Welcome to the Media Archaeology Wiki for DM @ GT!
What do we mean when we talk about “media archaeology”? In the most generous terms, media archaeology is a loosely-codified web of methods attached to the historical and material study of media and media transmission. As a domain of inquiry, media archaeology delights in and brings attention to the failed, the broken, the forgotten and the speculative. Media archaeology can offer a valuable counterpoint to more progressivist, linear or innovation-focused approaches emphasized in traditional media history and other historical disciplines.
This site is a collaborative workspace for graduate students in my media archaeology course. This project was inspired by the Dead Media Archive at NYU.
Spring 2016 Entries
[create a page using the tool in the right sidebar and link to it here]
I:
CD-R Spindle
Compact Disc Audio
The Trap Anti-Rape Device
The Gideon Bible
II:
Electric Football
The Phillips (hydraulic) computer
The Jockstrap
Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED)
III:
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)
Suffragetto
Quadraphonic Sound
The Islamic mortgage
What should my entry look like?
The Media Archaeology Wiki is an opportunity to experiment with varies techniques and methods we encounter in the course and apply them to a very specific case. The introduction of your entry should adopt the distanced, descriptive tone of encyclopedic writing, providing us with the basic knowledge we need to follow you into a deeper reading. Following subsections should take the reader into a more revealing space. What does the medium do to information that is not immediately apparently? What surprising connections might exist between this and objects we might not consider related? If we are, as McLuhan suggests, the servomechanisms of our machines, what kind of machine does it make of man? Does it take us into a space in which we can glimpse a vision of technological practices before they become dominant or hegemonic? What reveals itself if we trace its emergence and descent rather than its origin and its progress? Does it express a play of dominations, an amputation or extension, or does it collapse a long epoch into a simple form? These, and many other questions, are appropriate starting points for your inquiry. It's your job to select your object wisely, do historical research, and apply the techniques and methods so that they produce a rich answer. You must cite at least 1 (one) of the theorists/historians we've read in your entry.
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