Archive
MediArXiv open archive launches
We are thrilled to announce that MediArXiv—the free, nonprofit, scholar-led digital archive for media, film and communication studies—is officially launching this week. MediArXiv is an open platform, hosted by the Center for Open Science, for media, film, and communication scholars to upload working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published manuscripts. The service accepts articles, books, and book chapters, and we plan to support multimedia submissions in the future:
FAQs are available on our companion site:
MediArXiv joins the growing movement started by the math/physics/computer science-oriented http://arXiv.org over 25 years ago, as one of the first full-fledged “preprint” servers conceived for humanities and social science scholars. Our aim is to promote open scholarship across media, film, and communication studies around the world. In addition to accepting and moderating submissions, we plan to advocate for policy changes at the major media, film, & communication studies professional societies around the world—to push for open-access friendly policies, in particular, for the journals that these associations sponsor.
Commenting on the launch of MediArxiv, professor Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths) stated:
“MediArXiv offers an open access platform to share research run by and for researchers. Its growing community of scholars and papers in media and communications opens international dialogues on scholars’ own terms. Our field is especially critical of the operations of power and money in cultural evolution: here is a practice that turns critique into an new actuality we can all learn from.”
MediArxiv is launching with a 17-member Steering Committee of scholars and open access advocates from around the world. The Committee includes members from five continents, every rank (including graduate students), and along gender and other lines of equity. We support submissions in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Portugeuse, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Turkish:
MediArXiv was initiated by the nonprofit Open Access in Media Studies:
As a free, nonprofit, community-led digital archive, MediArXiv is fully committed to the Fair Open Access principles:
https://www.fairopenaccess.org/
The Center for Open Science (our hosting partner) press release:
https://cos.io/about/news/center-open-science-mediarxiv-and-bodoarxiv-la…
Please consider submitting your manuscripts to MediArXiv, and thank you for your support.
The MediArXiv Steering Committee
* Jeff Pooley, Associate Professor of Media & Communication, Muhlenberg College (USA) [Coordinator]
* Jeroen Sondervan, open access expert & and co-founder of Open Access in Media Studies. Affiliated with Utrecht University (Netherlands) [Coordinator]
* Sarah-Mai Dang, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Media Studies, Philipps University Marburg (Germany)
* Lai-Tze Fan, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Digital Media, University of Waterloo (Canada)
* Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies, Birkbeck, University of London (UK)
* Jonathan Gray, Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies, King’s College London (UK)
* Adelheid Heftberger, Head of Film Access, Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) (Germany)
* Leah Lievrouw, Professor of Information Studies, UCLA (USA)
* Nyasha Mboti, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)
* Gabriel Menotti, Associate Professor of Communications, Federal University of Espírito Santo (Brazil)
* Ricardo Cedeño Montaña, Associate Professor of Communications, Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia)
* Maria O’Brien, PhD Candidate, School of Communications, Dublin City University (Ireland)
* Kate O’Riordan, Professor of Digital Culture & Head of School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex (UK)
* Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics, University of Southampton (UK)
* Xiang Ren, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Media and Culture, Western Sydney University (Australia)
* Cheryll Ruth Soriano, Associate Professor of Communication, De La Salle University (Philippines)
* Ece Vitrinel, Assistant Professor of Communication, Galatasaray University (Turkey)
twitter: @mediarxiv
email: mediarxiv@mediarxiv.com
main site: mediarxiv.org
companion site: mediarxiv.com
rss: http://tiny.cc/zwzq4y
github: github.com/orgs/MediArXiv/dashboard
A Museum of Viruses
I just submitted to the publisher the new, 2nd and revised edition of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, a book that came out for the first time with Peter Lang in 2007. Around the time of submission, the new Archive.org online museum of computer viruses was launched and made rounds in the popular press too.
Already in 2002, Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt am Main, Germany engaged in exhibiting viral art its I Love You-Exhibition. Curator Franziska Nori expressed the importance of this topic: museums and cultural centres need to engage with this new form of cultural activity that tells the story of hackers and programming skills. The museum was to become also a laboratory where new cultural phenomena of digital culture are given a voice.
I wrote a general audience piece about the new Malware museum for The Conversation. For those of you who read German, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote a piece “Unterhaltsame Viren“. The new edition of Digital Contagions should be out by late 2016, or early 2017, just suitably to celebrate its 10th year!
“Sex, annotation, and verité totale”: Kurenniemi’s Archival Futurism
I am very glad to announce that Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 is out from the printers, hot off the (MIT) Press! Edited with curator, writer Joasia Krysa, the book focuses on the Finnish media art pioneer Kurenniemi, and is the key international collection on the curious thinker, sound and media artist-tinkerer, who became known for his remarkable synthetizers and archival futurism. Kurenniemi has gathered attention in the electronic music circles for a longer period of time, and with Documenta 13 he become known in the international art world too. His thoughts and work resonate with the work of other early pioneers; Simon Reynolds once called him a mix of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller, and Steve Jobs. In 2002, Mika Taanila directed the film The Future is Not What It Used to Be about Kurenniemi.
The book includes foreword by the eminent media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo and a range of critical essays on digital culture, archival mania and media arts. Key academic and art writers address Kurenniemi’s work but also more: the condition of the archive and sound arts, sonic fiction and speculative futures of singularity are some of the key themes that run through the book with contributions by many established names in media studies, art and sound technologies. In addition, we included many of Kurenniemi’ own writings over the decades, including some interviews that elaborate his wider computational views of the world, including his thought: by 2040s, the human brain can be completely simulated. His archive plays a key role, like an actor in itself: the archive also featured as a key “object” as part of the earlier Kiasma exhibition and we included some snippets, as well as an extensive visual section.
Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History sits as part of the Leonardo-book series, edited by Sean Cubitt. The book was started by Krysa through her curatorial work at the 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition. It is thanks to Joasia that I am part of the project and she deserves major praise for her amazing eye for detail, enthusiasm and energy in driving this project, from a major exhibition to a book, and more.
Here’s a preview of the book’s table of contents and Huhtamo’s Foreword.
For review copy requests, or other questions, inquiries about the book, please get in touch! We are hosting some book events in Montreal, Helsinki, Berlin and London over the coming months but more info on those separately.
Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, eds Krysa and Parikka
Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid—a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, ”In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi’s multiplicities.
The contributors describe Kurenniemi’s enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi’s achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.
Endorsements
“Sex, annotation, and verité totale: Kurenniemi is a missing mixing desk between so many interesting aspects of late-twentieth-century culture. No wonder he ends up offering us a new archival futurism!”
—Matthew Fuller, Professor, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Providing a long-overdue critical and historical introduction to the amazingly multifaceted work of media pioneer, visionary thinker, and self-archivist Erkki Kurenniemi, this book becomes both a media-archaeological excavation and engaging reflection on the challenges of writing media art history. The range of Kurenniemi’s fascinating practice—including electronic music composition, experimental filmmaking, robotics, and curation—defies traditional classifications, and calls for new historical narratives of media art. Started as a compilation of the long-term research that went into the exhibition of Kurenniemi’s work at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the volume combines highlights of his own writings and interviews with excellent contributions by scholars, contextualizing his archives, art, music, and vision.”
—Christiane Paul, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum
“This book is a major contribution not only to the unprecedented scientific and artistic imagination of Erkki Kurenniemi, but also to the whole research on media and ‘real time.’ The text unveils and critically presents the reader with a series of complex technological and artistic systems exploring the man-machine relationship under the assumption both do have consciousness. Kurenniemi’s work provides us with one of the most solid grounds to examine perception, the brain, the will to speculate and travel back and forth between several realms of knowledge. Kurenniemi is bold; this text is bold and a great contribution to new forms of studying risk taking in art and science.”
—Chus Martínez, Head of the Institute of Art, FHNW Academy of Art and Design
AHRC Funding for the “Internet of Cultural Things”-project
We are happy to announce that the AHRC has granted funding for our Internet of Cultural Things (IoCT) project, a one year research partnership between Kings College London, Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), and the British Library.
The project examines the cultural dimensions of data via the born-digital material generated by the British Library, ranging from items ingested to reading room occupancy to catalogue searches. Through practice-informed research we engage this otherwise hidden cultural data, and hold a series of pop-up installations to make it visible and interfaced with the public to think through our data interconnectedness. By focusing on cultural institutions, we can move beyond the integrated operating system of the ‘Internet of Things’ and its purported productivity gains, efficiencies. Instead, we will use critical creative practice to rethink cultural institutions as living organism of data that is both dynamic and recursive. We propose the IoCT as a concept to discuss this new situation of digital data and cultural institutions.
The project starts in September 2015, and is led by Dr Mark Cote (KCL) as the PI and Prof Jussi Parikka (WSA/Southampton) as the CO-I with partners from the British Library (Jamie Andrews) and collaborating with the artist Dr Richard Wright (London).
The British Library, a data institution.
Image by Richard Wright.
Made By: The Finnish Institute
The Finnish Institute in London has an interview series “Made By”. Alongside earlier interviews with designers, artists, etc., they did a little chat with me which you can find here.
Around the same time as this came out, early February, we had a conversation event at the Institute on historical knowledge, technology and the digital humanities. Notice the Finnish design and wooden materials that characterize the space – a sea of Aalto waiting for the audience.
Recursions: a new book series in media & cultural theory
We are proud to announce the launch of a new book series titled Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality and Cultural Techniques. Placed with Amsterdam University Press, a publisher known for its strong track-record in film and media studies, the series will publish fresh, exciting and important books in media theory. This includes both translations and other volumes that address the core themes outlined below. I am very excited about this project and working with my co-editors Anna Tuschling and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. We have already some significant projects lined up for 2015 and more forthcoming that we will announce in the coming weeks and months. We are supported by a very strong international advisory board. Get in touch if you want to learn more but first read below for more information!
New Series Announcement
The new book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques provides a platform for cutting- edge research in the field of media culture studies with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of communication. The series aims to be an internationally significant and exciting opening into emerging ideas in media theory ranging from media materialism and hardware-oriented studies to ecology, the post-human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contributions to media archaeology.
The series revolves around key themes:
- The material underpinning of media theory
- New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy
- Studies in cultural techniques
These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international media studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge formations and new materialities expressed through biological and technological developments are changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also interested in the mediatic conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing them as media theory.
Forthcoming 2015
- Sybille Krämer – Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy.
- Claus Pias – Computer Game Worlds.
Editorial Board
- Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton)
- Anna Tuschling (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
- Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia)
Advisory Board:
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University, US)
- Geert Lovink (Hogeschool van Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- John Durham Peters (University of Iowa, US)
- Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton University, US)
- Marie-Luise Angerer (University of Arts Cologne, Germany)
- Eva Horn (University of Vienna, Austria)
- Markus Krajewski (University of Basel, Switzerland)
- Erick Felinto (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
- Adalberto Müller (Federal University of Niterói, UFF, Rio de Janeiro)
- Eivind Røssaak (National Library of Norway)
- Steven Connor (Cambridge University, UK)
- Peter Krapp (UC Irvine, US)
- Antje Pfannkuchen (Dickinson College, PA, US)
- John Armitage (Winchester School of Art, UK)
- Till Heilmann (University of Siegen, Germany)
- Isabell Otto (University of Konstanz, Germany)
- Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (University of Bochum, Germany)
- Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths College, London, UK)
- Claus Pias (Leuphana University, Germany)
- Stefan Rieger (University of Bochum, Germany)
- Andrew Murphie (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
- Axel Fliethmann (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia)
- Yuji Nawata (Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan)
Authors’ information
Proposals welcomed
Proposals for monographs or edited volumes should kindly follow the standard AUP Proposal Form (http://en.aup.nl/en/service/authors) and should also include the envisaged table of contents, an overview of the volume and abstracts of the proposed chapters or articles.
Further information
If you are interested in publishing a book with us please contact Jeroen Sondervan, Senior Commissioning Editor for Film & Media Studies at j.sondervan@aup.nl or one of the series editors.
More information about Amsterdam University Press.
The Warhol Forensics
The news about the (re)discovered Andy Warhol-images, excavated by digital forensics means, has been making rounds in news and social media. In short, a team of experts – including Cory Arcangel – discovered Warhol’s Amiga-paintings from 1985 floppy discs. As described in the news story: ”
“Warhol’s Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.” The images are related to the famous Debbie Harry-image Warhol painted on Amiga.
The case is an interesting variation on themes of media art history as well as digital forensics. As Julian Oliver coined it in a tweet:
The media archaeological enters with a realisation of the importance of such methods for the cultural heritage of born-digital content, but there’s more. The non-narrative focus of such methodologies is a different way of accessing what could be thought of as media archaeology of software culture and graphics. The technological tools carry an epistemological, even ontological weight: we see things differently; we are able to access a world previously unseen, also in historical contexts.
But there is a pull towards traditional historical discourses. The project demonstrates a technical understanding of cultural heritage and contemporary software culture but rhetorically frames it as just another part of the art historical/archaeological mythology of rediscovering long lost masterpieces of a Genius. This side still needs some updating so that the technical episteme of the excavation, detailed here [PDF] can become fully realised. Techniques of reverse engineering as well as insights into image formats as ways to understand the technical image need to be matched up with discourse that is able to demonstrate something more than traditional art history by new means. It needs to be able to show what is already at stake in these methods: a historical mapping of the anonymous forces of history, to use words from S. Giedion.
Scholars such as Matt Kirschenbaum have already demonstrated the significant stakes of digital forensics as part of a radical mindset to historical scholarship, heritage and media theory and we need to be able to build on such work that is theoretically rich.
Speculative Scenarios for Digital Art
There is a new book on digital art, archives, preservation and memory out now. Edited by Annet Dekker, Speculative Scenarios, or what will happen to digital art in the (near) future? is an interesting and again timely take on some of the issues that connect media studies with archival specialists, cultural heritage with contemporary digital art practices. There are several great writers in the collection. You can find it online here and a printed version is out soonish too.
On the publisher website, the book is described as follows:
“There is a growing understanding of the use of technological tools for dissemination or mediation in the museum, but artistic experiences that are facilitated by new technologies are less familiar. Whereas the artworks’ presentation equipment becomes obsolete and software updates change settings and data feeds that are used in artworks, the language and theory relating to these works is still being formulated. To better produce, present and preserve digital works, an understanding of their history and the material is required to undertake any in-depth inquiry into the subject. In an attempt to fill some gaps the authors in this publication discuss digital aesthetics, the notion of the archive and the function of social memory. These essays and interviews are punctuated by three future scenarios in which the authors speculate on the role and function of digital arts, artists and art organisations.”
I was interviewed for the book and I talked about topics from zombie media to media archaeology & time, from the media archaeological fundus in Berlin to issues of the social. “In a way, practices – or one could say cultural techniques – of memory are actually what create the social. Perhaps the social doesn’t even exist without the various ways in which memory is sustained, articulated, archived, controlled, passed on, distributed, received, and remixed.”
Saved As: Today’s Media, Tomorrow’s Archive
Our co-organised event at SALT Galata in Istanbul gathered quite a good crowd of people interested in politics and software practices of archives. Together with Burak Arikan, and support from SALT and Winchester School of Art, we were able to get together great insights from academic, curatorial, and software art practice angles on how to think about cultural memory in the technological age. Our initial plan was to focus more on software art and archival question but in the light of past month or so, we wanted to make sure some sort of a connection to Gezi park, Istanbul and Turkey becomes visible. The talks are being uploaded online as video – below mine for those interested. It focused on questions of circulation, media practices, memory and archives in the techno-political context and asked the question of why might a future archivist suddenly find not only cute cat pictures circulating in the internet spaces of June 2013, but also so many penguins. I wanted to reflect on questions of memory and media practices through various examples of the creative visual culture surrounding the past events in Istanbul and Turkey.
We also gathered some follow-up interest. For instance the Today’s Zaman-newspaper interviewed me about the event: “is today’s media tomorrow’s archive?”
Here is Ebru Yetiskin’s article after the event: “Farklı Kaydet: Yeni Medya, Toplumsal Bellekler ve Başka Gelecekler” (in Turkish).
Digital Memory and the Archive is out!
Good news for the start of 2013: the volume of Wolfgang Ernst writings Digital Memory and the Archive is out! The book is soon available in bookstores. The collection that I edited is the first to introduce this very important German media theorist whose style of media archaeology is highly exciting and provocative. Ernst is one of the significant names in the German media studies landscape, and represents one of the directions where theory is going in the post-Friedrich Kittler world.
Ernst’s interest in media archaeology is very material, and insists on the agency of the machine. His theories are interested in material epistemologies and the operationality of old media devices. Media devices govern our ways of seeing and hearing, but also our modes of knowledge. Hence, Ernst’s media theory is a way to understand the change in our archival logic in software culture. But it’s not only about the digital and not only about archives. Indeed, his writings on the sonic and in general media arts are important insights into a meticulous material media theory that represents a unique way to understand the persistence of history and time. Ernst writes his theory through mediatic paths: from television to internet cultures, media arts to archival institutions, Hertzian discoveries to sound.
The collection has a longer introduction by me, as well as the section introductions that I wrote. Ernst was kind enough to write his own preface to this English edition of his writings where he pitches the idea of cross-Atlantic influences and meditation on what is happening in media studies at the moment. An inspiring read. Or in Wendy Chun’s words, quoting her endorsement:
“Digital Memory and the Archive offers the most compelling and insightful account published to date of how and why objects matter. Moving beyond textual analysis, its careful, theoretically rigorous engagement with the relic—the physicality of the archive—promises to change the direction of the digital humanities. Thanks to this book, we will all now be addressing the microtemporality of archives and the mechanics of remaining. Finally, a definitive collection in English of one of the most brilliant and influential media archaeologists.”
Below you will find the short blurb from the publisher University of Minnesota Press website as well as the table of contents.
In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites.
In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society.
Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.
Contents of Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive
Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology , by Jussi Parikka
Media Archaeology as a Trans-Atlantic Bridge, Wolfgang Ernst
Part I. The Media Archaeological Method
1. Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines
2. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media
Part II. From Temporality to the Multimedial Archive
3. Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory
4. Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories
5. Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television
6. Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?
Part III. Microtemporal Media
7. Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point of View
8. Distory: 100 Years of Electron Tubes, Media-Archaeologically Interpreted vis-à-vis 100 Years of Radio
9. Towards a Media Archaeology of Sonic Articulations
10. Experimenting Media‐Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing
Appendix. Archive Rumblings: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst , by Geert Lovink
Machinology 