# Wolfgang Ernst (2011) *Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media*. : University of California Press. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[]] > Title:: Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media > Author(s): [[Wolfgang Ernst]] > Year:: 2011 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: wolfgang_ernst_media_2011 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media](zotero://select/items/@wolfgang_ernst_media_2011) > ReviewedDate:: [[2024-01-25]] ## Citation ```latex [@wolfgang_ernst_media_2011] ``` ## Summary ## Annotation ## 239 - Media archaeology is generally associated with the rediscovery of cultural and technological layers of previous media as referring to the “digging out” of forgotten machinic visions of the past, of alternative - ![[853B48B5-06C4-4AF3-BB90-D429407EE701.png]] - (이 아티클의 목표) Foucauldean notion of the “archive” as the set of rules governing the range of what can be verbally, audiovisually, or alphanumerically expressed at all, media archaeology is both a method and an [[aesthetics]] of practicing media criticism, a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, and an awareness of moments when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active “archaeologists” of knowledge. ## 240-41 - 기기적으로 아무리 오래된 것이라도 현재도 운영된다면 그 운영방식 function에는 변화가 없다 (독일 라디오) rather, there is a media-archaeological short circuit between otherwise historically clearly separated times. - Media archaeology is about rereading and rewriting epistemological (rather than simply temporal) *momenta.*In his *Archaeology of the Cinema*C.W. Ceram states: “What matters in history is not whether certain chance discoveries take place, but whether they take effect.” ::Quoted in Erkki Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes toward an Archeology of the Media,” *Leonardo*30, no. 3 (1997): 221.:: ➡︎ 언제 시작되었느냐보다 언제부터 그 효과가 시작되었는가. 언제 화석이 되었는가보다 그 화석이 언제 발견되어 그 시기의 지식에 어떠한 영향을 끼쳤는가. - Archaeology, as opposed to history, refers to what is actually there: **what has remained from the past in the present like archaeological layers**, operatively embedded in technologies (the “archaeological” metaphor, as already mentioned, is hard to resist). - Both classical archaeologists and media archaeologists are fascinated by the hardware of culture, its artifacts—from ancient marbles up to electromechanical engineering products. - While a Greek vase can be interpreted by simply being looked at, a radio or computer does not reveal its essence by monumentally being there but **only when being processed by electromagnetic waves or calculating processes**. - Historical media narratives take place in imaginary time. Storage technologies, on the other hand, take place in the symbolic temporal order, and the contingent can now be dealt with by stochastic mathematics as implemented in real-time computing. ## 242 - The term *media archaeography* describes modes of writing that are not human textual products but rather expressions of the machines themselves… - operate on the symbolic level (i.e., computing) differ from traditional symbolic tools of cultural engineering (writing in the alphabet) - For media archaeologists, the recent turn from the epoch of electronics to that of information means that although data-processing media **are still rooted in archaeologically accessible materialities** (hardware, physics), their archaeology of knowledge requires competence in informatics (mathematical logic, technique, and control). - Media archaeology (like the membrane of the microphone) dispassionately pays attention to the subconscious qualities of technical media. ## 243 - **The phonograph as media artifact not only carries cultural meanings like words and music but is at the same time an archive of cultural engineering by its very material fabrication**—a kind of frozen media knowledge that—in a media- archaeological sense—is waiting to be unfrozen, liquified. Digital archaeology even operates below the sensual thresholds of sight and sound—a level that is not directly accessible to human senses because of its sheer electronic and calculating speed. - ## 244 - Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “Der Erzähler,” stated that experience, when cut off from epic tra- dition, could not be communicated in a narrative way anymore. Indeed, cul- tural analysis nowadays belongs to computing and signal processing and is not narratable. - While the Greek vocal alphabet probably was established for the special purpose of recording poetry (culture as symbolical operations), recording in the electromagnetic field, in a departure from the practices of cultural engineering with symbolic signs (alphabetic writing), builds a technological **microworld of its own—media that behave “analogously” to physics itself**. ## 246 - From a similar perspective, the media-archaeological development period of radio “before radio” was not simply the technological prehistory of the mass medium **but its alternative mode of existence**, in which the range of the electro-acoustic field was not limited to broadcasting. - The media-archaeological level is structural rather than historical, making it possible (in this case) to think about the radio in terms of the electromagnetic field instead of limiting it to the semantics of cultural voices. - [[Marshall McLuhan]] emphasizes that the “archaeological” analysis of scientific research has been a by-product of the era of discrete letters; analysis in fact operates by de-composing a text into single elements (*elementa,*or even *stoi- cheia,*the Greek expression for both single alphabetic letters and atomic units in nature). - 마셜 [[Marshall McLuhan|맥루한]] ➡︎ 추상적인 알파벳의 탄생으로 인간의 언어가 더 적은 elements로 부셔지고 각각의 elements는 의미를 잃었을때가 crucial moment 였다. - At this moment the machinic took over, since only machines could perform symbolic operations without the semantic referentiality that hindered effective data processing. ## 247 - The wire recording device from the early 1950s in the collection is not functional any- more. In such migrations between hard- and software, at any point cultural memory runs the risk of being interrupted. ::Ernst, Wolfgang, ‘Dis/Continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?’, in *New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader* (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105–23.:: ## 248 - Digital memory ignores the aesthetic differences between audio and visual data and makes one interface (to human ears and eyes) emulate another. For the computer, the difference between sound and image and text, if it counted, would count only as the difference between data *formats.* ## 249 - (under the digital circumstances) Hermeneutic empathy here clashes with pure data navigation: there is a world of difference between an *archaeology of knowledge*and historical imagination, which seeks to replace positive evidence by an act of reanimation. But sonar echoing in submarine archaeology only rhetorically corresponds with empathetic *resonance;* let us not confuse data streams (even when computed in real time) with moments of live communication. ## 250 - The media-archaeological exercise is to be aware at each given moment that when we direct our senses to human voices or images of the past replayed from media recordings we are not communicating with the dead; ::rather, we are deal- ing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory::. - The media-archaeological desire to be freed by machines from one’s own subjectivity (and desire for storytelling) is Foucauldean: in his *Archaeology of Knowledge*Foucault expresses his will to “define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme . . . a method of analysis purged of all anthropomorphism.” ::Michel Foucault, *Archaeology of Knowledge*(New York: Pantheon, 1999), 16.:: - **Media archaeology as well is interested in procedures and events that are not “historical” (i.e., narratable) but rather consist of “autochthonic transformations” (Foucault) within the realm of machines and their symbols.** ## 251 - Media archaeology deals with this crisis in the narrative memory of culture. Digital narrative, on a media-archaeological (not interface) level, is linked to discrete mathematics; in medieval German, the words for counting and narrating were etymologically the same. ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@wolfgang_ernst_media_2011]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```