Wolfgang Ernst: Digital Memory and the Archive (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · archive, art, communication, computing, culture, data, history, information, internet, knowledge, machine, media, media archeology, media studies, media theory, memory, photography, radio, sound, storage, technology, television, temporality, time
“In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites.
In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society.
Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history. ”
Edited and with an Introduction by Jussi Parikka
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Volume 39 of Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816677670, 9780816677672
265 pages
Reviews: Liam Cole Young (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013), Peter Ward (Information & Culture, 2014).
For more from Wolfgang Ernst see Monoskop wiki.
Comment (0)Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, body, cinema, death, ethics, materiality, perception, phenomenology, technology, temporality, vision, writing
“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages
Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool
PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)
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