical media archaeology will be presented against the soft archaeological metaphor, with an emphasis on Foucault’s approach and the non-human meaning of media-active archaeology. One characteristic of Media Archaeology is its focus on media materialism, analytically or creatively bound to practices like circuit bending. Seductive events like the excavation of once buried computer game cartridges (the E. T. case) request a more code-oriented, critical resistance to the archaeological metaphor, just like media archaeology as artistic research, such as the “Dead Media” project, requires a media-epistemological counter-reading. Diagrammatic Media Archaeography will be proposed as an alternative to culturally familiar narratives of media historiography. A special focus will be placed on video art and preservation where algorithms themselves become the archaeologists of archaic video recordings. The media-archaeological method is about signal “re-presencing” (Sobchack) rather than historicising (as in the cases of early television recording and the Voyager space mission “picture disc”). Media Archaeology as a method of techno-logical research stays close to the signal (be it analog waveforms or digital pulses). Media Archaeography as a mode of representation has been written about already (e.g. Ina Blom’s Autobiography of Video). For the challenge of media time heritage, video art preservation is applied media archaeology.