Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

6U
Media archaeology and genealogy (Chair, Alex Monea)
Hui-Lan Chang Media archaeology of visual techniques: An exploration of practice-oriented approach
In history, the inventions of various visual techniques not merely served as apparatus for watching but also
revealed the complicated relations among visual techniques, sensory experiences, and social cultures.
Meanwhile, the fundamental fact that the history of visual techniques is also the issues about the
deployment of power is also disclosed. Jonathan Crary (1992) clearly brought light to this viewpoint. Via
analyzing the evolution of visual techniques from camera obscura to stereoscope and alterations of
observers’ positions, visual mechanism and orders of knowledge in different time period could be
investigated. It is precisely on this foundation that allows this study to become closer to the media
archaeology (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011; Parikka, 2012; Zielinski, 2008). The basic stand is to unearth the past
of media that never happened and also be devoted to develop non-linear media narratives to expand and
implement the unfulfilled dreams of media. The structure of this study could be divided into three parts.
First part is to elaborate on what kind of essence and content alterations of moving image could be revealed
by visual techniques; Second part is to discourse how to apply media archaeology to the investigations about
the historical alterations of visual techniques in order to emphasize how temporality and sensory experience
co-construct alternative media narratives in what kind of cultural dimension; Third part is to describe how to
use media archaeology as practice approach and what kind of epistemological basis could be based on to
design an interactive art installation with sensory and aesthetic experience as foundation and thereby
revealing the implications of media archaeology on contemporary visual culture studies.
Michael Goddard
Media (An)archaeology, Machines, Techniques and Cultural Studies
The emergent paradigm of media archaeology is usually seen to have little in common with cultural studies,
focusing as it does on technical objects and systems and their logics rather than human agents and social
processes. This aversion to the social and cultural already present in the work of Friedrich Kittler (1999) is
almost a credo for Wolfgang Ernst, who distinguishes the media archaeological interest in machinic
processes sharply from what he calls cultural narratives. Yet in the articulation of media archaeology as
anarchaeology by Siegfried Zielinski (in Aduiovisions 1999 and Deep Time of the Media, 2006), there is a
much greater acknowledgement of the importance of cultural studies which Zielnski cites affirmatively as
one of three currents informing the triad of “culture-technology-subject” (Zielinski 1999, 20-21) that inform
his Audiovisions project. Similarly in Deep Time of the Media where the concept of anarchaeology is
formulated, derived from a German reading of Foucault, social and cultural processes retain their
importance alongside a series of moments of technical invention now extended well beyond the dates and
technologies of the mass media. More recent translations of media archaeology into an Anglo context often
seem to approximate cultural histories of technologies and also tend to give media archaeology a more
politically engaged and generally cultural and aesthetic inflection (see Huhtamo and Parikka ed. 2011). This
disparity within media archaeology points to different conceptions of machines, technologies and
techniques that are crucial for evaluating the potential contributions of media archaeology to cultural
studies in the 21st Century. Specifically between a techno fetishism of the machines as “pure” technical
object, and a more Deleuzian approach to the machine as complex process involving both subjects and
objects, human and non-human elements and material components and incorporeal events. This paper will
present these different treatments of culture within these strands of media archaeology in relation to recent
research I have been conducting into radical media in the 1970s. In this research technical invention and
innovation is shown as inseparable from political and cultural interventions designed to reconfigure a range
of different media apparatuses encompassing radio, cinema and video. It will argue that given a nonreductive
understanding of machines, media archaeology has a lot to contribute to contemporary cultural
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