3 results
1 - Media Archaeology as Laboratory for History Writing and Theory Making
- Edited by Mark Goodall, Ben Roberts
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- Book:
- New Media Archaeologies
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 07 January 2019, pp 23-44
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Summary
Abstract
As suggested in 1996 by Siegfried Zielinski, media archaeology should be considered as a “form of activity” (or Tatigkeit), as something that you do or execute. In this essay, I propose to think of media archaeology as a laboratory for history writing and theory making, by engaging with various hands-on media-archaeological methods, such as creative hacking, non-narrative modes of presentation, media bricolage and play. The central aim of such a media-archaeological enterprise is to rethink media's temporality, materiality and potentiality.
Keywords: Media Archaeology, Laboratory, Creative Hacking, Creative Thinking, Zielinski, Munari
Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tatigkeit.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
More than two decades ago, Siegfried Zielinski already suggested thinking of media archaeology as a practice, or a continual performance, as something that you do or carry out. More specifically, in an essay published in July 1996 in CTheory as part of the special section on Global Algorithm, the German media theorist called media archaeology his ‘form of activity’, adopting Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of Tatigkeit. In Zielinski's words, Wittgenstein ‘adhered to the premise that philosophy is not something to be sat out on a professorial chair, but should be a continuous action of clarification in its very own medium, language’ (Zielinski, 1996). As philosophy should consist of clarifying sentences (and not just of the sum of ‘philosophical sentences’), so media archaeology could be thought of as the ‘continuous action’ of excavation into the media's past(s) and future(s), that is, as the process of digging, discovering, rediscovering, rethinking, etc., rather than as the final results of such actions. In 1996, Zielinski tentatively defined media archaeology as an ‘approach […] which in a pragmatic perspective means to dig out secret paths in history, which might help us to find our way into the future’ (Ibid.).
This early media-archaeological definition/proposition by Zielinski resonates with two mottos formulated in the 1970s that are influential for my current research and my own take on media archaeology. The first motto is from American architect and systems theorist Richard Buckminster Fuller, as cited by Gene Youngblood in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema: ‘I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.’ (Youngblood, p. 45).
5 - Marinetti’s Tattilismo Revisited: Hand Travels, Tactile Screens, and Touch Cinema in the 21st Century
- Edited by Rossella Catanese
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- Book:
- Futurist Cinema
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 12 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 13 December 2017, pp 69-88
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This essay suggests reconsidering Futurist cinema in the light of Marinetti’s Tattilismo (or Art of Touch), by exploring contemporary experiences of tactile art and imagining the possible future(s) of touch cinema. In the early 1920s, Marinetti's Art of Touch was a provocation in the face of the dominant hands-off museum culture. Today, we are surrounded by screens and surfaces that invite us to touch them. Yet, as exposed here in six different takes, this increase of tactile interfaces in our daily lives does not (necessarily) imply an enrichment of our sensory perception, let alone a completion of touch cinema.
Keywords: Art of Touch, Marinetti, Contemporary Art Installations, Touch Cinema, Sensory Perception
Take One: TOUCHING REALITY
A huge forefinger ‘travels’ over the horrifying picture of a wounded, bloodcovered body; with the help of a (equally huge) thumb, it stretches the image in order to obtain a closer view, points to some detail and pushes the image around; with a firm movement from right to left, it makes another picture of another mutilated body, dead or alive, appear. The finger repeats this right-to-left gesture several times – now faster, now slower – to reveal more brutal images. At one point, it reverses the direction of its gesture, from left to right, to return to the previous image. Then, it resumes its swift right-to-left movement. Shortly after, it arrests to zoom in again on a gruesome part of the picture.
This ‘hand travel’, which lasts about five minutes, was recorded in 2012 by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. The video is entitled TOUCHING REALITY, but, in reality, the finger does not touch anything, that is, it does not touch any thing, any destroyed body of this brutal reality of war and murder. It merely glides over the surface of a smartphone or tablet; it touches a touchscreen without really touching what is on display. Furthermore, Hirschhorn reinforces the distance by deliberately opting for a non-interactive installation that excludes the spectator, gallery visitor, or museum-goer from engaging directly, tangibly, with the artwork. The touchscreen footage is displayed on a non-touchable projection surface or screen. The spectator, who contemplates this detached, non-engaged ‘hand travel’, is thus put into an equally non-engaging viewing position.
Re-disciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier
- Edited by Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener
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- Book:
- Cinephilia
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 25 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2005, pp 125-134
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In the late 1990s, I toured California in a roofless Jeep. After a long day of “tough” (windy) driving, I ended up, rather accidentally, in the “no-nonsense services town” of Barstow. On the historic Route 66, I took a cheap room in a Best Motel. Fatigued and dazed by the trip, I nestled down on the queen-sized bed and switched on the color TV, one of the motel's amenities. There were probably over 100 channels. And, inevitably, I started zapping. I would prefer to see myself in this specific situation not as a couch potato, but as an active “homo zappens” who is taking control of the multiplicity and the simultaneity of signs (or channels). This is, of course, self-deceit.
While “mindlessly surfing” typical American television (soaps, sports, weather channels, CNN, lots of commercials…), I suddenly stumbled upon something different, something bizarre: it was a sequence of black and white images, in French, with English subtitles. In my zombie mood (or mode) I zapped forward; then, abruptly, I stopped and went back. I had to go back to those images. These were Nouvelle Vague images, there was no doubt about that. I was sure it wasn't Truffaut because it was too surreal. It had to be Godard. Once back in the Old World, I did some research and discovered that it was, indeed, Les carabiniers (France: 1963, THE RIFLEMEN).
“To Collect Photographs Is to Collect theWorld”
I was able to trace back LES CARABINIERS thanks to its picture postcard sequence, which is one of the most remarkable moments of the film. During this 12-minute sequence, the riflemen's wives (and the spectator) get a summary of their war conquests. Because: “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” according to Susan Sontag who pays close attention to Godard's film from page one of her collection On Photography:
In…LES CARABINIERS (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe.