Jussi Parikka

Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method

ABSTRACT This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgotten media discourses, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking and other hacktivist exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology. The concept of dead media is discussed as “zombie media”—dead media revitalized, brought back to use, reworked.

Operative media archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s materialist media diagrammatics

Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into ‘old media’ have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, debates surrounding media archaeology as a method seem to be taking it forward not only as a subdiscipline of (media) history, but increasingly into what will be introduced as materialist media diagrammatics. This article maps some recent media archaeological waves in German media theory. The text addresses Wolfgang Ernst’s mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts on how to rethink media archaeology as a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and as a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seems to not only replicate Kittler’s huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but develop that in novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst’s provocative take that hopes to distinguish itself as a Berlin brand of media theory in its hardware materiality and time-critical focus resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies.

Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold:

In recent methodological scholarship on digital games, a strong connection is noted between “platform studies” and media archaeology. While platform studies has its critics, who primarily lament the limitations of the project, a recent spate of publications in the field suggests considerable dynamism in platform studies as the concept is further developed. This article argues that by examining platform studies from the perspective of media archaeology, it becomes apparent that platform studies establishes an “epistemic threshold”. Additionally, platform studies is a historical method which both establish continuities and mark breaks with previous platforms and technologies. From the perspective of this threshold, this article explores epistemic questions that arise from how platform studies forms an archive, and how media archaeology can enrich the method’s explicit concerns and engagements with technology and culture.

Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies

This text reflects cultural techniques in relation to other concepts in cultural and media studies by addressing their relation to selected Anglo-American and French discussions. It also investigates the relation of cultural techniques to more recent material and speculative turns. Suggesting that the cultural techniques approaches introduce their own important material dimension to media-specific analysis of culture, the article argues that cultural techniques should be read in relation to recent post-Fordist political theory and explorations of the post-human in order to develop conceptual hybrids that are able to inject politics into media theoretical accounts, as well as excavate histories of cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism.

INSECTS AND CANARIES: medianatures and aesthetics of the invisible

This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological question is unravelled, furthermore, with examples concerning the mass extinction of bees, also discussed in Lenore Malens video installation The Animal That I Am (2009–10). In this way, it argues for a media theoretical understanding of the visual culture of ecocrisis as well as the complex question of epistemology of such a visibility/invisibility.

McLuhan at Taksim Square

I was carrying a fresh copy of Understanding Media with me on Istiklal Street, Istanbul, alongside people in gas masks and police in riot gear. It no longer felt relevant to write about past experiences of engaging with the book or to reflect on McLuhan as a forerunner of media archaeology. This time I did not want to write about ‘anti-McLuhan’ minor histories of media technologies: the ones that do not take media as extensions of Man but as extensions of the animal – for instance, insects – as their starting point (Parikka, 2010).

SUBLIMATED ATTRACTIONS: The introduction of early computers in Finland in the late 1950s as a mediated experience

The paper focuses on the emergence of Finnish computer culture in the late 1950s. The introduction of computers is studied by using a wide range of source material of popular media, such as commercial and company promotion films, newspapers, popular magazine articles, cartoons and comic strips. The paper argues that the introduction of the new computing technology was deeply experienced with the help of popular media, where the technological capabilities of computers as thinking and sensing ‘all-purpose machines’ were translated into several media-specific audio-visual forms. Computers were represented as sensing and sensible technology, a rubric that was remediated by the help of old media. In this process, the spectacularization of computers worked not only as an innocent fabulation of the computers to convince the ‘general public’ but to create a certain social arrangement particular to this spectacle. The idea that the end-user is cut off from the actual processes of the computer, as suggested by such media historians as Friedrich Kittler, was evident already in the earlier construction of computing culture in the mainframe era.

Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks by Tony D. Sampson

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The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think by Alexander Klose (review)

there is more than just information exchange. How can an interface foster online conversation? By portraying participants more vividly, by defining contexts and boundaries, highlighting relationships, emotional reactions and rhythms in an exchange. And finally, the “close-up” is how the individual is seen and chooses to be seen in online communities. Perhaps the most interesting section, because it is the most challenging from a design perspective, is how to create a meaningful “data portrait.” Usernames, photos and fantasy avatars allow us to keep track of distinct identities online, but give us very little information about a person and as representations they can often be misleading. Data about a user’s networked life conveyed through abstraction and metaphor may be one way to make an individual more vivid, but this introduces other issues of privacy, surveillance and control over one’s identity. Donath makes a compelling case that because networked social spaces are designed interfaces, issues of privacy, surveillance, healthy group dynamics and the health of the larger commons are also design issues. That she presents these issues in their ethical complexity is a testament to her concern and hope for design strategies that pay attention to all the implications of networked life. The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online is “a manifesto about what the connected world can be like.” Social interaction design can not only be a catalyst for healthy online communities but also a catalyst for more interactive physical spaces that are themselves increasingly networked. Think about what our cities would be like without parks, benches and gathering spots. These are public spaces, not overly determined or rule bound, as they are spaces to be alone or together with others. But they are conducive to openness and vivid presence. It is in this spirit that Donath wants designers and users of social technologies to think in new ways about how we become vividly present to each other in virtual spaces. the contAiner principle: how A box chAnges the wAy we think

Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. Katz (review)

dimensions, from cosmos to mythology, Hüppauf commences and Papastergiadis concludes the volume, the thread becoming materialized in a fascinating chapter by Brock and Hasenpusch in describing their work on Australian stick and leaf insects (Phasmida), spectacularly illustrated with contemporary and historical images; even the eggs they lay can be patterned to merge with the vegetation habitat. Other such “masters of camouflage” are noted by Morris: cephalopods, moths, butterflies and owls. Interest in these have led to advanced biotechnology research delivering “adaptive camouflage” and “Quantum Stealth,” work that is itself concealed, “commissioned by the military and hidden from the public under strict classification.” The postmodern debates of yesteryear, appropriation, “the poetics of the copy,” avant-garde modernism (apparently this approach “is one of anti-camouflage or attention seeking”) and originality, are applied by McLean to the photo facsimiles of the American Sherrie Levine and the extraordinary works and projects of the Australian artist Imants Tillers. Hansford pursues further “unstable forms of being” by examining recent developments in gene research and the dressing of cells to deceive viruses or to coax an immune system and leads on to a discussion of the work of artists Armanious, Dwyer and Williams, concluding, “We are cuttlefish or we are nothing.” Camouflage as the aesthetic basis of making two-dimensional artworks is discussed by Tyler, in the context of New Zealand and the Maori, and by Howard and Olubas, “within the changing contexts of inter/national military engagement and artistic collaboration,” a practice that for Howard goes back to the American Vietnam War. More recently, a series of meetings in China has resulted in an artist and a member of the PLA military exchanging work sites, “the material space of collaborative art practice . . . as camoufleurs, Xing Junqin and Ian Howard have exposed their intentions through art, their desire to talk to the other side.” The performative aspect of practice is extended by West Brett in a reflection upon the lengths to which individuals would go to disappear from the radar of East German surveillance and data collection to eventually cross the political dividing line disguised B O O K S