The Cinema of Extractions: Film as Infrastructure for (Artistic?) Research

In contemporary discussions of film and artistic research, the historical undercurrent of film as an intense research and development activity, does not seem to be widely discussed. In contrast, film history and media archaeology has since long re-evaluated the status of early moving image technologies, which do not any longer denote pre-cinematic curiosities that simply predate the institution of cinema and its narrative forms but is rather seen as containing socio-technical trajectories and aesthetic regimes that can be studied in their own right. This essay performs a further modulation of the legacies of film history, one in which moving image technology is not seen as primarily a vehicle for film as cinema, but a continuously evolving technological and aesthetic infrastructure for film as research. This then becomes the starting point from which to reflect on artistic research in film, which today is being institutionalized as a form of practice-based research, arguably with the risk of loosing sight of an already long-established tradition of film, not only as research but also as artistic research. With the aid of an accompanying desktop video essay, the article speculates on the changing contexts of film as research visà-vis film as artistic research, from early cinema and its connection to scientific discoveries and the advanced data-analysis of today’s streaming platforms. Inspired by “The New Film History” and Tom Gunning’s influential notion of “The Cinema of Attractions” which revised the view on early cinema and the development of a filmic avant-garde, the presentation eventually focuses on artistic responses to the contemporary “Cinema of Extractions”, as a datafied infrastructure that now conditions what is knowable and sayable through the moving image

Community New Media - Beyond "Dissolutionized" Dissent

Community (New) Media - Public access in the age of networked social media. How are alternative media networks being formulated when the main cultural drive actually seems to be towards the Web 2.0 ideals of social media? Is there still any radical potential left in a concept of Community (New) Media? The base for the investigation is research on the state of non-commercial community media in Denmark and the case of the artist-run local TV-station tv-tv. What is the meaning of the station’s slogan “everybody can make TV” in a culture where everybody actually can make TV? Traditionally, alternative media networks have stressed the importance of the non-commercial, but new “free” Internet tools for media publishing re-introduce the commercial in deceptive ways. Old alt media networks are simply lacking the understanding of the criteria behind Internet participation in the Web 2.0 culture. In the presentation I will explore the need for rethinking the role of alternative “public access” media in the paradoxical context of the “massive de-massification” of social media networks

Humans Thinking Like Machines - Incidental Media Art in the Swedish Welfare State

In 1966, a group of Tanzanian exchange students in Sweden were treated to an unusual performance of early computer music. An IBM 1403 line printer, originally intended to print out forms and records for civic registration and tax collection, played them a rickety version of “Mungu Ibariki Afrika” (God Bless Africa), then recently selected as the national anthem of Tanzania. I first stumbled on the story of Swedish tax bureaucrats bringing out music from their machines in a short text chronicling the technological development of the Swedish system for tax collection from “inkpen” to “computer brain”. An article written by a former administrative director of one of the first “county computer centers” in Sweden, Åke Johansson, by chance also a colleague and close friend of my late grandfather. This means my research has been personal as well as archival: through interviews with Åke and offline as well as online research, I’ve tried to map out the different actors and background contexts of this story. What is emerging is a network of a kind of early everyday media art which I here will explore as “incidental media art” taking place within the walls of workplaces such as universities, banks and public administration offices. This is a kind of everyday creativity that is quite startling, given that it hails from the “mainframe” era of computers, before the ubiquity of today’s networked digital environments and the advent of “personal computing”. Similar ideas of serendipitous actions have been expressed earlier in relation to cybernetic frameworks, such as in the concept of the posthuman, as a way to conceptualize emergence beyond the autonomy of the human subject. My example of the Swedish tax administration and the Tanzanian students may be characterized as following this path of thought, but at the same time it has a very concrete relationship to a colonisation-computerisation nexus which will rather guide my analysis here. It is my intention to show how such a dialectic may be useful for scrutinizing how we look upon subversion and appropriation, as concepts supposedly integral to media art histories

Transversal media practices : media archaeology, art and technological development

Transversal Media Practices work across specific situations of technological development, critically examining and redefining the terms of production in different media by bringing heterogeneous histories, institutions, actors and materialities into play with one another. This dissertation is all about trying out and refining the methodologies of such transversal media practices, in the end outlining a conceptual set of tools for further development. Following the technological hype of the “digital revolution” of the mid-1990s, the field of new media studies gained popularity over a ten year period. This dissertation takes its cue from a historical turn in new media theory, and argues that it is time leave behind strict polarisations between old and new as well as analogue and digital. The study unfolds through two case-studies. The first, “The World’s Last Television Studio”, looks at tv-tv, an art and media-activist project that negotiates the socio¬cultural and material changes of the “old” and institutionalised mass medium of television. In the second case study, “The Art of the Overhead”, another old medium is engaged: the overhead projector – a quintessen¬tial 20th century institutional medium here presented as a device for rethinking the new through the old. The problematic of technological development, i.e. dealing with questions of how (media) technologies develop over time, forms the background to these two case studies. A key issue being how cultural and artistic practices dealing with the interaction of old and new media invite us to conceptualise technological development in new ways. The emerging field of media archaeology is employed as a methodology in media studies and cultural production, comprising a theoretical and applied analysis of media history, materiality and practice. This transversal approach allows media archaeologists to deal with the relation between the old and the new in a non-linear way as well as to pay attention to the technical materiality of media. It is argued that the transversality of the media-archaeological approach should be seen in contrast to other conceptions of media history and technological development, such as progressivist, mono-medial and evolutionary ones. In this study, the author tries out the potential of media archaeology to reform our conception of media technologies, and eventually formulates a set of concepts for thinking and doing media archaeology as a transversal media practice. These tools are about the imaginary, residual and renewable dimensions of media technologies and are meant to assist in the opening up and intervening into processes of standardised media development. On a general level the resulting set of tools for transversal media practices builds a bridge between theory and practice: they can be used for further research and cultural analysis where objects of study speak back to analytical concepts. At the same time these are tools for transversality that expand this form of cultural analysis in that the travelling between disciplines here also means a travelling between theory and practice. On a specific level, the tools enable this travel between theory and practice in media- and communication studies, and as such they contribute to the development of new practice-based methodologies in media research

The Eternal Network: The Ends and Becomings of Network Culture

‘The network is everlasting’ wrote Robert Filliou and George Brecht in 1967, a statement that, at first glance, still seems to be true of today’s world. Yet there are also signs that the omnipresence of networks is evolving into another reality. In recent times, the limits of networks rather than their endless possibilities have been brought into focus. Ongoing media debates about hate speech, fake news, and algorithmic bias swirl into a growing backlash against networks. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the contemporary reach and relevance of the network imaginary. Accompanying transmediale 2020 End to End’s exhibition ‘The Eternal Network’, this collection gathers contributions from artists, activists, and theorists who engage with the question of the network anew. In referencing Filliou’s eternal notion, the exhibition and publication project closes the loop between pre- and post-internet imaginaries, opening up possible futures with and beyond networks. This calls many of the collection’s authors to turn to instances of independent and critical net cultures as historical points of inspiration for rethinking, reforming, or refuting networks in the present. --- The Eternal Network: Vom Enden und Werden der Netzkultur DEUTSCHE FASSUNG: „Das Netzwerk wird es ewig geben“, schrieben Robert Filliou und George Brecht 1967 – eine Aussage, die auf den ersten Blick auch heute noch zuzutreffen scheint. Doch gibt es auch Anzeichen, dass die Allgegenwärtigkeit von Netzwerken eine andere W irklichkeit hervorbringt. Mittlerweile rückt die Endlichkeit von Netzwerken – anstatt deren endlose Möglichkeiten – in den Fokus; davon zeugen die anhaltenden Mediendebatten über Hassrede, Fake News und algorithmischer Diskriminierung. Vielleicht ist es an der Zeit, die aktuelle Reichweite und Relevanz des Netzwerks neu zu betrachten. Begleitend zur Ausstellung „Das ewige Netzwerk“ der transmediale 2020 End to End versammelt dieser Band Beiträge von Künstler*innen, Aktivist*innen und Theoretiker* innen, die sich neu mit der Frage des Netzwerks beschäftigen. Ausstellung und Publikation beziehen sich auf Fillious Konzept von der Ewigkeit des Netzwerks. Sie verbinden dabei die Vorstellungswelten, die zeitlich vor der Entwicklung des Internets entstanden sind, mit jenen, die darauf folgten. So eröffnen sie mögliche Zukünfte mit und jenseits von Netzwerken. Viele Autor*innen in diesem Band lassen sich dabei von historischen Momenten der unabhängigen und kritischen Netzkulturen inspirieren, um Netzwerke der Gegenwart neu zu denken, sie zu reformieren oder anzufechten