Archive
The Residual Media Depot summer school
I had the pleasure of being one of the participants in the Media Archaeology summer school in Montreal at the Residual Media Depot (Concordia). Invited by Darren Wershler, and teaching alongside also Lori Emerson, we had a wonderful group of participants from Canada, Finland, USA, UK and Spain whose own projects and their work at the Depot during the week demonstrated a fantastically broad spectrum of what media archaeology can perform.
I could not emphasise the word perform enough: while we engaged with the theoretical limits and limitations of theoretical work in and around media archaeology, including how it interfaces with for example infrastructure studies, the various probes the students presented and the hands-on work in the Depot investigated the idea of collections as part of the methodology. The performative aspect of media archaeology – and theory broadly speaking – allows to both see it as a situated practice that benefits from its access to institutions and collections as well as creates the space for such to exist: to imagine a media archaeology lab or a collection becomes also a projective way of engaging with the current themes of reshifting humanities infrastructure and institutional changes. As Wershler and Lori Emerson, the director of the Media Archaeology Lab at Boulder, Colorado, also underlined, it is through the particular materiality and access to collections that one can think differently in relation to what are often deemed objects of (media) cultural heritage.
Relating the course’s themes to also his own research, Wershler explained how his interest in the cultural life of signals builds on work in the Depot too. To engage in the work of assembly through old but still functioning systems one is led to understand the various ways the life of signals is constantly constructed and re-constructed across multiple fields of agency from hobbyists to the mini-industry building the various technological tools for an afterlife of for example consoles.
Media archaeology embodies multiple temporalities. The different theoretical frameworks from Erkki Huhtamo to Siegfried Zielinski to Wolfgang Ernst are different solutions to the problem of time – how to approach time differently in methodological ways and in ways that understand technical temporality. For example, Ernst’s ways of approaching time criticality and temporal operationality are something that both offer a different ontological take on technology and also can act as interesting guides in how we work with collections such as the Depot.
In my view, the Residual Media Depot was a perfect platform for the workshop. Wershler had designed the week as a mix of theoretical investigations, student probes and practice-based work that functioned somewhere between maker methodologies, art practices and an archival interest in collections that are important for media theory too. The collection is focused on cultures and technologies of gaming with a special focus on consoles, but as Wershler emphasises, it is not a game archaeology depot. The consoles and the material around them is an entry point to media history and signal culture.
In several ways, the Depot’s work aligns nicely with the Media Archaeology Lab but also with our AMT group: to establish a framework and an enabling situation for a research-teaching continuum that is interested as much in practice-based work as it is in explicating what practices of theory are. All of this feeds also as part of the Lab Book we are writing together.
You can find more information about the Depot on their website and on the same site you can find all the student probes from our week of Media Archaeology.
The Residual Media Depot (RMD) is a project of the Media History Research Centre in the Milieux Institute at Concordia University.
Save as: Social Memory
An event in Istanbul – welcome!
Save as: Social Memory
Convened by Burak Arıkan and Jussi Parikka, and in collaboration with SALT and support of Winchester School of Art.
June 26-27, 2013 19:00
SALT Galata Atelier IV, Istanbul
Participants: Burak Arıkan, Joasia Krysia, Nicolas Malevé, Ali Miharbi, Jussi Parikka
One of the major concerns during the Gezi resistance was how to keep our memories, our pain and grief, our anger, our gains, and our losses alive. We tried to preserve our experiences and present them in numerous media. However, we haven’t had the time and means to critically approach to the rapidly growing archives or to create technologically enhanced curated content.
This symposium brings together three artists, a curator, and an academic who works in the area of software art, archive, and media archaeology. Cultural practices that use the language of technology and digital born content from different perspectives of preservation and memory will be debated. How can we preserve the software itself along with the content it generates? In what way should we consider software itself as the creative archive, arche, of our digital culture? What new archival practices does technology-based art and culture present? How do software, social media, and network practices introduce a sphere of counter-representation which curate alternative narratives of the present? Panelists will discuss the topics of archiving the present as we live, algorithmic curating in crisis, critical collective intelligence, and language of technology as a thinking tool.
Programme schedule:
Wednesday June 26th
19:00 Introduction
19:15 Jussi Parikka – Media Archaeology: Archives of the Present
20:00 Nicolas Malevé – Sniff and sneak through my archives
20:45 Ali Miharbi – Language of technology as a thinking tool
Thursday June 27th
19:00 Joasia Krysia – Speculations on Algorithmic Curating
19:45 Burak Arıkan – Counter Collective Intelligence
20:30 Round Table
Abstracts and bios of speakers:
Jussi Parikka – Media Archaeology: Archives of the Present
Media Archaeology has emerged the past years as a dynamic theory about media culture. This refers to the impact it has had in giving a vocabulary for the material constitution of contemporary technical media culture. Media archaeology examines media technical conditions of existence of culture, and as such, is in a good position to frame the relevance of software for questions of the archive.
However, media archaeology is also a way to investigate the ontology of the present: it asks what sorts of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion constitute what we perceive, and what remains unperceived? How is the network conditioning our sense of knowledge and our sense of the everyday? How will the speculative future archivist, looking back at June 2013, see and understand our events and networked condition, conditioned by software as well as its political context.
Jussi Parikka Bio
Dr Jussi Parikka is a media theorist who writes on media archaeology, digital culture and obscure topics from insects to viruses. He is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and author of various books, essays and other writings. His monographs include the award-winning Insect Media: An Archaeology of Insects and Technology, as well as the recent What is Media Archaeology? He blogs at http://jussiparikka.net
Nicolas Malevé – Sniff and sneak through my archives
‘(6/24/1996 9:44pm, Personal)”
Will she (either of them) share the love of pornography? Or at least, art? I shall present myself to both of them as a geniality self-flagellat%n machine. Just one bottle tonight, ok? I shall invite them on to my journey of change, showing the way ahead. Immortality. I will let them to sniff and sneak through my archives. (Erkki Kurenniemi, Newton diary, 1996).
The presentation will take as a point of departure the rich set of documents collected and created by Erkki Kurenniemi, Finnish pioneering electro acoustic musician and inventor of early synthesizers, who obsessively recorded his life. The talk will introduce to the different tools and methods we, Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé, members of the Belgian collective Constant, used to enter in dialog with the vast amount of unclassified documents that constitute the humus for an archive of Kurenniemi’s work.
These tools are our intermediaries, our extra senses to “read” the images, to “listen” to the sounds, to “watch” the videos. The algorithms we borrow, design or customize become our interlocutors. They report back from what they detect, correlate and connect in the different layers of data. They are different voices, each telling a its own story. Having presented these different voices, we will see what happens when other human agents (lawyers, archive institutions) join the dialogue between these intermediaries and ourselves.
Nicolas Malevé Bio
Since 1998 Nicolas Malevé, multimedia artist, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures, metadata and the semantic web and the means to visually represent them.
Ali Miharbi – Language of technology as a thinking tool
In this presentation I will sketch the potential of the language of technology as a tool to open up, enrich or simply illustrate our current discussions on social/political issues. Using examples of my work as points of departure I will touch on a variety of concepts like performativity, humor and the problem of representation.
Ali Miharbi Bio
Ali Miharbi (b. 1976) lives and works in Istanbul. He acquired a dual degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering (BS, 2000) and Art Theory & Practice – Painting (BA, 2000) at Northwestern University. In 2010 he completed his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He opened his first solo exhibition at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY. His recent group exhibitions include “Commons Tense”, Electriciteitsfabriek, The Hague (2012), “Turkish Art New and Superb”, TANAS, Berlin (2012), “Consequences are no coincidence”, Pilot Galeri, Istanbul (2012), “video_dumbo: Quasi Cinema”, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, New York (2011), “FILE 2011″, FIESP Cultural Center, São Paulo (2010), “When Ideas Become Crime”, Depo, Istanbul (2010). His work can take many forms from photographic, graphic or sculptural pieces to dynamic systems driven by live or stored data where he investigates mechanisms that underlie or are constituted by the flows of daily life.
Joasia Krysia – Speculations on Algorithmic Curating
Between the 1960s and 2005, Erkki Kurenniemi, the Finnish artist, scientist, futurologist and technology pioneer set out to document his everyday life with the intention to create a template for all human life that could be reenacted by algorithms to be written in a future quantum world (with the date 2048 in mind). In a wider sense Kurenniemi acted not only as an archivist of his life but also a kind of curator – working with materials not simply to collect and store but to shape using computational power once it is sufficient for purpose. In 2012 Constant Association for Art and Media began to develop some experiments, making programs to begin to understand Kurenniemi’s materials in ways that go beyond the traditional archiving procedures of ordering and classifying. I would like to argue that their approach is not simply archival either but curatorial in as much as they uncover aspects of what is not directly apparent in the material and produce meaning out of the work. This talk speculates further on this algorithmic approach and extend it to possibilities of thinking about the curatorial process in this way. I want to speculate on the use of algorithms in producing small curatorial experiments that begin to suggest new ways of understanding materials that are not directly apparent to human curators. Can we begin to think of curatorial processes and the production of curatorial knowledge that extends human agency and uncovers dynamic qualities of materials?
Joasia Krysia Bio
Joasia Krysa is Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), and prior to this she was Associate Professor (Reader) in Art and Technology at Plymouth University, UK (2000 – 2012). She is co-founder of KURATOR, an association of curators and researchers interested in algorithmic culture, and was part of curatorial team for dOCUMENTA (13). She has a background in political sciences and cultural theory, and has PhD in the the field of curating. Her academic and curatorial work is located across contemporary art, digital culture, and critical theory.
She is series co-editor of the DATA browser books (New York), author of Ada Lovelace, notebook no 055 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series 100 Thoughts – 100 Notes (Hatje Cantz 2012) and the edited anthology Curating Immateriality (Autonomedia, 2006). She has contributed chapters to, amongst others, Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT Press, 2008), and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (University of California Press, 2008). Her current curatorial work include Systemic Series, a two year programme developed for Kunsthal Aarhus (2013-2014).
Burak Arıkan – Counter Collective Intelligence
Arıkan will pursue a traversal in his works, starting from MyPocket (2008) and raising questions on the preservation of immateriality; discussing Network Map of Foundations and Corporations in Turkey (2010) in relation to power and governence during the Gezi protests; narrating the collective network diagrams generated on the Graph Commons platform (2011-); and finally calling for action for a recent data research and mapping project, code named “Network of Dispossessions”, mapping of government-corporate partnerships in urban transformation.
Burak Arıkan Bio
Burak Arıkan is an artist working with complex networks. He takes the obvious social, economical, and political issues as input and runs through an abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, results in performances, and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible, thus discussable. Recent exhibitions include: Home Works 6 (2013), 11th Sharjah Biennial (2013), 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), and Nam June Paik Award Exhibition (2012). Arıkan is the founder of Graph Commons platform, dedicated to provide “network intelligence” for everyone.
Image: Network Map of Foundations and Corporations in Turkey-project by Burak Arikan.
Announcing Medianatures and Living Books About Life
It’s (a)live! Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste and the whole impressive series of 21 open access books about humanities-science-themes, commissioned by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, published by Open Humanities Press and funded by JISC: Living Books About Life.
My edited book was inspired by Sean Cubitt’s (and others, see the Acknowledgements of the introduction) recent research into media and waste, and I owe full thanks to him. What I wanted to investigate was the question of how materiality can be thought through such “bad matter” of waste, and related to for instance energy (consumption). The introduction outlines my approach, and ties it together with some debates in new materialism (this side of the argument is more fully outlined in a short text of mine “New Materialism as Media Theory”, forthcoming very soon in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies-journal).
The best introduction to the whole project is however found in this press release by Hall, Zylinska and Birchall:
____________
Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life
LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org
The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org).
Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.
Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles. On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.
By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.
One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.
These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — together with interactive maps and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, iPad apps and e-book readers such as Kindle.
Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing. It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’
Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.
Books:
* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections: Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)
W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org
Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org
Culture Synchronised: Remixes with Nick Cook and Eclectic Method
The room Hel 252 is starting to have good karma as the remix-class room at Anglia Ruskin. Not because its equipped with computers, editing equipment or such, but because it is starting to have a good track record as the room where we have now hosted both the screening and discussion of RIP: Remix Manifesto with Brett Gaylor, and now also discussed the work of Eclectic Method — one of the most well known remix-acts.
Geoff Gamlen, a founding member of Eclectic Method, visited us in the context of Professor Nicholas Cook’s talk on musical multimedia. Professor Cook continued themes that were addressed already in his 1998 book on the topic and now followed up in the form of a new book project that 
deals with performance. With a full room of excited audience, Cook gave a strong presentation on hot topics in musicology and the need to move to new areas of investigation, as well as showing how such ideas relate to the wider field of cultural production in the digital age. Remix-culture is not restricted to music but where such examples as Eclectic Method (or we could as well mention for example Girl Talk) are emblematic of software driven cultural production that ties contemporary culture with early 20th century avant-garde art practices, and shows how political economy of copyright/copyleft, of participatory and collaborative modes of sharing and producing, of aesthetics of image/sound-collages and synchronisations, all are involved in this wider musical assemblage. What Cook argued in terms of musicological approaches that, in my own words, are suggesting “the primacy of variation” was apt. Such performance practices as Eclectic Method’s are important in trying to come up with up-to-date understanding of what is performance, what is the author, and how performance practices relate to wider media cultural changes that are as much about the sonic, as they are about pop cultural aesthetics — hence the examples on Tarantino were apt in the presentation. We need to move on (whether in terms of the epistemic frameworks or the legal ones) from the 19th century romantic notion of the Creator as the source of the artwork to what I would suggest (in a kinda of a Henry Jenkins sort of way) to an alternative 19th century of folk cultures where sharing and participating was the way culture was distributed, and in continuous variation. Despite the increasing amount of skeptics from Andrew Keen to Jaron Lanier (and in a much more interesting fashion Dmytri Kleiner), who also rightly so remind us that Web 2.0 is not only about celebration of amateur creativity and sharing but a business strategy that compiles free labour through website bottlenecks into privatized value, I would suggest that there is a lot to learn from such practices of creation as remixing and their implications for a theoretical understanding of musical and media performance.
Eclectic Method’s work…range from political remixes…
…to pop/rock culture synchronisations…
Machinology 