Machinology

The French translation of What is Media Archaeology? is now out. Titled Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des média? it is translated by Christophe Degoutin and also includes a new preface by Emmanuel Guez from the PAMAL (media archaeology lab) in Avignon.

cover image from Haroon Mirza’s installation.

In his introduction to this book in the context of contemporary media theory, Guez nicely picks up on how my interest is not in building systems nor in ontological definition that nails down media archaeology for good. Instead, the book is a cartography of theoretical and methodological potentials, of paths taken and potentials for development, of necessary cross-fertilization and being aware of the blindspots. Hence this cartography (picking on Deleuze’s writing on Foucault and Rosi Braidotti’s apt ideas) is interested in positions, effects, operations and how media archaeology is exercised – a topic that I have been wanting to engage more recently through the current collaborative work on media (archaeology) labs as places of situated and institutional practice. And in the French context, it surely will resonate with a different set of theoretical heritage, current practices and media discourses than in some other contexts.

Apt timing, the French translation of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film and Typewriter is the same month of January 2018 as well.

For more information and to order the book, see the publisher’s website.

For a recent interview in French, see “Zombies, virus et pollution : comment l’archéologie des médias imagine notre futur.”

For an earlier French translation of the conversation between me and Garnet Hertz on media archaeology, see “Archéologie des media et arts médiaux.“