Media Archaeology

Overview

Media archaeology is a field of media studies that examines new media from a framework informed by critical consideration of the past, particularly concerned with the relationship between new and old media and with lost or obscure media and techniques. Typically, media archaeology's approach to media downplays the traditional concerns and categories of criticism like authorship or even text, in favor of a material culture approach. The framework of media archaeology has primarily been articulated by Finnish new media theorists Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, German film historian Thomas Elsaesser, German media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, and American media studies theorist Anne Friedberg. Originating in about the 1980s and becoming better known in the early twenty-first century, media archaeology is not a purely academic endeavor but one that includes media artists interested in exploring what "new media" means.

Media archaeology is more concerned than some media studies with the materiality of media, emphasizing that even digital media consume physical resources like silicon, lithium, gold, cobalt, and copper, even apart from energy usage. In this view, media studies are material studies, and the history of media is a material history. This overlaps considerably with the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies, which grew out of anthropology, museum studies, and the work of Leslie White (particularly his 1949 Science of Culture). Material culture refers to all the physical elements of a culture, and the consumption and uses of those elements that are engaged in within that culture. Material culture studies examines the relationships between people and those elements and the way meaning is attached to material.

While laypeople may associate archaeology with the recovery and examination of artifacts from ancient cultures, it is more broadly a subfield of anthropology that studies human activity and culture through the lens of its material culture. While prehistoric archaeology and classical archaeology deal with the long-lost cultures of the popular imagination, historical archaeology examines the material culture of more recent eras, while the young field of cognitive archaeology uses material culture to inform theories about how the people of historical cultures thought. Among some of the topics within media archaeology's purview are the role of the military-industrial complex in the emergence of online networks and network culture; the material culture of "hacktivism," the open source movement, and hardware hacking; the cultures of the commercial computing industries; and especially, the creation, dissemination, death, and afterlife of physical media formats. The unexpected resurgence in the twenty-first century of recorded music formats thought long buried—first vinyl records, and then cassettes, even as a previously stable format, the compact disc, declined in popularity—is an area of rich exploration for media archaeology, as is the role of "smart" watches in reviving middle-class interest in personal timepieces after the mobile phone's ubiquity contributed to their decline. In both such cases, there is a complex relationship between old and new technologies, and in particular a shift in the meanings and associations attached to a technology. There are many similar cases, in the online culture of "retrogaming," the use of 8-bit music, and the handling of media franchises, whether through remakes or revivals of television shows, feature film adaptations of old television shows or comic book properties, the transfer of video game franchises across new platforms and technologies, or the many references to white male geek culture in films like Ready Player One.

Further Insights

In the introduction to What Is Media Archaeology? (2012), Parikka discusses steampunk subculture as a symbol of media archaeology's concerns. A combination of twenty-first century sensibilities, Victorian-era aesthetic, and punk's DIY philosophy, steampunk was inspired by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel The Difference Engine, which posited an alternate history in which the computer age arrived in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. Rather than transpose twentieth century material technology onto a nineteenth century setting, though, The Difference Engine—and steampunk in general—reimagines the functions of twentieth and twenty-first century technologies in a nineteenth century material culture: Computers that are mechanical and employ punch cards, steam-powered automobiles, and so on. Steampunk directly challenges the presupposition that technological progress follows a specific path and schedule.

Similarly, media archaeology engages with both old and new media, but uncovers the past not in order to reconstruct history "as it was" but to better understand both the present day and, ideally, the future to come. An axiom in media archaeology is that "new media remediates old media." As the Lego brand becomes associated with new interactive technologies, video games are resurrected as mobile phone games, popular social media accounts resurrect and re-popularize pre-digital media (from 1970s recipe cards to 1920s magazine advertisements), and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performs the Super Mario Bros theme, the line between old and new becomes not only blurred, but also no longer a line.

Media archaeology has numerous theoretical antecedents. The early twentieth century philosopher Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, one of his most influential works, in 1936. Benjamin was particularly concerned with the then-young medium of film and its significance to mass culture. "Mechanical reproduction"—the rise of mass media like film, magazines, and recorded music, but also a practice dating back to woodcut relief printing and other techniques—freed art from the "aura" of the original art work, and from art's "parasitic" relationship to ritual. Benjamin expected these new media, and especially film, to usher in a classless society, by making the means and products of art more easily available and less dependent on the powers that be. Benjamin's ideas had a long-lasting and far-reaching influence on cultural studies and social sciences, but in particular, his focus on the relationships between technology and art/media products is an important precursor to media archaeology.

In 1969, French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault published The Archaeology of Knowledge, expanding on the "archaeological method" he used in his groundbreaking works Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and The Order of Things (1966). Foucault argued that the study of intellectual history (often called the history of ideas, at the time) had several basic methodological flaws, and that its conclusions frequently depended on the implicit existence of continuities between different historical worldviews that ultimately did not seem attested. As an alternative, he proposed a history of ideas as one of the discourses emerging from discursive relationships, in which ruptures are as important as unity.

In the 1980s, the new film history emerged, moving away from the conventional view that film consists of three pillars (photograph, projection, and persistence of vision) in order to foreground the technologies involved in filmmaking and film viewing. It developed in parallel with New Historicism, a movement within literary theory to both understand intellectual history through literature and literature through the cultural context in which it was written, with special reference to material culture. At the time, computers were relatively new technologies for the film world—some experimental computer-animated shorts were made in the 1960s, and computers were used in title animation for some years thereafter, but digital image processing was not used in a feature film until 1973 (in Westworld), and the use of computers in special effects began in earnest several years later with Star Wars (1977) and The Black Hole (1979), culminating with 1982's Tron, the first feature film to make significant use of CGI. Soon more technologies emerged that changed cinema production, and in the twenty-first century, the spread of digital projection, high-definition televisions, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and streaming services constituted the most significant changes to film technology on the viewer's end since cable television and the VCR. 3D technology, which had enjoyed brief faddish popularity in the 1950s and 1980s, even made a return in the twenty-first century, in a perfect example of "new media remediating old media." Perhaps the most influential film historian on media archaeology, though, dealt not with these new technologies, but with the early history of film before the classic Hollywood era began. Tom Gunning's work addressed the material culture surrounding motion pictures from their origins to World War I, and was one of the first historians to situate this period in its own context rather than positioning it as simply the precursor to classic cinema.

In the 1980s and 1990s, much of the work of literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich Kittler contributed to the early development of media archaeology. Kittler has described his work as "driving the human out of the humanities," and positions himself as an opponent of Marshall McLuhan's contention that media are extensions of the human, a view that deemphasizes the material culture of media. Instead, Kittler emphasized the importance of material culture in the history and study of media, from the changing technologies used to write and publish literature to the transistor and the silicon chip, describing such media as existing in a continuum: The human activity of writing continued, and the material culture surrounding the act of writing changed, from clay tablets to papyrus to printing presses to word processing programs sending their output to the cloud. Kittler himself was deeply influenced by Foucault, proposing an endeavor of reading media technology in a framework similar to Foucault's approach to cultural discourse. Kittler is sometimes described as a media archaeologist himself; having died in 2011, around the time the first major books on media archaeology were published, he is perhaps best thought of as a transitional figure, part of the continuum between media archaeology and its antecedents.

Issues

Parikka's work emphasizes a continuum between nature and technology, or material and practice. Media archaeology, like the media studies fields to which it is related, is a field that engages with media from a position that acknowledges that culture and the material world are not separate spheres; in his introduction to A Geology of Media (2015), Parikka points out that the physical changes to the environment wrought during the anthropocene, from climate change to species extinctions, demonstrate that "morals, culture, and geology have something to do with each other." He coined the term "medianature," after feminist historian Donna Haraway's "natureculture"; both terms serve to dismantle the convention of treating those constituent terms (media and nature, nature and culture) as binaries. In Haraway's work, the artificial nature/culture binary is implicated in environmental destruction and anthropogenic climate change, by "othering" the natural world, as well as in racist and misogynistic institutions, by constructing theories of nature that position certain classes of people as closer to nature or "primitive," while those who have moved away from nature are cultured and civilized. Parikka's medianature similarly pushes against a media/nature dichotomy, or the illusion that media exist outside of material culture and the physical world that constitutes it. In the Medianatures anthology that Parikka edited (2011), the emphasis of authors is on the materiality of electronic media: the plastics, wood, glass, and metals used in constructing or accessing old or new electronic media.

Parikka uses the term "geology" in part to explain the approach of media archaeology to history. Modern geology originated in the eighteenth century, and the fundamental idea guiding its study of the earth is that the planet is a stratified system, and in those stratifications are the evidence pertaining to different epochs. The physical composition of the planet is essentially a recording medium on which events from climate fluctuations to tectonic shifts are recorded. Media archaeology similarly approaches the past with a different framing than does the field of history, which typically brackets time periods according to specific political, social, and cultural developments, like the cultural flourishing of the Renaissance, the religious and political changes of the axial age, or the political demarcation of the American Revolution. The framing of the past in media archaeology owes more to the concept of deep time, as popularized by Stephen Jay Gould, that is, a system of dating based on natural events like the appearance of vertebrates or water on Earth, rather than on events in human history. Deep time is also connected to Parikka's contention that media archaeology should consider not only the past but also the future, specifically the role that media production plays in resource depletion and e-waste.

Bibliography

Allred, M. K. (2018). Mormonism and the archaeology of media. Mormon Studies Review, 546–52. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=127026932&site=ehost-live

Born, E. (2016). Media archaeology, cultural techniques, and the Middle Ages: An approach to the study of media before the media. Seminar—A Journal of Germanic Studies, 52(2), 107–133. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=116207284&site=ehost-live

García Bravo, E., Burbano, A., Byrd, V. L., & Forbes, A. G. (2017). The interactive image: A media archaeology approach. Leonardo, 50(4), 368–375. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=124418245&site=ehost-live

Huhtamo, E. & Galili, D. (2022, Feb. 2). The pasts and prospects of media archaeology. Early Popular Visual Culture, (18), 333-39. doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2021.2016195

Parikka, J. (2015.) A geology of media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parikka, J. (Ed.). (2011). Medianatures: The materiality of information technology and electronic waste. Living Books about Life.

Parikka, J. (2015). Sites of media archaeology: Producing the contemporary as a shared topic. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2(1), 8–14. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=116120958&site=ehost-live

Parikka, J. (2012). What is media archaeology?Malden, MA: Polity.

Piccini, A. (2015). Media-archaeologies: An invitation. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2(1), 1–8. Retrieved March 12 2024, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=116120957&site=ehost-live

Punday, D. (2017). Space across narrative media: Towards an archaeology of narratology. Narrative, 25(1), 92–112. Retrieved March 12 2024, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=120237924&site=ehost-live

Roberts, B., and Goodall, M. (2019) New Media Archaeologies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Whitson, R. (2017). Review: Jussi Parikka, digital contagions: A media archaeology of computer viruses. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(7/8), 293–298. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=126706141&site=ehost-live