Debra Levine

What was profound about this experience of watching, both alone and with others, was that we all acknowledged how the conduct of the interviews and the structure of the interviewees' narrative demonstrated that acts of kindness and care secured ACT UP's communal survival. This ...

Director Milo Rau collaborated with children ages 8 to 17 to explore the Belgian national crisis precipitated by the abduction, rape, and torture of six girls, and the murder of four of them, by Marc Dutroux between 1995–1996. Staged as five acting lessons, the child actors in Five Easy Pieces (2016) become theatrical material for reconsidering how the myth of childhood “innocence” results in political actions and cultural technologies that teach real children how “not to see” beyond the frameworks that replicate patriarchal and heteronormative state power.

Much like Derrida’s assertion in Archive Fever that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relation to the future” (1998, 17), Fredrich Kittler, in Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, wrote that “media determine our situation” (1999, xxxix). How it does so, and the methodologies by which we pursue the question, is the quest posed by the series of short books, In Search of Media. Every book in the series investigates “the terms—the limits, the conditions, the periods, the relations the phrases—of media” (vii). Because of Kittler’s prescience (we can hardly think ourselves out of the darkness of the present without the imaginative technologies through which we produce and reflect our reality), and Derrida’s attention to how the technological infrastructure determines what can be known and done with information, the stakes of engaging with media by activating particular methodologies of (inter and trans) disciplinary fields is critical at this present moment. While the keyword titles of earlier series publications (Pattern Discrimination, Markets, Communication, and Machine) mark out more obvious connections to video and digital technologies and their circulation in the economy of late stage capital, the term “remain” remains more mysterious, more stubborn, and certainly more multivalent. In the introduction to Remain, the fifth text of the series, Ioana B. Jucan posits that methods and lenses of media archeology and performance studies scholarship may productively theorize how media remains engender situations or events, past and future. These are the fields of study that look at the vitality and vibrancy of remains as temporality, matter, and performance. More often media remains are engaged as leftovers—knowable detritus of past imaginative ventures that have endeavored to contribute to social progress. There is little argument over their material composition. Media remains are technological commodities and discrete works forged by obsolete technologies. Like pornography, the assumption is that we know them when we see them. But how they become classified as outmoded is a comparative process. We deem an expressive technology outmoded when another surpasses it. It is then that the old new media is understood as obsolete. What happens next? Where surpassed, outmoded, or antiquated technology goes is also important. Is it relegated to junkyards, forgotten storage spaces, museums, and teaching collections? In this text, the reasons they end up in such spaces matter less than reactivating the situations of those spaces. The preservation or neglect of media remains affords us the insight and means for comparing the then and now of our mediatic situation, but in this small but important volume, the investigations generated from media archeology and performance studies disrupt these conventional assumptions of temporality and prioritize situatedness by considering remains of outmoded new media as events precipitated by the localities in which we find them. Co-contributor and media archeologist Jussi Parikka’s essay suggests that the singular term remain(!) is a performative as well as a noun. Media remains remain, not as obsolete glimpses to a past that has passed. Rather they can serve as a “primary entry to a different temporal regime” (9). Co-contributor and performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider’s essay metaphorically links media remains to theater because both share a peculiar ontological status; both are pronounced dead and obsolete, and yet both still persist and broker new experiences. Schneider observes that performances of media remains function as “intermediaries” because remains are taken up iteratively over historical and contemporary presents (51). The material presence of remains allows us to look back at the habitual reconstitution of media and the medium of media over space and time. Most importantly, remains prompt us to question why and how their continued presence catalyzes dynamic social interactions that belie normative classifications, and material limits of the media remain. If the beginning of the book teases the reader that the concept “media remains” permits an interlocutor to think that technoculture itself could produce a remainder that exists beyond or outside of the encompassing social condition of media and mediation, both authors

... Hubbard has subsequently collaborated with author and activist Sarah Schulman on the ACT UP Oral History Project, which aims to pro-duce a ... to articulate the shared structures of feeling that arise from the corporeal experience of living with AIDS, while Marlon Riggs's No ...

... Hubbard has subsequently collaborated with author and activist Sarah Schulman on the ACT UP Oral History Project, which aims to pro-duce a ... to articulate the shared structures of feeling that arise from the corporeal experience of living with AIDS, while Marlon Riggs's No ...

What was profound about this experience of watching, both alone and with others, was that we all acknowledged how the conduct of the interviews and the structure of the interviewees' narrative demonstrated that acts of kindness and care secured ACT UP's communal survival. This ...