If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media From the Hootenanny to the People\u27s Microphone

American folk music gatekeepers have been rightfully critiqued for positing problematic naturalizations of authenticity. Yet, there are underexplored thinkers and artists across the history of folk music whose relationship to media is more complicated. By drawing on the field of media archeology, this dissertation explores the various diagrams and models of communication that can be pulled from the long American folk revival. Media archeology as described by such thinkers as Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski is not a conventionally linear means of narrating media history; media archeology rather seeks to uncover forgotten and all-but-lost potentialities within our historical media ecologies. In this way, drawing also on the work of Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explore the subterranean but vivid discourse on technology offered by several key players in American folk music history. I begin by closely reading the work, writings, and eclectic projects of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Lomax’s anthropological and folkloristic research was grounded in a myriad of both analogue and digital media; he pioneered the use of sound-recording technology in the field, used IBM mainframes to analyze musicological data in the sixties, and even experimented with personal computers and multimedia software in the eighties and nineties. I probe Lomax’s writings to find an anomalous and productive conception of the digital. Second, I look at Pete Seeger’s complicated relationship to McLuhan; despite his problems with the Torontonian superstar, Seeger’s own thought works towards a similarly medium-specific understanding of resistance. Chapter 3 considers Steve Jobs’s and Apple’s mobilization of Bob Dylan’s work and star image. Although Apple’s effacement of the machine has roots in Dylan’s own artistic lineage (via Romanticism), we can also find a post-humanist Dylan—one interested in noise, machines, and parasites. The final chapter explores through-lines between the “Hootenanny” parties held by Woody Guthrie and his friends in the early 1940s and more recent mobile, music-making iPhone apps, with a final stop at the Occupy movement’s “People’s Microphone.” These exploratory case studies bring to light a set of connections and convergences between digital history, folk music, and critical theory

Media Archeology and magic lantern slides

.Las sesiones que combinaban la proyección de imágenes, la recitación de textos y la interpretación de melodías musicales alcanzaron entre los siglos XIX y XX una importante relevancia socio-cultural a nivel internacional en múltiples contextos científicos, educativos y populares. Para sus fines, dichas sesiones se sirvieron de un nuevo dispositivo que adoptó denominaciones como fantascopio, megascopio, micros-copio solar o linterna de proyección, y que dio nombre a un medio de comunicación social muy popular conocido bajo el término de “linterna mágica”

Textual Demoscene

The demoscene is a mainly European subculture of computer programmers, whose programs generate computer art in real time. The aim of this report is to attempt a description of the textual dimension of the demoscene. The report is the effect of efforts to perform an ethnographic exploration of the Polish computer scene; it quotes interviews with participants of demo parties, where text plays a significant role: in demos, real-time texts, IF, mags or digital adaptations. Media archeology focusing on the textual aspect of the demoscene is important to understanding the beginnings of digital literature and genres of digital-born texts

A Voice of Process: Re-Presencing the Gendered Labor of Apollo Innovation

From Ada Lovelace to Margaret Hamilton, retelling the stories of previously unrecognized women can broaden histories of technology and challenge the dominant imaginary of innovation today. These figures remind us that women can be—and always have been—part of computing. Yet, their significant accomplishments represent a small fraction of women’s contributions to technology. Women, and especially working class women of color, have consistently done the work just below the surface of discovery. However, the data comprising their experiences remains thin, keeping those figures on the scientific margins. This essay explores how communication studies can integrate expanded methods of media archeology to address issues of representation in the absence of remarkable personal narratives. We present the case study the Apollo Guidance Computer’s woven core memory, a history that is “re-presenced” through a participatory workshop that engages participants in collaborative acts of weaving. In an appeal to the tactics of design, this recuperation opens an indeterminate past to illuminate the networks of labor called into being by technological artifacts. We argue that integrating these methods can produce new, feminist histories of material practices—bringing people and places into the present along with their associated artifacts

Material windows and working stations. The discourse networks behind skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment.The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment

The Depth Conditions of Possibility: The Data Episteme

Book review of Colin Koopman's How We Became Our Data (2019

Sticky Media. Encounters with Oil through Imaginary Media Archaeology

This paper investigates how media archaeology and the concept of deep time could be taken literally, by bringing authors of early media studies (McLuhan, Innis) together with contemporary eco-material approaches (Gabrys, Parikka) on the topic of oil. Following these conjunctions of media and oil the article first traces certain prevailing narrations in media studies, before turning to the understanding of oil beyond its industrial uses and its catastrophic dimensions in the petro-imaginary of Satin Island by Tom McCarthy. In terms of imaginary media archeology, petro-imaginary provides a conceptual space in which a new relation of images of material reality to media technologies can be drafted, tested, and reviewed. By proposing the figure of sticky media, in contrast to the prevailing metaphors of fluidity, I emphasize their material moments

Archeology as a Metaphor in Contemporary Culture

The scientific discipline of archeology has gone through various stages of its development and improvement of research methods. First, it was combined with ancient history and the history of art. In the mid-nineteenth century, the base of its chronology was on biblical events. Modernist archeology of the twentieth century focused on classifying monuments and reconstructing cultural processes. In the second half of the twentieth century, archeology inspired other disciplines of culture and science to “stratigraphically” look at their own history. In this way, the stratification of scientific thought (archeology of knowledge), the history of photography (archeology of photography), and the media (archeology of media) began to be analyzed. Archeology has become a cognitive metaphor in contemporary culture. Lack of knowledge of the theoretical and methodological achievements worked out by archaeologists may, after some time, lead to the trivialization and petrification of the archaeological metaphor, although today it still seems fresh and innovative for “archeology of media,” “archeology of photography,” or “archeology of modernism.