DEAD MEDIA RESEARCH STUDIO

DEAD MEDIA RESEARCH STUDIO is devoted to media archaeology, research on the retro, the vintage, the forgotten, obsolete, obscure or otherwise dead media technologies, forms, and formats. the media objects of the past stand at the center of networks of production and consumption assembled at a particular moment in time. from music made for vinyl records, wax cylinders and tefifons, to programs broadcast on radio and cathode ray televisions, recorded on super 8, vhs, or betamax, to games played on atari and oscilloscope, this course introduces the skills and resources necessary for excavating these networks and conducting scholarship on seemingly dead media.

this course includes exposure to theories of media archaeology, including writings from friedrich kittler, jussi parikka, wolfgang ernst, and jonathan sterne; an introduction to research methods and archaeological practice; instruction on localization and utilization of word, image, and sound archives; and an emphasis on the need to restore, revive, and zombify artifacts to re-contextualize networks of social and cultural meaning.

Topic Schedule
Archeologies of Media Archaeology
Introduction
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011) Parikka, “Cartographies of the Old and the New,” What is Media Archaeology (2012) Siegfried Zielinski, “Including a Proposal for the Cartography of Media Anarchaeology,” Deep Time of the Media (2006) Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) 🎮 Media Object Show-and-Tell ⏲ Assignment: Begin Investigations for the Flea Market Archaeology Workshop ⏲ Assignment: Begin Media Archaeology Site List
Obsolescence and Obscurity
Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: The Future of New Media,” Residual Media (2007) Jeffrey Sconce, "Circuit City Unplugged" (2009) 🎮 Mobile Phone Autopsy Screening: The Family Dog Supplement: Lisa Parks, “Falling Apart: Electronics Salvaging & the Global Media Economy,” Residual Media (2007)
🤖 Flea Market Archaeology Workshop ⏲ Assignment: Plan Dead Media Streaming Program ⏲ Assignment: Begin Dead Media Linked List
Art by Telephone
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) Louis Kaplan, “The Telephone Paintings: Hanging up Moholy,” Leonardo (1993) Supplement: “Telecommunication Art,” Leonardo; Tristan Tzara, “Prologue to Dada” 📽 Screening: The World's Telephone Workshop.
"We Go Into the Movies," Western Electric News (1918) 📽 Screening: Caroline Martel, The Phantom of the Operator (2004) 🤖 Telephone Trick Picture Workshop ⏲ Assignment: Begin Video Presentation Prep for Betamax Broadcast Studio Workshop
Sex, Lies, Videotape
Kate Egan, “The Celebration of a ‘Proper Product’: Exploring the Residual Collectible through the ‘Video Nasty,’” Residual Media (2007). Lucas Hilderbrand, “Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics,” Camera Obscura (2004). 🎮 Activity: Vernacular Video
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000) 🤖 Betamax Broadcast Studio Workshop
Point and Click
Alexander Galloway, “Origins of the First Person Shooter,” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006) Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies (2013) Supplement: Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (2014) 🎮 Supplemental Activity: Reproducing Obsolete Games 🎮 Activity: Domestic Games
Excepts from the 7th Guest (1993) 📽 Supplement: Mark Ferrari, "8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box” (2017) 🤖 Warcraft Adventures Workshop
Robots and Reanimation
Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo (2012) Morten Riis, “The Media Archaeological Repairman,” Organized Sound (2013) Matthew Griffin and Susanne Herrmann, "Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler," New Literary History (1996) Supplement: Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace (2001) 🎮 Activity: Soldering Primer
🤖 Soldering Workshop 🎮 Activity: Circuit Bending
Obsolete Art
Ben Fino-Radin, “Art In the Age of Obsolescence: Rescuing an Artwork from Crumbling Technologies” (2016) 🚊 Field Trip MOMA
The GLI.TC/H Reader (2011) 📽 Screening: The Art of Glitch & Selections from Fornax Void 🤖 Glitch Art Workshop ⏲ Assignment: Floppy Ethnography Prep
Sacred Vibrations
Lisa Gitelman, “The Case of Phonographs,” Always Already New (2006) Jonathan Sterne, “A Resonant Tomb” (2003) John Davis, “Going Analog: Vinylphiles and the Consumption of the ‘Obsolete’ Vinyl Record,” Residual Media (2007) Supplement: Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012) 📽 Screening: Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound (2016)
🤖 Software Defined Radio Workshop ⏲ Assignment: VHF Signal Mapping
Optical Media
Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (2010) 🎮 Activity: Gameboy Camera and Printer 🎮 Activity: CD-Interative and Viceo CD 🤖 Floppy Photography Workshop
Digital Objects
Vivian Sobchack, “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime” (1999) Alexander Galloway, "The Unworkable Interface" (2008) Wendy Chun, "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge" and “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish” (2008) ⏲ Assignment: Prepare Software Archaeology Object
Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software” (1995) 🤖 Software Archaeology Workshop
BASIC Programming
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2012) Selections from Nibble Magazine (1980s) and “Nibble’s Mike Harvey,” Juiced.GS (2006) Supplement: Jussi Parikka, “History of Computers,” and Montfort and Bogost, “Platform," Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (2014) 🎮 Activity: Introduction to BASIC
Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012) A Touch of Applesoft Basic (1986) 🤖 Programming in Applesoft Basic Workshop
Archive Fever
Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," Diacritics (1995) Lori Emerson, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine’: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst” (2013) Geert Lovink, “Archive Rumblings: Interview with Wolfgang Ernst” (February 2003)
Writing Machines
Lisa Gitelman, "Automatic Writing," Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (1999) Friedrich Kittler, "The Mechanized Philosopher" in Looking After Nietzsche (1990) Supplement: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) 🎮 Activity: Touch-Typing
Friedrich Kittler, "The Great Lalula," Discourse Networks (1990) Enrique Vila-Matas, A Brief History of Portable Literature (2015) 🤖 Typing Pool Workshop
Production/Reproduction
Mark Firpo, Copy Art (1978) Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) 📽 Screening: John Berger, “Ways of Seeing, Episode 1” (1972)
Sigmund Freud, "A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) 🤖 Mimeograph Workshop
Final Assembly
🤖 Zine Production Workshop
🤖 Dead Media Symposium

Additional Reading

• Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990)
• Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, (2012)
• Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (2016)
• Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948)
• Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree (eds.), New Media, 1740-1915 (2003)
• Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014)
• Raiford Guins, "Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of ET The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600"
• Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions In Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (2013)
• Erkki Huhtamo, "From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archaeology of the Media" (1997)
• Erkki Huhtamo, "Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming" (2005)
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
• Friedrich Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter
• Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (2011)
• Wolfgang Lefèvre (ed.), Picturing Machines 1400-1700, (2004)
• Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993)
• James Lyons, John Plunkett, Multimedia Histories: From Magic Lanterns to Internet (2007)
• Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1988)
• Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
• Mara Mills, "On Disability and Cybernetics: Hellen Keller, Norbert Weiner, and the Hearing Glove" (2011).
• Jussi Parikka, "Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Media Diagrammatics" (2011)
• Jussi Parikka, "Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism" (2013)
• Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archeology of Computer Viruses (2007)
• Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
• Alexander Monea and Paul Edwards, "Media Genealogy| An Archive for the Future: Paul N. Edwards on Technology, Historiography, Self and World" (2016) and Alexander Monea and Jeremy Packer, "Media Geneaology: Technological and Historical Engagements with Power" (2016)
• Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992)
• Nicole Starosielski, Braxton Soderman, Cris Cheek (eds.), Amodern 2: Network Archaeology (October 2013)
• John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (2012)
• Grant Wythoff, "Pocket Wireless and the Shape of Media to Come, 1899-1922" (2013)
• Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (2006)