Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications

Introduction: an archaeology of Media Archaeology by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
Page 1: "Studies of new media often share a disregard for the past."

Dismantling the Fairy Engine: media archaeology as Topos study by Erkki Huhtamo
Page 28, "The Little People is a topos - a stereotypical formula evokes over and over again in different guises and for varying purposes. "  (the idea that little people are inside the machine).
page 31, "The continued usefulness of the notion of the topos for media archaeology must rely on the assumption that its origins and manifestations are both created and conditioned by cultural forces. "
Page 33, Curtius: "Specialization without universalism is blind. Universalism without specialization is inane".
Page 36-37, cyborgs discussed.

On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media by Erik Kluitenberg
Page 49, "Book of imaginary media" from 2006
Page 55, Peter Blegvad play "On Imaginary Media" distinguishes three general types of media: media remembered, media observed, and media imagined.
Page 56, Siegfried Zielinski on three categories of imaginary media: untimely, conceptual, and impossible.
Page 58, strange prayers described as media.
- EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomena
Page 59, Edison and EVP
- Zoe Beloff on spirit photography. Find Dr. Charles Richet who documented seances with multiple stereoscopic cameras.
Page 60, talking with the dead
Page 61, universal translator from Star Trek.
- Sex substitution through "machines celibataires" or "bachelor machines".  (Karka, Duchamp, Barbarella, Metropolis)
Page 62, being in two places at once.

On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine by Jeffrey Sconce
Page 71, "technical delusion - the electronic manifestation of 'thought insertion' and/or 'thought broadcasting',  providing subjects with plausible technical explanations as to how their thoughts might have become implanted".
- 1919 paper "On the origins of the influencing machine in schizophrenia"
Page 73-75, early paranoid case study.
Page 81, "Schizophrenics ... identified by inability to process metaphors".
Page 83-84, Radio Mania, radio and thought transferal/surveillance.
Page 85-87 (especially 87) Freud belief in telepathy
Page 89-90, biting critique of blogging.

Freud and the Technical Media: the enduring magic of the wunderblock by Thomas Elsaesser
Much on "mystic writing pad" - the peel off pad, Freud's memory metaphor.
Page 96, archaeology of Freud: "What were the problems Freud thought that his new science of psychoanalysis might help to answer?"
Page 100, Freud as media theorist "body/mind are storage and recording medium"
Page 108, "Time, in Freud, is the protective-compensatory effect of a subjective experience of intermittence of rupture, a failure and loss of signal even, occurring in the transition between recording and storage."
Page 112 Dracula (1897) as commentary on media origins.

The "Baby Talkie," Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern by Machiko Kusahara
Page 125, "The zograscope is seen in use in a famous woodblock print by Harunobu, Tamagawa inkoya"
Page 130, Kinora - mini-mutoscope for home.
"In Japan there are patent applications from 1932 and 1933 introducing panorama toys for which gramophones are used to automatically scroll the pictures".
Page 137, [Suiho] Tagawa was a former Dada artist, best known for his comic story Norakura (see animation in Pervasive Animation book).

The Observer's Dilemma: to touch or not to touch by Wanda Strauven
Page 152, Thaumatrope, zoetrope etc, interactivity through use of hands.
Page 152-153, Reynaud's praxinoscope theatre (1892) no longer a toy since viewer is not manipulating it.
Page 154, choreutoscope? "The eye is dependent on the hand" Piano/video game correlation.
Page 157, "Rube" film marks evidence and decline of audience /device interaction in early cinema, examples on page 158.

The Game Player's Duty: the user as the gestalt of the ports by Claus Pias
Page 169, Early computer "wirlwind" treats user as a device.
Computer decision making all compared to duty. If you do not follow rules exactly, you lose, just as Homberg is executed for breach of protocol in a war even though he won (page 167).
Page 180 "The discourse elements of the computer game are not called 'killing people' or 'catching gold nuggets' but timeliness, rhythm, or control. And these are continuously tested in a symbolic identity of the player.".

The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future is a Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Page 184, "a nonsimultaneity of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such"
Page 187, "one must act as though future predictions were fact in order to prevent the predicted future from taking place"
Page 196, "[Mercury delay] tubes memory and RAM explained/compared.
Page 198 "The internet wayback machine (IWM) is necessary because the internet, which is in so many ways about memory, has no memory!"
Page 199, "What makes a blog uninteresting is not necessarily its content, which often reads like a laundry list of things done or to do, but rather its immobility. The ever-updating, inhumanly clocked time in which our machines and memories are embedded and constantly refreshed makes its material stale. "

Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation by Paul DeMarinis
Page 212, Analog and digital ... are two concepts with a common origin, although they have been cast as a contra-distinctive pair"
Page 220, Philadelphia's panopticon prison pipes don't go cell to cell so tapped signalling won't happen.
Page 227-228, artist Yasunaotone might relate to Eric Hill.
Page 230, with Sound Designer II software you can draw a waveform using a tablet.

Media Archaeography, method and machine versus history and narrative of media by Wolfgang Ernst
Page 245, tape recorder compared to Ulysses - he had to be tied up to resist temptation of sound while tape can pay equal attention to beautiful and other voices but be unmoved.
Page 247, wire recordings from 1950s available at Milman Parry Collection or Oral Literature at Harvard (web site)
Page 150, "be aware ... that ... human voices or images of the past replayed from media recordings we are not communicating with the dead; rather, we are dealing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory."
Page 253, "Since technologies changed from tools to machines, these techniques have comprised not only texts and images but numbers as well. Media archaeology therefore is close to mathematics".

Mapping Noise, techniques and tactics of irregularities, interception, and disturbance by Jussi Parikka
Page 256, "technical media are posthuman media in the sense of addressing a whole other sensorium than that of the human being".
Page 260, 50% redundancy in English "helps combat noise".
Page 268, "As Carolyn Marvin notes, poems that served as light filler in electrical journals often identified woman as technological objects under male control. Yet the huge number of women working as interconnectors in telegraph offices, as secretaries with typing machines, and later as telephone operators were uncertain elements, probably because of their imagine cultural status as unreliable and emotional".
Book: Haunted Media by Jeffery Sconce
Page 268-270, ghosts, spirits, aliens inmachine.
Page 271, "I love you project to archive viral code"

Objects of Our Affection, how object orientation made computers a medium by Casey Alt
History of computers from"computing" machine to "media" machine, mainly through evolution of object orientation and systems theory.
Page 287, "Thus, for Kay, who understands object orientation at such a deep and intimate material level, the question of the relationship between object orientation and mediality is so obvious as to be tautological and, therefore, a nonquestion".
Page 295, "Like Bergson before him, Deleuze thus considered the material universe to be a vast, vibrating assemblage of all material movement-images acting and reacting to one another in a jittery field of unfolding relationality."
Page 297-298, McLuhen interpretation.

Digital Media Archaeology, interpreting computational processes by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Page 302, "Christopher Strachey's 1952 loveletter generator for the Manchester Mark I"
Page 310, Queneau and Le Lionnais's "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" generator using flip strips for each line of sonnet.

Afterward, media archaeology and re-presencing the past by Vivian Sobchak
Page 328 "... media archaeologists are still romantics - albeit also self satirists." 

Lovers of Cinema

Over past couple weeks, I read; "Lovers of Cinema; the first American film avant-garde, 1919-1945", edited by Jan-Christopher Horak, 1995.


The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 14-15, "the 1950s avant-gardists proclaimed themselves to be independent filmmakers, actively engage in the production of 'art', while the earlier generation viewed themselves as cineastes, as lovers of cinema, as 'amateurs' willing to work in any arena furthering the cause of film art, even if it meant working for hire"
Page 19, "Professionalism was equated with commercialism, while amateurism connoted artistic integrity. This discourse also identifies personal expression with formal experimentation, a dualism repeated continually in contemporary  aesthetic manifestos and reviews, and echoed in the polemics of the second American avant-garde.""
Page 21, 1926 re-release of Caligari.
Page 27, shady distributors.
Page 29, [early avant-garde] "demonstrated a certain wild eclecticism, innovativeness, and at times naivete that was only possible for American filmmakers."
Page 30, American romanticism, which manifests itself in a longing for (wo)man's reunification with nature".
Page 33, neoriealist 1931 "Cityof Contrasts" with comical soundtrack.
Page 36, "Nature as a visual metaphor for the expression of human subjectivity"
Page 44, "introspection" by Sara Aledge
Page 45, "Lullaby" by painter Boris Deotsch is "reminiscent of Caligari" (image on page 46).
Page 51, Theodore Huff parody films "starred children, giving the films an ambiguous sexuality and implicating the subject in the director's slightly perverse gaze".
Page 51, William Vance's "Hearts of the Age" (1934) was, according to Orson Wells, a parody of "Blood of a Poet".
Page 52, Satirical film about making surreal film "Evan As You and I" by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay, and Leroy Robbins.

The Limits of Experimentation in Hollywood by Kristin Thompson
Page 84-85, "Beggers on Horseback" (1925) was widely seen as the first major Hollywood film influenced by German Expressionism"

Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde by Brian Taves
Bio and stories about Robert Florey who made four films with enthusiastic help from Hollywood.

Americans in Paris, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy by William Moritz
Page 120, funny story about Man Ray having dispute over distribution and then stealing and disassembling a film.
Page 126, more Man Ray stories.
Page 121-127, Dudley Murphy story - who would be the deleted collaborator on the Legar film "Ballet Mechanique".
Page 130, "Sports Parade" by Murphy in 1932 is compared to "Wavelength".

Startling Angles: amateur film and the early avant-garde by Patricia Zimmermann
Page 137, 1923 article "The Importance of Doing Things Badly" (find?)
Page 139, "amateur film, whether reproducing Hollywood narrative style or experimenting with film form, was located within a discourse searching for a revival of artistic dignity through the integrity of individual filmmaking"
Page 149-150, "Cinematic Design", 1931 book by Leonard Hacker, "explicated form, rhythm, color, and relativity in motion pictures".

U.S. Modernism and the Emergence of "The Right Wing of Film Art"; the films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber by Lisa Cartwright
Page 157, "Watson claims that he and Webber selected the Poe story as the basis for their first film collaboration precisely because they had not read it in ten or fifteen years, and therefore would be free of its influence".
Page 159, The Dial: "a transcendentalist quarterly of religion and the arts ... explores mysticism and progressive revision of Christian doctrine in the light of modern science".
Page 169-170, EE Cummings' role in The Fall of the House of Usher.
Page 171, Ezra Pound influence on ee cummings via Vortisism.
"attachment of a gyroscope to the shutter, and the substitution of a prismatic ring in place of the shutter"
Page 172, Geometry and poetry and film.
Page 173, Photo of Sodom optical printer.

Theodore Huff; historian and filmmaker by Chuck Kleinhans
Page 183, Huff is an intellectual generalist and "an intellectual handyman". Wrote first book on Chaplin.
Page 187, "amateur contests ... reveal a gap between ambition and accomplishment"
Page 197, Huff collected stills and large collection of silent film music and cue sheets.
Page 202, "FOOF" = Friend of old film.

Ralph Steiner by Scott MacDonald
Page 209, "the 87 second passage that immediately follows the 'question mark' is, in my view, teh most beautiful in the film ... exquisite imagery".
Pge 212, "effects that some independent and industry filmmakers labor years to create ... are, Steiner proves, available to anyone willing to look more carefully at he world".
Page 220, "organized religion and the film industry ... ignored the realities of hunger in favor of empty illusionism"
Pie In The Sky: "subjective camera images became self reflexive moments"
Page 222, Hands: government propaganda film by Steiner.
Page 224-225, The City; compared to Koyaanisqatsi.

Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social documentary and the avant-garde in the 1930s by Charles Wolfe
Page 235, Grierson's and others one line definitions of "documentary", a new term in the 1930s.
Page 237, Leger's writings quoted on fundamental materials of photographic art.

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 267, "Manhatta is in fact central to film modernism's project of deconstructing Renaissance perspective in favor of multiple, reflexive points of view"
Page 278, argument supporting the intertitles as part of the original plan.

The City Viewed; the films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg by William Uricchio
Page 287, list of city films of the 1930s.
Page 288, alternatives to description (travelogues) or interpretation (Nanook of the North) is offered by avant-garde.
Page 292, shift from an essentially romantic tradition of self-expression to a socially engaged and often critical aesthetic.

Mary Ellen Bute by Lauren Rabinovitz

Page 317, "Tension between film's elitist modernist aesthetics and their popular reception as pretty amusements."  (thought: is this why McLaren is not written about as a/g filmmaker?)

Page 319, Brute and Leon Theremin with the color organ. 

Page 324, Collaboration with McLaren (Spook Sport)

Page 326, "she adopted the oscilloscope as her 'true pencil of light'"

Page 328, "her publicity statements especially opposed the modernist distanciation from mass tastes"

Machines That Give Birth to Images; Douglss Crockwell by Tom Gunning
Page 335, A/G flmmakers "filmmaking not only defined [his/her] lifestyle, it also subsumed it"
Page 336, "Charles Ives ... noted that innovative ideas seem to be more readily accepted in business than in official American culture and academia" (then more discussion of affect of teaching careers).
Page 337, "[Crockwell's] commercial work ... was produced with the traditional hand directed tools ... his experimental work .. was a product of machines".
Page 340, "Crockwell's machines were created... in imitation of, and homage to... the mutoscope"
Page 341, "While the projected motion pictures ... were inspired by ... magic lantern slides ... the peep show devices ... derive from such single-viewer devices as the stereoscope".
Page 342, Mutoscope remained limited to brief doses of scopic pleasure, an attraction associated with either eroticism or pure curiosity, lacking clearly defined social benefits."
Page 343, discuss sequential art in terms of mutoscope. Word: "simulacrum" which Christine cites "Disneyland" as an example.
Page 346-347, quoting Crockwell: "others have allowed the music to dominate, even to keying every motion to a musical beat. I believe the beauties of abstract animation in their own right"
Page 352, Crockwell describes wax animation he patented: "this solid block contains within itself the past, present and future of an animated sequence suspended in time" and goes on to refer to 4 dimensional objects.
Page 353, "enduring paradoxes of modern culture - the extraordinary exchange of connotations that take place between machines and sexuality"
Page 355, "At the turn of the century, motion pictures were initially exhibited as demonstrations of the apparatus that photographed and projected them, rather than simply images on the screen. ... Quite rapidly, however, the subject matter of the film or the name of the production company took pride of place, and the apparatuses were tucked away, far from the public's view. Except, of course, for the amusement arcade mutoscope.." 

Fantastic Voyages chapters 10-12

The Stars Might be Smiling: a feminist forage into a famous film by Victoria Duckett
Page 163, "As Debora L. Silverman explains ... the very emphasis on women as decorative object and decorative artist was a calculated response t the threat of female emancipation in the 1890s.  ... 'by celebrating woman as queens and artist of the interior, they ... relinquish her role as decorative object and decorative artist".
Page 164, "This is a trip to the moon where aged scientists remain aged scientists and where youthful female stars disdainfully hurry them on their way".
Page 167, "facial distortions ... to resist criminal identity" (part of mug shot ideas being twisted).
Page 169, discussion of moon face based upon de Bergerac who wrote "Journey to the Moon".
Page 173, Sleeping Venus is d'Aley; an actress with a reputation for loose morals (perhaps in Victorian porn?).
Page 174, simulated nudity in theatre discussed.

Impossible Voyages and Extraordinary Adventures in Early Science Fiction Cinema; from Robida to Melies and Marcel Fabre by Antonio Costa
Page 188, "It may be no coincidence that the 'rediscovery' of Melies occured at the height of the surrealist movement".
Page 194-5, short bio of Marcel Fabre and his film Saturnio Farandola

No One-Way Ticket to the Moon by Viva Paci
Page 203, "Melies could be compared t Norman McLaren or Charlie Chaplin; all three of the solitary autonomous innovators, capable of applying their talents to everything".
Page 208, Melies and Buzz Berkley compared as having no off screen space.
Page 210, Jean-Christophe Averty (early French tv) created work in cinema of attractions. 

Fantastic Voyages chapters 5-9

Distance Does Not Matter: Melies, le Cinema, and the Moon by Murray Pomerance
This was primarily a detailed description of the moon film.
The character Barbafouillis's name translates as "beard-in-a-triangle"
Page 92, points out that a clock is seen twice but both times, it reads four o'clock. Suggests various theories why this would be (aside from pragmatic one of the clock not being functional).

Shooting into Outer Space: reframing modern vision by Tom Gunning
Page 98, "Modern vision is mediated vision"
Pge 99, "explore the rocket ... as a vehicle of sight"
Page 107, "Reflects an era of colonization in which the exotic becomes a possession .. they bring back to earth a Selenite as captive and trophy".
Page 108, "Film history consists not only in the recovery of the past but alsoa trajectory into the future".

A Trip to the Moon as Feerie by Frank Kessler
Page 115, "feerie ... a long-standing stage tradition"
Page 116, film versions of feerie plays from Pathe' named.
Page 117, [feerie] abandoned its potential as an art form to become but a pretext for mechanical artifice"
Page 121, "apotheosis", some sort of design climax featuring extreme elements from set and costume design and the direction. In early films it was announced by intertitle and colourized.

A Trip to the Moon as an American Phenomenon by Richard Abel
Page 134, "before being electrocucuted for killing a trainer (filmed to promote direct current by Edison in 1903), an elephant named Topsy was given the task of pushing the main building three-quarters of a mile to the new site' (Coney Island)
Pge 134-135, descriptions of Long Island and touring version of Trip to the Moon cyclorama.
Page 138, Edison taking credit for Melies film.

A Trip to the Fair; or, Moon-Walking in Space by Matthew Solomon
Page 143 "Le Grand Melies", a 1953 historical drama film by George Franju about Melies.
Page 144-5, compare trip to the moon with walking between each site around a fairground.
Page 146, "barnum" a French word after P.T.Barnum
Page 154, "the film ultimately aligns itself with the excesses of traveling fairgrounds shows rather than the didactic aspirations of international expositions"

Melies trip to the moon first four chapters

First few chapters of "Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Melies's Trip To The Moon", edited by Matthew Solomon, 2011, States University, NY.

A Trip to the Movies by Paolo Cherchi Usai
Page 26, Melies's brother, Gaston, was sset up in NYC to make films but lost a lot of money.
Page 28, Melies loved to play the devil and used different names for his characters such as Alcofrisbas, Parafaragamus, Barbeonuillis, and Mabouloff.

Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Melies by Andre Gaudreault
Page 33, "the desire to tell stories was not the only preoccupation of the early filmmakers"
Page 34, "spectators are never really fooled ... many of the filmic elements ... exist to remind viewers they are watching a film"
Page 35, Noel Burch's "institutional mode of representation", cinema as we see it today with the fourth wall always intact.
Page 36, "Melies usually only tells a story in order to embellish or tie together the presentation of his latest effects"
Page 37, "he sees narrativity as pretext rather than text, and is not determinant in his imagination"
Page 43, importance of Melies editing (primarily match/jump cuts) overlooked historically.
Page 43-44, "Human Fly" film, change camera from horizontal to vertical in match cut by moving both camera and backdrop.
Page 44, "Black Imp contains about 60 cuts within three and a half minutes"

A Trip to the Moon: a composite film by Thierry Lefebvre
Primarily discusses influences on the Trip to the Moon film.
Page 51, Cyclorama at Pan American Expo in 1901
Page 54-57, operetta influence
Page 58-59, H.G.Wells influence
Page 60, Munchausen influence

First-Footing on the Moon by Ian Christie
Page 70, as theatres and literature became increasingly multi-media, "in place of 'art for art's sake' ... a new fusion of art and technology was under way"
Page 71-72, Jules Verne compared to reality of 1960s space flights. H.G.Wells more fanciful antigravity element "cavorite", and Wells and George Bernard Shaw as supporters of eugenics.
Page 73, Wells and Jules Verne both supporters of imperialism.
Page 75, Robert W. Paul - another early trick filmmaker from England who built own studio. See film "The ? Motorist".

Jubilee Book

Read "Jubilee Book, essays on amateur film" from AEI (Association Europeenne Inedits) from 1997. It contains articles by:
Andre Huet
David Cleveland
Heather Norris Nicholson
Karen L. Ishizuka
Andre Colleu
Ole Brage
Patricia R. Zimmermann
Susan Aasman and Klaas Gert Lugtenborg
Jean-Claude Guezennec
Janet McBain
Bert Hogenkamp and Mieke Lauwers
Suzanne Capiau
Gerald Saul
Alan Burton
with introduction by Jean-Philippe Art

I have had this book since it was published with my article in it but only sampled from it and never read it cover to cover. Now I have (except for the articles in French). Much of this book anticipates the writings in the "Mining the Home Movie" book which has numerous articles by the same writers (but not me). Therefore, my notes are less extensive.

Page 41, "amateur movies ... use a borrowed visual vocabulary and reproduce stereotypes"

Page 46, "Their naivete, immediacy and reflexivity are the very qualities that provide a 'veil of poetry' over ordinary events"

Page 73, "Amateur film's exile from the world of legitimate film discourse constitues the very reason why it should be preserved. Its status as a cultural exile demonstrates its potential threat to the dominant visual order"
Page 75, "the notion of 'professional' developed to describe desirable attributes of intellectual workers and managers within the increasingly corporate economy. The professional was committed to a profession rather than to the self. He possessed reproducible skills that accrued monopoly control. He was a team player without passion".
Page 78, "amateur films lack form, structure, style and coherence ... these ruptures and fissures, as identified by French historian Michel Foucault, suggest that the text alone is insufficient."

Page 87, "Resistance is a perfect example of how memory turned into commemoration can manipulate history"
Page 98-99, Norman McLaren enters Scottish Amateur Film Festival with his student film in 1934.

Page 109, define amateur but also negative connotations of adverb "amateurish".
Page 110, "American Avant Garde turns cliches of amateur filmmaking into aesthetic virtue".
Page 113, "The typical amateur filmmaker wants to fix happiness".
Page 114, "hobby film" defined.

Page 139, "see yourself in the movies" schemes discussed again with comparison/justification for showing alongside professional films.
Last article is overall a chronicle of the co-op movement beginning in 1898 with them making various films since the beginning, created and funded film unit for worker films to create propaganda over next half century, peaking in 1930s and fading with prosperity of 1950s.  

An Arrow, Not a Target" by Scott MacKenzie

Found "An Arrow, Not a Target": Film Process and Processing at the Independent Imaging Retreat by Scott MacKenize on Google Scholar. It is a chapter of a book called "The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas" by Mette Hjort. Within this article, I am cited on page 182 from my "Fragile Harvest" program for my Phil Hoffman screening in 2011. This is published as an ebook in 2013.
MacKenzie wrote the book I've been poking through on film manifestos.
Page 175, In this chapter he quotes Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida: "The (true) realist does not take the photo as a copy of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art"
Look for "Film Alchemist" Jurgen Reble, "Chemistry and Alchemy of Colours"