Media Art Practice as Media Archaeology — Why and How?

This article is a note for myself (a quick recap of my own method of media archaeology through practice):

Our performance in Culture Lab, Newcastle University on 28 Aug 2014

What is Media Archaeology?
1. Media Archaeology is a field of study that is varied and not a consistent whole.
2. Media Archaeology investigates unsung heroes and forgotten technologies with an attempt to shed a new light on possible futures. It looks for inspiration in the past.
3. Media archaeology is a critique of progress. It speaks to the present and critiques the present in examining its historical objects. It does this by imposing limits on the viability of linear extrapolation of perceived conditions into the future. (Kluitenberg, 2011, p.51)
4. Media archaeology tries to uncover the heterogeneity and multiplicity of its object.
5. Media archaeology adopts a ‘paleontological’ view of media development, which believes that human media had much more diversity in the past (as more bio-diversity in paleontology). The history of the media is not the product of a predictable and necessary advance from primitive to complex apparatus. The current state of the art does not represent the best possible state. (Zielinski, 2006, p.5).

Such orientation of media archaeology suggests that the media development cannot be considered a linear progress, but a heady mixture of the imagined, the desired, and the realized. The future course of technological and media development becomes contentious and largely unpredictable. Media archaeology is an approach that helps us to see through the actual-historical trajectory, and transcend the “unacceptable realities”, that is, the once existed but unrealized or abandoned media lineages before us. And, find benign ways into the future through these secret paths in history.

For example, a media-archaeological review of canonical Wundermaschinen reveals how the interplay of the imaginary and the actual, the realized and the desired, was constantly at work in material practice. Some practices of Wundermaschinen particularly reflected on Kluitenberg’s idea that actual media machines give rise to speculation of what such machines might be able to achieve or what they signify. Conversely, imaginations of possible media continually give rise to actual media practices. Even though these may not achieve what was imagined for them, their creators quite often derive their inspiration in considerable measure from such imaginations and the desires that fuel them. (Kluitenberg, 2011, p.67). More interestingly, the creators of Wundermaschinen tended to display the artifacts in a performative setting for creating specific imaginaries on the viewer. The Wundermaschinen thus show us that it is contentious to draw a clear distinction between the actual functionality of realized media machines and the purely imaginary qualities ascribed to them. The imaginaries and the actualized are always co-mingled.

The Wundermaschinen not only provided good reference of such imaginary, dream, and desired machines, they also demonstrated many “unacceptable realities” in media history, that is, the once existed but unrealized or abandoned media lineages before us. For example, the delicate All-Writing Miraculous Machine constructed by Friedrich von Knaus in 1760 reveals to us the once elegant and performance-like setting of writing apparatuses (Figure 1). It was not only an apparatus that wrote texts on paper, but also an apparatus of imaginary and curiosity. It demonstrated the diversities in media history, which reflects on the ‘paleontological’ view of media development adopted by Zielinski (2006, p.5). Most of the Wundermaschinen were very rare designs with main concerns of raising specific curiosity or extraordinary experience on the viewer. Their design were embodiment of functions and imaginaries that we do not see often in contemporary dominant media objects (such as metaphorical, correspondence, ultimate reality, divine, revelation and etc.).

Allesschreibende Wundermaschine02

Figure 1. All-Writing Miraculous Machine constructed by Friedrich von Knaus in 1760. Museum of Technology, Vienna, Austria.

Adopting such ‘media archaeological’ view toward the history of Wundermaschinen, some inquiries emerged:
1. How can emerging media practice embody such media archaeological understanding of Wundermaschinen?
2. Can we do media archaeology through creative media practice?

1. How Can Emerging Media Practice Embody Such Media Archaeological Understanding of Wundermaschinen?
The imaginary and actual media machines are co-mingled, and think about the imaginary (such as dreams and desires) reveals this. My research suggests that we should build ‘machines of wonder’ through linking emerging practices closely with the unrealized dreams, desires and imaginaries of historical media machines. Such practice-based research neither seeks breakthrough nor advancement for future technology, but to create experience of wonder that embodies the diversity, heterogeneity and multiplicity of media objects. Such practice of ‘machine of wonder’ aims to demonstrate a certain ‘utopian moment’ or ‘aberrant trajectory’ for the media, which is, an alternative to the dominant writing of media history.

My research thus concerns: How such notion of ‘critiquing the progress view of media development to demonstrate heterogeneity’, and ‘constructing objects of wonder, imaginary and dreams in a performative setting’ can reveal its potential in media art practices?

2. Creative Media Practice as Media Archaeology?

My Methods
1. Think and practically experiment about how emerging media practice (information representation, maker-prototyping) can reflect specific dream (e.g. correspondence, revelation, and etc.) in past media apparatuses.
2. Locate the ‘unrealized’ and ‘forgotten’ aspects of these dreams (mainly through literature review and media archaeology), and experiment how an emerging media practice can engage them.
3. The annotation and technical description of projects is important, as it can show how the project is related to the dreams and the forgotten. The ‘annotated portfolio’ (Bowers, 2012) can become a unique way of doing media archaeology.

My Objectives
1. Construct a clear framework for building ’21st Century Wundermaschinen’.
2. Practically construct ’21st Century Wundermaschinen’ and display for feedback and reflection.
3. Such media practice should escape the progressive account that is embodied in most contemporary media machines. Thus, a systematic annotations of these ’21st Century Wundermaschinen’ should help convey such diversity and heterogeneity in media history.