UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

However, in the case of Yugoslav digital afterlife, the concept of media archaeology proves
relevant precisely in its metaphorical use: considering the fact that the country ceased to exist and
new states came in its wake, much of the country‘s past was, more often deliberately than not,
forgotten, erased, destroyed. Hence, the activities I analyse in the following Chapters snugly fit
this definition, as they in fact excavate media content from archives, personal collections, recorded
TV shows, etc. In the case of Yugoslavia this applies to a twofold excavation: first, excavating,
digitising and distributing (predominantly popular cultural) mediatised content that after the breakup
of the country and the installation of new regimes were left to their technological and cultural
oblivion. And second, this process also implies ‗excavation‘ from underneath new ideological
edifices that effectively promoted forgetting/annihilation of not insignificant portions of Yugoslav
everyday.
To explicate the point further, Jussi Parikka argues that ―[m]edia archaeology has succeeded in
establishing itself as a heterogeneous set of theories and methods that investigate media history
through its alternative roots, its forgotten paths, and neglected ideas and machines that still are
useful when reflecting the supposed newness of digital culture.‖ Crucially, Parikka maintains that
media archaeology:
[A]bandons historicism when by it is meant the idea that the past is given and out there
waiting for us to find it; instead, it believes in the radical assembling of history, and histories
in the plural, but so that it is not only a subset of cultural historical writing. Instead, media
archaeology needs to insist both on the material nature of its enterprise – that media are
always articulated in material, also in non-narrative frameworks whether technical media
such as phonographs, or algorithmic such as databases and software networks – and that the
work of assembling temporal mediations takes place in an increasingly varied and distributed
network of institutions, practices and technological platforms. 60
A certain correspondence can be found between media archaeology and the principle of the
Mnemosyne, particularly in the part referring to a radical assembling of history, e.g. the
creation/proliferation of ‗grass-roots‘ or ‗guerrilla‘ multimodal mobile media objects (4MO) in the
processes of co-creating vernacular (digital) memory. With reference to this study, the
correspondence lies in a ‗guerrilla historian‘ excavating and reassembling media content—which,
as I argue above, in post-socialist transformations became de-canonised, left out from public
60 Jussi Parikka, ―What is media archaeology? – Beta definition 0.8,‖ Cartographies of media archaeology,
http://mediacartographies.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-media-archaeology-beta.html, accessed 11 February 2011.
25