Digital Memory and the Archive -- Wolfgang Ernst (Jussi Parikka ed.) Full Citation and Summary Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. This book, edited by Jussi Parikka (see also What is Media Archaeology), collects a series of thematic texts by Wolfgang Ernst which present various aspects of his archive-oriented Media Archaeology. This book leans towards methodological and conceptual elucidation, providing texts which build-out Ernst's operative terminology directly and through examples. Ernst, though trained as a Classical historian and archaeologist, is now the Chair of Media Theories at Humboldt University in Berlin and founder of the "Media Archaeological Fundus," a collection of interesting media machines. Chapter Notes Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst's Media Archaeology -- Jussi Parikka - This section provides an intro to Ernst's "archive oriented media theory," a kind of media archaeology (pp. 2) - Also connects his positions to larger discourses around time-criticality, archive (Foucault as we will see later), and diagrams (pp. 2) - Connection to "German media theory" [though this term isn't great] (hardware orientation through Kittler) (pp. 3) - Short section up front on archival misreading in contemporary digital culture (conflation of digital storage/transmission with institutional big A archiving) (pp. 1-2) - Section on the development of Ernst's thought; how his historical training archives (pp. 3-6) - Early work in museology; German institutions, narration expanding to counting maths as components of narrativity (pp. 4) - Movement to Foucauldian methods investigating concrete conditions (archive) of knowledge; influenced by other media theorists in Germany working with Foucault, Derrida, Lacan (Kittler for example) (pp. 4) - Archival approach to media which grows out of Kittler's work rather than continuing it, within the broader discussion of media materiality; recent moves closer to techno-mathematical (pp. 5) - Turn toward "time-criticality" as a means of distancing from History/Historians for machine-times/processes which do not fit into that discipline (pp. 5) - Thinking history from media in a non-historical way; "Temporalities are conditioned by mediatic frameworks." (pp. 6) - SUM UP/IN GENERAL: Ernst develops an archaeology [F] of knowledge in media, the mediatic world as the conditions of knowledge (pp. 6) - Section w/ what differentiates Ernst's position from other forms of media archaeology (eg: Huhtamo, Zielinski) (pp. 7-12) - Media archaeology for Ernst is different from cultural history since it looks at conditions of knowledge - Media archaeology is less about narration (even counter-histories) and more about how narration is recorded and in what ways (it's physical media, its processes, durations, its apparatus); not an ontological/philosophical object-centring but a methodological one - Description as the operative form of investigation ("happy positivism") which sets up a division of labour between media archaeology and other disciplines (cultural history, politics, etc.) - Interest in the physicality of technical media; hence object-oriented in a "material culture" way or a "science & engineering" way - Archaeology of ruptures [F], discontinuities [F], recursion, variation; technical temporality which is non-semantic & non-emotional (as per the machine) - Cultural memory articulated through media as underpinned by their inherent calculation/number-logic based ontology; alternative to historical narrativization - Technical recording of the past beyond what can be narrativized at all, technical media transmission through time is non-hermeneutic in what it contains - "cold gaze" of technical media as a means of stepping out of the human position - Criticism: distancing as objectification & detachment that refuses to deal with messiness, focus too much on the machine as seemingly autonomous (which it isn't), mythologizing the machine as completely opposed to all other temporalities; disregard from the processes of technical emergence (design, patenting, etc.), focus too much on the object/apparatus - Section on the "operational" aspect of Ernst's media archaeology (pp. 12-19) - Comparison of Ernst to other media theorists/archaeologists who engage with actual media apparatuses (collectors, curators, archivists); Ernst engages with apparatus through reverse-engineering - Media theories tested against hardware; "experimental" or "empirical" research approach; media artefacts are "epistemological playthings"; Media Archaeological Fundus [see Parikka 2016 for more] (pp. 13) - Complexification of history as not human-reducible, but simplifies the fact that technologies are embedded within and engaged with human life/temporality - IMPORTANT critique: Ernst's tinkering w/ the past approach lacks political emphasis/analysis that can deal w'/ political-economy and gets too stuck with its own fascination with the apparatus (pp. 14) - Ernst eschews politics for more general explorations of epistemology, for him temporality - Media archaeology as "post-human" insofar as it takes machine time seriously; importance of machine time (iteration, recursion, short-circuit) for our general understanding of temporality - Need to see media tech as dynamic, related to rhythmics and sound and in that way registerable to us - SO "time-criticality" = "there is a logic in chronos that is not reducible to history" (pp.15) - Micro-temporality of digital/technical memory which much continually refresh itself faster than human perceptibility - Micro-temporality as archives [F] in motion - Disregards structural issues (capitalism et al, ownership, labour, etc.) for link between technical and aesthetic frameworks [see the continual connection of American media theorists to artistic practices over "infraordinary" technologies; Parikka does this as well] - Signal as basic unity of analysis since it is what moves; is simultaneously physical and symbolic - "Modern technical media are media of mathematical codes, and in their execution they become processes defined y patters of signals unfolding in time. They also become frequencies instead of beings, quantities instead of qualities, and functions instead if attributes..." [from Siegert] (pp. 18) - Understanding media from the viewpoint of their channels - Ernst's definition of media (P's paraphrase): "the physical passage, or place, that mediates something codified and gets decodified at the other end." (emphasises the channel) (pp. 19) - Section on the Germanness of German Media Theory (pp. 19-22) - The name hides a multiplicity of approaches, the name does more harm than good in flattening the methods - Parikka argues that "German Media Theory" needs to re-engage with historical contexts, specifically political-economic changes (pp. 20) - Weight placed on labelling of works with a more loaded name due to a methodological preference and not an explicitly articulated position (pp. 22) Media Archaeology as a Transatlantic Bridge - Introduction by Ernst[?] which covers three main points which the following chapters will deal with - Taking a position in relation to media theory's epistemological orientations (pp. 23-26) - Identification of two currents: nondiscursive practices of technical media (media archaeology) & media phenomena's appearance to human senses (media phenomenology) (pp. 23) - Taking the direction of media archaeology and identifying two major currents within it: remediation of old theories & Foucauldian (pp. 24) - Taking the direction of Foucault-inflected media archaeology and stressing the needed distance from cultural studies/hermeneutic methods in favour of a "cold gaze" which focuses on hardware which is not primarily meaningful (pp. 25) - Temporary bracketing off of discourses and their continuities in favour of ruptures and discontinuity of the technological settings (pp. 25) - Ernst's method of media "archivology" (pp. 27-29) - Foucault's archaeology + Foucault's archive against the background of normative Archaeology (discipline w/ its methods) and Archiving (in the sense of storing material) - Against the traditional archival interest in artefacts stored, media archaeology is interested in "the unrevealing of symbols, signals, and information." (pp. 27) - Focus on processual nature of contemporary media, diagrams (as with Pierce) produced by the informatized organization of knowledge - Approaching knowledge which is stored and transmitted through the media "endodata" which is non-hermeneutic - Which means that often, the media archaeological gaze is better executed by machines themselves that already operate in that world - Cross-referencing historicization/cultural variance of human senses (Benjamin, Marx) with the "senses" of the machine to provide a more complete understanding of digital-technical media - Focus on "infrastructure of media-historical knowledge"; how media themselves reformat our understanding of the historical & narration - Archivology is generative of new kinds of archival action (new ways of searching, cross-referencing, remixing, etc.); archival action on the terms of media (signal) - Media "tempor(e)alities" (pp. 29-31) - Derives from Ernst's obsession with rewriting the past in non-historical ways (Metahistory is an influence) - Resisting Foucauldian text-focus (and spatialization which underpins it) with dynamics in which writing doesn't communicate meaning but produces processes - Sonic mode of exploring relation between human senses and machinic processes in a time-based manner Part I. The Media-Archaeological Method - This section focuses on Ernst's specific version of the media archaeological method; Parikka stresses that "there is no one media archaeological method" (pp. 35) - Stresses anti-narrativism of Ernst against Anglo-American narrativism Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines - Main argument: cultural history and media archaeology operate in parallel to each other, each filling in the blanks of the other, BUT one cannot do both at the same time - First section compares cultural historical view to media archaeological through light as a function of historical thinking (pp. 37-39) - Main thrust of this is cultural history = "evolutionary continuities and soft transformations" through discursive continuity & media archaeology = ruptures, but on the level of technologies, non-discursive (pp. 38) - These two things can both be true at the same time, just in different places - Identifies a major contemporary rupture: signal processing replacing discourse and semiotics (pp. 39) - Second section on the interplay between culture and technology in which one may drive the emergence of the other (40-43) - Three views on the technological media displacement of visual representation: - Stephen Bann - "poetics of the museum" (pp. 40) - Rhetorical tropes prefigure historical imagination - Close parallel movement of a period's representation media which share codes despite their media difference - Lessing - Laocoon (pp. 40) - Medium specificity to how history is constituted based on the difference of how they happen (space or time) - Walter Benjamin - TWAAMR (pp.41) - Mentioned in passing to demonstrate technological media as a rupture in the operation of images - "Media archaeology, which is concerned with such technocultural processes, is both a self-reflexive method and an archival {F} object of research." (pp. 41) - Sets up the main question for media archaeology in light of this: did the new historical imagination that emerged with the interplay of culture and technology emerge from new media or were the media invented to fit a new epistemological setting? (pp. 42) - Is the move from cultural technologies to technological media a rupture or an evolution? - "It is worth remembering that the archive as the condition for our knowledge of history becomes dependent on the media of its transmission... The mechanisms that regulate entry into the discourse of history or exclusion from cultural memory are therefore part of the media-archaeological investigation." (pp. 42) - The upshot: Ernst takes the side of medium specificity against Bann's art-historical aesthetics which comes too close to the "virtues and virtuosos" of art and not close enough to the media (pp. 43) - Third section outlines media archaeology as a "media critical antiquarianism" methodologically (pp. 43-51) - In antiquarianism: - the issue of distance and empathy, material closeness of the past but discursive distance (pp. 43) - History is not just text, but artefact which is always more than what text can reveal; text as software which operates upon artefactual hardware (pp. 43) - Characterized as "data oriented" (pp. 44) - Methodological preference for precise case studies ("embedded theory") over general theories projected onto examples (pp. 44) - "monumental" relation to the past, no search for binding historical narrative (pp. 44) - "Media archaeology is on the side of the indexical and the archival mode of writing..." as opposed to speculative narrativization, on the non-discursive elements of the past which are already not narrative (pp. 45) - Shows how the media drives the epistemic change through indexicality using photography as an example - In history writing, the reality of the past is simulated rhetorically; in photography, a specific "moment of light" is stored indexically (pp. 48) - The ability to access the "source data" and examine it directly changes the way the past is known (pp. 48) - The change is between incomplete forms of access to the past since both simulate unmediated access in different ways: they are both historiography but of different types (pp. 48-49) - Also differences within media types - "...technological media haver to make their recipient forget their technical operation at the machine-to-human interface in order to create the illusion of pure content: only at the moment of technological breakdown will the medium become visible." [see also Perec, L'Infraordinnaire] (pp. 48) - Further, into digital photography, a new temporal layer through time-stamping; micro-temporality of images changes the way the past is thought - Upshot is that media technologies can reveal what is inaccessible to humans, operating at completely different scales which changes underlying epistemic conditions (pp. 51) - Final section on reflexive irony in the media archaeological method (pp. 51-54) - Starts by using the museum as an example, how they present the past through the predominant media of their context (pp. 51) - Eg: period rooms - John Soane museum as media critical through its irony - "It becomes a media critical museum because it consciously exposes its own technique of display. Whereas the secret of technological media is precisely that they usually hide their mechanisms in order to let their message appear in pure form." "...any ironical medium -- displays its own artificiality, technical fictionality, and artifactuality." (pp. 52) - In media archaeology, media irony = "the awareness of the media as coproducers of cultural content, with the medium evidently part of the message" (pp. 52) - "A truly archaeological awareness of the past goes so far as to exclude any human presence from the representation of the material of the past." (pp. 53) - Evidence and authenticity are provided by the apparatus which eliminates subjectivity of a narrator for media specificity [which may be analysed reflexively] - Finishes off with the fact that cultural history and media archaeology are supplementary since both voices (human and medial) are just as present and important, speaking in parallel with each other Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History of Narrative Media - This chapter argues for a media archaeology in which machines themselves act as archaeologists providing insights that narrativity & history cannot - Begins with a setting the record straight about what media archaeology is for Ernst: - IS NOT the discipline of archaeology (digging up the past historically) (pp. 55) - IS based on Foucault's archaeological method of epistemological excavation (pp. 55) - IS NOT historically narrative but IS an alternative (pp. 55) - IS hardware and code (as in governing protocols) oriented, an epistemological reverse engineering (pp. 55) - IS NOT about temporal antecedence (pre-histories of media) but technoepistempological underpinnings (pp. 55) - IS aware of moments when media themselves become "archaeologists" of knowledge - IS NOT about telling media stories (even counter-histories a la Foucault) (pp. 56) - IS NOT a nostalgic collection of "dead media" (pp. 56) - IS a method of analysis which focuses on media operations and sources of operativity in codes, not content (pp. 56-57) - research subjects and researchers - As research subjects: - They exist within a different kind of temporality which can short circuit historically separated periods (pp. 57) - "...undo historical distance by simply being present." [das Ding] But different from object artefacts since they operate, they are processual (pp. 57) - Register what remains of the past in the present by containing an "inner world" leftover of their context which may interface with the outside world (pp. 57) - As researchers/authors - "media archaeography" = "modes of writing that are not human products but rather expressions of machines themselves" (pp. 58) - Media speak for themselves, processing signals which humans cannot sense (pp. 58) - Important for revealing non-discursivity since the machinic scales of technical media must be accessed via other machines (pp. 59) - A section where Ernst uses the music ethnological gramophone archives in Berlin and Vienna as an example of media acting archaeologists of themselves (pp. 59-65) - These archives contain signal which is non-semantic stored alongside their cultural content - Ernst demonstrates how other technical media work with human researchers to extract non-semantic information and reveal it for human readability; "Media theories work only when being tested against hard(ware) evidence" (pp. 60) - The state of writing changes from signs that are meaningful to signal which is registered (pp. 61) - The change is from translation to measurement: "The measuring device, for a moment, suspends human perception from the limitations of its own subjectivity and culturality, though we take into account that any measuring configuration is itself marked by the historic index of its own epoch." (pp. 61) - Cultural analysis becomes calculation, which is then retranslated for human reading; media materiality is engaged on its own terms (mathematic informatics) which reveals and explains that which escapes cultural analysis (pp. 62) - The machine working with signal makes no distinction between senders (pp. 63) - Semantics = poetic regulation; Signal = physiological regulation (pp. 65) - Change to our understanding of "tradition" in digital epistemology: data migration becomes a form of tradition as content is repackaged in new formats/media - A section where Ernst uses digital restoration of sonic artefacts to examine how the media archaeological gaze works (pp. 65-68) - Sound recording flattens the binaries of presence/absence, past/present into the operativity of the machine (pp. 66) - Media storage as a kind of "freezing" of the content which awaits a media which can "redeem" the content (pp. 66) - Digital "unfreezing" which involves rereading sonic media visually, then converting back into sound reveals the main thrust of digital memory: ALL DATA IS INTERCHANGABLE, aesthetic differences can be disregarded by the digital machine as differences of format [ie. these are only differences on the interface side] (pp. 66) - This stresses the previous point that media archaeology can be practiced by media themselves (pp. 67) - Media aesthesis (immediate signal perception) operates in direct contact with its objects (transitively) as opposed to aesthetics which must pass through a layer of interpretation first (pp. 67) - Section which explores the "cultural sonosphere" as a further example of media operating on a different epistemological territory - Stressing that sonic media contain, first and foremost, the noise of the transmission system itself (pp. 68) - They store a direct index of the real which is filtered out by human perception an memory (human memory/perception filters out all noise deemed un-meaningful) (pp. 69) - "The media-archaeological desire to be freed by machines from one's own subjectivity (and desire for storytelling) is Foucauldian..." (pp. 69) - "Human beings have created logical machines, have created a discontinuity with their own cultural regime." - A section which focuses on digital temporality and the change which happens as analog media are subsumed to "cybernetic epistemology" (pp. 70-71) - Cybernetic epistemology = feedback loop between analog past and digital present - The loop is effected by translating the analog world into the digital: taking media out of traditional historical archive (governed by the time of discourse) to digital archives (governed by digital microtemporality) - [Time of discourse as human time of reading and responding, digital time as refresh rates; note also how this changes the speed of production/reproduction, speeding it up to be interoperable with digital times. We have a situation where the a digital-capital time modifies the speed and turn-over of discourse (publishing, sociality, political discourse) to make it interoperable with its own changed rhythms] (pp. 70) - These media must be analysed differently: ".., enumerative rather than narrative, descriptive rather than discursive, infrastructure rather than sociological, taking numbers into account rather than just letters and images." (pp. 70) - Final section sums up what media archaeological analysis does (pp. 71-73) - "Media archaeological analysis, on the contrary, does not operate on the phenomenological multimedia level; instead it sees all so-called multimedia as radically digital..." (pp. 71) - Looking from the side of the machine allows for "...reconstructing the generative matrix created by mediatic dispositifs." - Change happens in the move from tools to machines (pp. 72) - [The question of where interpretation goes when it is methodologically rejected. Is there a sub-methodological level of interpretation which allows technical-mathematical methods to be moved from one place and applied elsewhere?] - Goal of media archaeology is to get closer to culture by methodologically moving away from it (pp. 72) Part II. Temporality and the Multimedia Archive - Archive as dynamic (pp. 77) - Centrality of temporality (pp. 77) - "Dynamics" is not a feature of human archives and meaning making but is its technological basis (pp. 78) - Movement from archival order whose strictures are static to archival dynamics that institute processual control structures (pp. 78) - Looking at dynamics in necessary for Ernst in understanding power (pp. 79) Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and Digital Memory - General thrust is that digital archiving and archives of digital material is very different from analogue textual/artefactual archiving and operates by a very different system of regulation - First section covers main features of digital archiving (in relation to analogue archiving), digital archive is "use-oriented ("to be completed") "dynarchive"." (pp. 82) - Digital archives not "read-only" but are continuously generated in relation to present needs (pp. 81) - Digital archives collect/connect local archives to each other via the digital component [eg: archive.org hosting a bunch of geographically disparate archives] (pp. 81) - Information aesthetics (formats) over classification criteria (pp. 81) - Generative forms of archiving through non-semantic search methods, new kinds of agents and filters (pp. 81-82) - Closer to the computer's memory aesthetic than traditional archives: dynamic constant access over static storage of material, regroupable and updatable through forms of internal feedback (pp. 82) - Digital archival objects (ie. digital art) come into being anew every time they are accessed, their source code is stored so that they may be remade/refreshed (pp, 82) - A section which argues that relationality is the main operativity of the digital archive - The most salient feature of digital archiving is its use of binary encoding (pp. 82) - Binary encoding subsumes the digital archive to operative mathematics (computation) which is about relations over things (pp. 83) - The digital archive has one register in which content and organizational model are both the same thing, finding is in the content [not like in the 19th cen. archive where there are documents stored and a card-index finding aid which exists in a different register) (pp. 83) "...a finding aid in the documents themselves, a self-referent archive." (pp. 84) - The digital archive is therefore about "meaningfully linking up different information nodes..." "Here it is no longer a question of reactivating objects, but relations." (pp. 83) - Section which takes on the question of what the internet is within the new formulation of digital archiving - Main argument (which elucidates digital archiving in general) is that the internet is not an archive, but contains archives at different levels; it is a "transarchive" (pp. 84) - It is a collection or assembly of material, since anything can be converted into bits and uploaded (ie. there are no protocols which regulate what is excluded, what noise) (pp. 85) - BUT it does contain archives of protocols which enable material to be organized into continually reconfigurable, temporally limited organizations of content (pp. 85) - The generative rules and protocols CAN be archived but the outcomes can only be documented [Ernst uses the example of a video art installation, the video tape can be archived but the realization of the installation can only be documented] (pp. 85) - Short section on relation of digital memory to digital archiving - Digital memory micro-temporality is superimposed upon historical archive macro-time (they are different, but happen in the same place w/ different registering regimes) (pp. 87) - The space of digital memory is a precondition for digital micro-time insofar as it enables the high speed of data processing (higher speed requires more space) (pp. 87) - "What makes the difference between memory and an archive is an organized archival barrier." (rules of exclusion) (pp. 87) - All computers are digital archives since they are for data storage & retrieval, they contain digital memory which stores/operates along a set of protocols [contained in the way memory/processing is physically constituted] (pp, 87) - Short section on the actual role of digital archiving - Digital archiving of analogue material is primarily about how it is made-accessible/disseminated in the present rather than its longevity (pp. 88) - This makes its material-specificity less important; it must be subsumed to a new non-semantic alphanumeric encoding (archaeography) to gain that usability (pp. 88) - A section on archiving media art - Digital archiving of media art will require "laying bare the algorithms -- the arché -- of the archive." (pp. 89) - This algorithmic level = "submedia space" as per Boris Groys since "as media carriers the media apparatuses are as good as inaccessible to the viewer." (pp. 89) - Importance of evaluating works on two different criteria: archivability and need for archiving, both especially important since media art often resist archiving (fleetingness of digitality, their existence as algorithmic artefacts) - The issues of the inherent instability of digital media, its tendency to deteriorate physically & become unreadable due to obsolescence (pp. 90) - "As Volker Kahl points out electronic communication "is based on time. It leaves no traces apart from its result which lies outside this process, unless traces are deliberately laid." (pp. 90) - The question of whether media art, which already has its own erasure in mind, needs archiving (pp. 90) - A section where Ernst answers that question: media art does need archiving, but in a manner that is attuned to the digitality of media art (pp. 91) - This archive would operate on archival content which is already computational (that is, existing as file formats and not different media), they are already able to be generative in the way Ernst proposed above, through operations on their data content (alphanumeric bytes) from the POV of the computer (pp. 91) - Final section which sums up the above and closes with a couple main points: - A genuinely digital media object/archive is processual, it cannot be engaged with at a standstill (pp. 93) - Digital memory stores as much as it erases, and the process of storage requires continual erasure and rewriting (pp. 93) - Computational devices may be static artefacts, but they only become important when they're working processes are happening; they are their action (pp. 93) Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories - Main argument: the change from mechanical/textual storage to fluid electromagnet storage requires a new model for analysing this dynamic form of memory (pp. 95) - Section where Ernst provides an overview of digital archival dynamics - Digital archive = "regeneration, (co-)produced by online users for their own needs." (pp. 95) - There is still a form of archiving (arché) which provides the possibility of the dynamics (pp. 95) - Description of the digital archive not through "the transarchival notion of "organizational," cybernetic, feedback-based, instant memory..." but through "material memory agencies" which are hardware and institutional and operate in time (albeit at non-human timescales) (pp. 97) - "Media archaeology hierarchy of technical memory levels:" (pp. 97) - ROM (protected, static memory) - The register (memory which is read-write and directly addressable; compare to RAM) - The accumulator (calculation-specific space which temporarily hold results, see CPU accumulators and how they work) - The buffer (transient data storage) - Modes of accessing stored data (direct access storage, sequential access storage, eg. How data is actually stored and how one must retrieve it.) - Associative storage (addressing of stored elements by content) - Close coupling of the above memory types to timing levels: (pp. 97) - Cycle time (refresh rates, "clock speeds" of processing and on the bus; ie. machine-internal cyclic time) - Latency (the time it takes for data to be shifted and relocated; this time is visible at the interface and is linear insofar as an event happens) - Access time (latency+transfer time, time from the point of view of the interface: from command to retrieval to relocation to appearance at the interface) - Ernst stresses the permanent movement of memory at the micro-level - Demonstration of the generalization of digital archival dynamics - No longer accumulation but permanent transfer of elements (pp. 98) - [This aligns with supply-chain dynamics where storage is only a temporary resting place in shipping networks; is this the location of interoperability between architectural processing and capital?] - "... no delay between memory and the present..." - "With supremacy of selection over storage, addressability over storage, there is no memory in the emphatic sense anymore; archival terminology -- or rather the archive itself -- becomes literally metaphorical, a function of transfer processes." (pp. 98) - Digital space not about memory as cultural record but "about a performative form of memory as communication." (pp. 99) - Gesture toward change from archival order to archival field literally underpinned by electromagnetic field dynamics (pp. 98) - "...the cultural techniques of re-activable storage are in a permanent state of latency." (pp. 98) - Ernst redefines storage/memory in light of the above discussion in re dynamics - Memory defined as "a device into which information can be introduced and then extracted at a considerably later time" means that "storage is nothing but a limit value of transfer." (pp. 100) - "Storage is a transfer across a temporal distance." (pp. 100) [this shows up earlier than Ernst to differing degrees and explicitness; see "Digging up the Pas T" (bpnichol 1981)and how it shows in in McLuhan, I've noted this in Neo-Colonialism of the Global Village (Ginger Nolan 2018)] - Transformation of "deep archives" to "flat" archives, in the sense of material configuration and not necessarily "governance" (pp. 100) - Defines arché as "the governing rule for the emergence of sensible phenomena at all." (pp. 100) - Sums up that memory should now be thought of a "cybernetic memory" which is not storage for posterity but an ingredient in present operations, systems of short-term storage that are the condition of data processing (pp. 101) Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on Television - Main thrust is that TV is defined less by its content than by live transmission which is characteristic of the medium - Ernst starts by providing the basis for a media archaeological approach to TV (pp. 102), that narrativity/semantics is already undermined in TV (pp. 103), that cultural studies discourse analysis can't deal with TV's medium-specificity (pp. 104) while media archaeology "searches the depths of hardware for what can become a program." (pp. 104) - Of importance is that, "For media archaeology, the only message of television is this signal: no semantics." (pp. 105) Here, signal and noise have nothing to do with communicating some content or meaning but are noise = continuity (sensible data stream) and signal = discontinuity (the extraordinary, the unexpected) (pp. 105) - Quick cuts (identified on pp. 103) is on the side of continuity of transmission, noise (no need to relate blocks of data to each other in continuity of broadcast); Live transmission (identified on pp. 103) is on the side of signal, the need for the extraordinary (pp. 106) - Ernst goes into a discussion of live transmission which makes up the rest of the argumentation (pp. 106-112) - Extraordinariness of display as a function of qualitative noisiness (low quality image) (pp. 107-108) - the extraordinariness of display as a function of turning an occurrence into an event through broadcasting live (pp. 109, discussion of the news) - Veracity of extraordinariness/liveness through textual marker "broadcasting live" that cannot be directly verified through receiver feedback (pp. 110-111) Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space? - Two part discussion: 1) epistemological reflection on the term "media archaeology" 2) case studies (outlined on 113-114) - PART 1: epistemological reflection - Demonstrates the epistemic difference with media history - Media history is about continuities, lineages which make "permanent connections between heterogeneous parts" (pp. 115) - Means focus on the trace of an event (Ernst uses the example of the HP garage and of the 8-Bit Museum's preservation of computer lineage) (pp.115) - Media archaeology is about describing the "nondiscursive practices of the technocultural archive without reducing the archive to its technical apparatuses" - Means focus on the storage, rereading, and rewriting of processual artefacts (eg. source codes) with a view to the specific operations of the codes (pp. 115) - Introduces the "anarchive" which is in opposition to ownership and artefactual stability through the example of game piracy and abandonware (pp. 115) - Prehistory of the computer example showing media history's desire to find pre-histories of computation, compared to Kittler's focus on differences (pp. 115-117) - Stresses the way that media of the past can only be investigated materially through other media filters, themselves tempering what can be revealed and known (Benjamin's optical unconscious and Lacan's computation) (pp. 117-118) - Of epistemic importance for media archaeology of digitality (as for computational media themselves) there is no multimedia, just a single medium which is able to emulate all other media at the interface (pp. 118-119) - This produces a non-spatialized knowledge (insofar as all elements are transmitted/stored in the same form) which is temporal through the continuity of the data stream (pp. 120) - Importance of interactivity in which accessing an element can also be a rewriting or reorganizing of the archive, feedback instead of unidirectional transmission (pp. 121) - Also of note is that interactivity requires the multimedia conceit of the interface despite backend continuity (pp. 121) - Media archaeology thinks media relations differently from media history - Media history = writing printing digital (pp. 123) - Media archaeology looks at how all of the above relate in a non-teleological way via short circuits; what components of the past are still present, where do they now take place (pp. 123) - With the move from print archives (the organization of material is dealt with in the same way as the interface does) to digital archives (single medium in the backend enabling multimedia at the interface) the archive becomes a "discrete matrix of life itself" (pp. 125) - PART 2: Case studies - 1: Virtual reactivation of no-longer playable sonic media at Hornbostel's Phonogramm-Archiv (pp. 126-127) - Demonstrates digital disregard of multimedia in the internals (visual reading of sonic media to turn it back into sound) - 2: Berlin hospital Cherité medical image archive (pp. 129-130) - "The archival regime of memory is not an idiosyncratic choice but a rule governed, administratively programmed operatin of inclusions and exclusions that can be reformulated cybernetically or even digitally." (pp. 129) - Digging up points of discontinuity and absence with media (the Nazi film project thrown into a lake as the red Army approached Berlin & rediscovered with sensors) - 3: Angela Buloch's Blow Up (pp. 130-137) - Demonstrates the potentials of how digital archiving no longer addresses semantically, but by the data constitution of content (in this case, the ability to address specific image pixels) - 4: The Internet (pp. 137-140) - General implications: breaking clear distinction between "(stored) past and (the illusion of) the present" (pp. 137), from space (location) to topology (address) (pp. 138) - "Although the Internet still orders knowledge, apparently without providing it with irreversible hierarchies (on the visible surface), the authoritative archive of protocols is more rigid than any traditional archive has been." (pp. 139) - [implications for non-hierarchical organization in general; the more hierarchically fluid a condition is, the more intensive are the protocols each element must abide by/submit themselves to] - Ends off on the opposition of digital anarchiving (anarchoarchiving) to very constitution of the traditional archive which is based on storage as ownership (pp. 140) - Two kinds of memory will remain: 1) digital-owned memory which destroys the analog versions of its content, based on ownership (eg: streaming services) 2) anarchive as mentioned above which is in opposition to ownership (pp. 140) Part III. Microtemporal Media - Parikka identifies time as a central theme in media archaeology (pp. 143) - In comparison to other media archaeologists (eg: Zielinski, Huhtamo) Ernst is less interested in phenomenal time (geological deep time, social time, human time) than timing in the machine: "microtemporality" (pp. 143) - Internal media time and external media time (media have durations that might not be visible to us) (pp. 144) Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point of View - Main argument: "narration and counting can be seen as functions of alternating conditions of the media." Narration and counting are different but related (pp. 147) - Brief outline of the relation between the two - Numerical ordering as cultural practice before being implemented in media (pp. 147) - Oral traditions are narrative, however, the narrativity is serial, ie. countable, in different ways (mnemonics, syllabic metre) (pp. 147) - Longer examination of narration/counting in relation to history (pp. 148-152) - Use of an etymological method (tellan is "to put in order" narratively and in counting) which provides a way in to talking about chronologization (pp. 148) - Chronology, annals, king lists, descriptive lists, are telling-as-counting that enumerate events serially though they are not yet history (pp. 148-149) - Clocks and the mechanization of telling-as-counting - Telling-as-counting (annalism) a dataset which resists connecting events to each other and making any other ordering than temporal seriality (this then this then this) (pp.151) - History as sensemaking, pattering which takes annalistic "data" and patterns it into a narrative story (pp. 151) - Movement from annalistic "diagram" of the past to a micro-narratively embellished movement across the diagram (pp. 151) - Section where Ernst uses Lessing's Laocoon (again) to examine description vs narration (pp. 153-153) - Ernst maps that difference to Lessing's splitting of temporal and spatial media: description = painting, spatial; narrative = poetry, temporal - "Description is at odd with narrative..." (you can't have both at once, description interrupts narrative to hold its continuity in brackets for a moment; E states this back on pp. 148 as well) (pp. 153) - What is important though is that description (mapped to archaeology, annals) and narration (mapped to history) are both present in the same medium of text, though they might flip back and forth - Short section where Ernst reveals the breakage in the above separation in film where the technical basis of film is seriality (of frames) while it appears as spatial image (pp. 153-155) - Time drives the bus here though since it operates on the technical level with spatiality being su8bsumed and emergent-from sequence (pp. 155) - Space and time are both present, but operate in different zones with one taking the lead over the other at the basis of the medium - Section on digital aesthetics which shows the breakage of Lessing again, but flipped (pp. 155-157) - Here, space drives the bus in the spatiality of the screen that has no inherent sequence (pp. 155) - But, time operates on the sub-level (media archaeological level of hardware) in serial, yet cyclical, computational microevents which hold the whole spatial edifice up (pp. 155) - Tracking serial locations in a continuous space as the means of producing a sense of time (as opposed to in film where time is stable and changes on the screen trace spaces) (pp. 156) - In film, time is the medium for space and in digitality, space is the medium for time (pp, 156) Distory: One Hundred Years of Electron Tubes, Media-Archaeologically Interpreted, vis-à-vis One Hundred Years of Radio - This chapter presents a history of radio from the point of view of its technical underpinning, the electron tube, as opposed to its media content regimes, the institution of broadcasting (pp. 144); this media archaeological radio was not defined by "macrotemporal programming" but microtemporal oscillation (pp. 158) - Ernst proposes that the beginning of broadcast marks the end of radio a "producer of media knowledge: the beginning of radio as a mass medium refers to yet a different type of radio." (pp. 158-159) - Section on how radio short-circuits historical time (epoch-making, chronologization) by the fact that its apparatuses can still function, radio proposes a new way to think its own temporality (pp. 159-162) - a tube radio from 192X can still pick up signal and is therefore of the present even if its "world" is gone, effecting the short-circuit, a "compressed time with respect to our sensory perception." (pp. 159) - Outlines two kinds of pre-radio tubes - [NOTE: Ernst hews quite closely to the individuals as prime-movers of the invention of tubes, a kind of undermining of his own project which shows up again in the last chapter of the book] - De Forest's Audion (triode vacuum tube): for radio transmission through oscillation; attenuation equalization of oscillation, demodulation of a high frequency signal, amplification of resulting low frequency signal; ideal for speech transmission (pp. 161) - Von Lieben's tube: for telephony; minimizes distortion on telephone lines (pp. 161) - Ernst sets up the rest of the conversation: he will show how tubes cut transversally across "media complexes" connecting them to one another against the grain of history (especially histories of media which overcome one another linearly) (pp. 162) - "Media-epistemological entities are at odds with those histories that further differentiate media only as the process of such technologies developing into mass media." (pp. 162) - Section on how the media archaeological (early) phase of radio is not just a pre-history but also an alternative to radio as mass media - Epistemic message of radio: speech is fleeting, it degrades and has no staying power (this move: speech signal waves = linguistic meaning sound signal noise), speech breaks down (pp. 162) - This phase is characterized by radio as not yet a medium for semantic content (pp. 162-163) - Morse code transmissions through "spark gap" transmitters; serial burst transmission rather than continuous broadcasting, this is transmission of signal without semantic content which must be encoded on one end and decoded at the other (pp. 163) - Non-computational digitality (this short circuit) (pp. 163) - Broadcasting turns the waves (high frequency) itself into a medium in which semantic signals (low frequency) are inscribed while spark gap is entirely different in how it transmits information (serial, bit by bit) (pp. 164) - Mention of radio broadcasting (its mass media character) through interface with financing/marketing [another instance where the individual (Edison or Marconi eg.) take on the roll of "great minds"] (pp. 163) - Section that hooks radio tube into scientific experimental knowledge (pp. 165-166) - "For technological archaeology, the defect is the true index of the real." (pp. 165) - The tube as base grid (the kind of operative diagram) for how to read its instantiations as media (tubes instantiated in radio, in computing, in television) (pp. 165) - The tube's use in experimental measurement and verification runs counter to its instantiation as a mediatic component (pp. 165-166) - Section discussing digital radio broadcasting (pp. 166-168) - Another short circuit by which noisiness (to human ears) of the digital signal connects back to noisiness of cathode ray tubesl; following this through Brownian motion and thermodynamics (pp. 167) - Another short circuit as digital transmission returns: radio broadcasting is encoded again as serial digital transmissions, as information as opposed to continuous analog signals (pp. 166-167) - Section on how computation changes the tube's status without changing its internal material constitution, showing how it can bridge various media and times (pp. 168-171) - Change from modulation to digital encoding changes the epistemological and practical nature of radio; tubes are displaced from radio transmission to computation (pp. 168) - In computation, they worked like transistors, their use as flip-flops and early IC's (Schottky Transistor package which uses a Schottky diode to make sure all the charge in a transistor is cleared; this prevents transistors from getting stuck in the on state) (pp. 169) - Tubes in computation feed-back on theorization of cybernetics (pp. 169) - The tube changed its use-status (Ernst says "status of being") without changing its technical arrangement, it crosses a change from analog to digital processing without itself changing (pp. 170) - Ernst asserts that this exploration of the tube reveals that the digital can be "described entirely within the bounds of the analog." (pp. 170) - At its base, technical level, digital and analog media work with the same components (pp. 170) - From the point of view of the hardware component, from the mathematics, digital media does not displace analog media, but renders itself within the bounds of the analog or as a modality of the analog Toward a Media Archaeology of Sonic Articulations - Main argument: listening to the "sonospheres" of the past through replaying past recording media constitutes a new kind of historical knowledge, one that is media aware (pp. 172, 183) - Section which compares historical and media archaeological sonosphere reconstruction (pp. 172-174) - Historical: subjugation of sonosphere to historical discourse/writing (pp. 172) - Media archaeological: reenactment of the sonosphere (pp. 173) - Media archaeology approaches what the humanities cannot deal with: media as its technical a priori (pp. 173) - A media archaeological ear for the past which deals with noise (non-semantic signal) as the sonic trace of a historical condition (pp. 174) - Non-historical study of the past since it cannot be subsumed to historiography (narrativization), it is a historical condition without the event (pp. 174) - Section comparing technical recording and symbolic transcription (pp. 174-175) - Symbolic notation records signal only, it acts as a filter which only passes semantic content; symbolic notation makes decisions about what is deemed "tradition" (pp. 174) - Technical recording deals with signal and is therefore indifferent to the content of the sound it records: it picks up semantic content along with the background noise (pp. 174) - This exposes the cultural event to experimentation and analysis on the technical level, a non-hermeneutic analysis of a cultural condition (pp. 175) - A section which outlines media archaeological reenactment (pp. 175-177) - Media archaeological reenactment is based on the repeatability of technical media (ie. one instance of playback is theoretically the same as any other) making it closer to the scientific institution of experiments than historical reconstruction (pp. 175) - Reenactment of the actual "sound generating setting" sets up a historical short circuit where we are dealing with an invariant acoustic condition (the physical/technical operation/laws of the artefact does not change) despite the change in our culturally tuned sonic awareness (pp. 175-176) - On 175, Ernst uses the example of the Pythagorean monochord - When put to use, past sonic artefacts change from being historical (inert and subject to historiography) to being processual (being media again through their action) (pp. 177) - "...acoustic "understanding" of the past..." which is not speculative but actual - [NOTE: Ernst trusts media to record everything of a specific condition. There's an interesting extra level to mediatic, non-semantic recording which is where media find themselves. This has to do with what kinds of political-economic and cultural mechanisms they find themselves within/interfacing with] - A section which introduces the specific technique of media archaeological reenactment (pp. 177-178) - "there is a memory of auditory culture in the past that is not historical but media archival." (pp. 177) - Acoustic archaeology = use of historical instruments to replay sounds; this is an engagement with our sensorium is remains historical in that sense (empathetic) (pp. 178) - Media archaeology = use of present media to investigate past media, specifically measuring media which can rectify signals as "moving diagrams" (pp. 178) - Section on acoustic measuring media to show their difference from historiography (symbolic inscription) and that they produce an indexical relation between sound and image. Ernst does this by presenting a few disparate examples (pp. 178-181) - Section that sums everything up (pp. 181-183) - "Media-active archaeology can be applied to past sound, generating a different kind of audio archive." (pp. 181) - The media-active readings of past sonic media converts them into non-semantic units which can only be accessible to human analysis through "operative technomathematical diagrams" (pp. 181) - Change in how we access the past since sonic "events" can be identically repeated and measured empirically (pp. 182) - "The media archaeological exercise is to be aware of the fact that at each technologically given moment we are dealing with media and not humans, that we are not speaking with the dead but dealing with dead media that operate." (pp. 183) Experimenting With Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing - Main argument: media archaeology does not deal with artefacts but with events; Ernst investigates this through how media exist as active processes on the microtemporal level of the apparatus and what the apparatus does to the "temporal sense" of the user (pp. 185) - Sets this up in the intro by showing how interaction with media is a form of experimentation (whether literally through measuring media or a kind of "reverse experimentation" of using media that was once an experimental measuring device) (pp. 184) - Defines experiment as event and allows for the media "experiment/reverse-experiment" to be thought through epistemological processualism (eg. Whitehead) (pp. 184) - Sets up his three case studies: the Pythagorean monochord, Hertz's radio experiment, and Alan Turing's computation as discrete states (pp. 185) - Ernst will argue that in each of the above settings there is a "time-invariant event" at work within the apparatus and the "epistemological dispositif" (pp. 185) - This invariance is at the level of "physical nature," "There is always the imminent "veto" that comes from physics." This underpins the dynamics of "culturized" actions and allows media to observe and record it by virtue of being underneath it (pp. 185) - Pythagorean monochord case study (pp. 185-186) - Reenacting the monochord means reenacting the relationship between sound vibration and integer numbers (pp. 186) - Essentially, the inert diagrammatic relationship is presented as a process - The invariant aspect of the physics means that there is no difference between our version in the present and the original; there's a communication across historical time (pp. 186) - The physical invariants provide a view into invariants of knowledge over time as opposed to historical specificity; we can see directly that the knowledge revealed by the monochord is the same despite context (pp. 186) - Hertz radio experiment case study (pp. 186-189) - The experiment which verified the relation between electricity and magnetism also contained within it at the microtemporal level the historical invariant of radio wave transmission (pp. 187) - Mathematical diagram of the extents of electro-magnetism is animated as a process (pp. 187) - "The experimental system "knew" it [radio transmission] already" on the level of the apparatus' microtime. But human detection was not yet a thing (pp. 188) - [note: "already" is for a specific sensing group in a specific place, not a universal already but a local and uneven already that acts or does not act at different levels and extents] - Turing and computation case study (pp. 189-191) - This case study deals with simulation of the world as an experimental process (pp. 189) - Introducing an opposition (sort of) - Mathematical simulation is an inert diagram of a temporal process (pp. 189) - This is semantic-symbolic and is outside of physics itself, an abstraction (pp 189) - Analog simulation (analog computers) are physical simulations which operate by means of physical laws and are tied to these (pp. 189) - This is not an abstraction from the world, but is immersed in it (pp. 189) - The distance of the observer is negated due to the immersion (pp. 191) - Digital simulation happens between those two poles, it produces a virtual space where time can be variable by animating the mathematics (pp. 191) - "mathematical moments of the real." (pp. 191) Appendix: Archive Rumblings: An Interview With Wolfgang Ernst - An interview that Ernst did with Geert Lovink. Below are some interesting points made: - "My media archaeology is an archaeology of the technological conditions of the sayable and thinkable in culture..." (pp. 195) - "The real multimedia archive is the arché of its source codes; multimedia archaeology is storage and rereading and rewriting of such programs," (pp. 196) - Ernst's sort of response to Parikka's critique of his work's refusal of politics (pp. 198) - Ernst's critique of "knowledge management" approach to knowledge (pp. 199) - "...this approach dissimulates the existence of material memory agencies -- both hardware and institutions -- which still govern the power of what can be stored legally and technically, and what will be forgotten."