Media Archaeology Summary

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What is Media Archaeology as been written by Jussi Parikka in 2012, the author is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, he is also Docent of digital culture theory at the University of Turku in Finland. Parikka has worked with Erkki Huhtamo and prior to this book they have published together “Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications” in the summer of 2011. What is Media Archaeology? Seeks not only to demarcate and ground the discipline, but also to synthesize its disparate voices into a more cohesive theory of digital media culture. The stated aim of the book is to define what Media Archaeology has been elaborating on four key points (Modernity, Cinema,…show more content…
He finds this uncertainty indicative: Media Archaeology proves to be a term that it is not easy to define concisely. The author explains how Media Archaeology’s most tangible roots are in film history; Tom Gunning is often cited and so are his attempts to understand early forms of cinema on their own terms, rather than as mere staging posts on the path towards classic Hollywood cinema. The ‘cinema of attractions’ has influenced contemporary media experience such as IMAX, videogames and QuickTime movies. The author suggest that a media archaeological approach to film history would work at profound moments of change in cinema history such as the coming of sound, the roll out of television, and the opening of the digital frontier, and he finds no reason to assume that what is true for film history would not be for a wider range of media. In this form Media Archaeology seems to be the best way to try to understand the significance of moments of technological convergence and…show more content…
Meanwhile, computers have become so complex they can only be manufactured through computer-aided design. In this sense, Parikka sees Media archaeology as a method of intellectual inquiry that stresses non-human agency. Parikka describes as media archaeology downplays common critical categories such as text, works or author, to focus on the inter-medial journeys of cyclically occurring formal tropes, a type of bio-politics most concerned with the pre- and un-conscious, and the deep non-human structure of media technology. An other important reoccurring presence in What is Media Archaeology? is the work of the American artist Paul DeMarinis, whose work obsessively reuses old technologies. Because of the book’s stress on the centrality of deconstructing and reconstructing media technologies in order to reveal secret histories and lost lineages, there are extended discussions of contemporary artists in America and Europe. Parikka ties computer hackers and DIY programmers into an ‘alternative’ scene with artists and curators practicing media
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