Media Archaeology

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Entrare nell’immagine: un desiderio che accompagna l’umanità
dall’alba dei tempi, perdendosi nelle nebbie del mito. Un desiderio
che nei secoli ogni cultura visuale ha cercato di realizzare con
i mezzi di volta in volta disponibili. E che oggi le tecnologie di realtà
virtuale promettono di soddisfare: l’immagine si fa ambiente immersivo,
ci avvolge a 360 gradi, è presenza in carne e ossa. Saltano
le cornici che la confinavano in un mondo a parte. Persino il
medium in cui si concretizza sembra farsi trasparente. Una volta
aperto il passaggio fra il mondo reale e il mondo iconico, dobbiamo
però aspettarci un varco percorribile nei due sensi: penetriamo
nel mondo dell’immagine, ma l’immagine esonda nel nostro
mondo. Al desiderio si accompagna il timore per tale tracimazione.
Questo libro esplora quel doppio movimento, e ricostruisce la
storia di quel desiderio-timore, delle fantasie che ha innescato e
delle strategie escogitate per corrispondervi: dal proto-immersivo
Narciso ai caschi VR, passando per il trompe-l’oeil e le sculture
viventi, gli specchi e le architetture illusionistiche, i panorami e le
fantasmagorie, l’arte-ambiente, il cinema in 3D. Indugiando sulla
soglia che al contempo separa e congiunge quei due mondi, ne
subiamo il fascino, e ne apprezziamo il rischio.

In this article, I counter persistent claims of big data revolutionising managerial decision-making, by tracing the technological and cultural origins of data-based management in the United States back to the 1970s and 1980s using historical source materials from the trade magazine Datamation. I argue that innovations in database technology within this period – database management systems and the relational database model – shaped and reinforced a data-based mindset. This mindset, I demonstrate, is manifested in four interlinked concepts of data: data as asset, data as raw, data as reality, and data as relatable. These concepts, I argue, provide a basis for current associations of big data with ideological values of objectivity and truthfulness. The article contributes to a growing body of work in media and communication studies that deconstructs the ideological discourses facilitating big data's unquestioned integration in the business world.

Este ensayo presenta una discusión y análisis sobre el caso Cybersyn, desde una perspectiva de arqueología de medios, poniendo particular atención en los desarrollos teóricos y metodológicos planteados por los académicos Friedrich Kittler y Wolfgang Ernst. En consecuencia, la discusión se centrará en aspectos no-visuales del proyecto en cuestión, dejando de lado las miradas «iconográficas» que hasta ahora han abordado este caso, primeramente, desde las fotografías que documentan su sala de operaciones. De modo alternativo, propongo mover nuestra atención hacia la red de télex y el sistema de procesamiento que sostuvieron a Cybersyn, para buscar en ellos, en los sistemas de símbolos que por allí circularon, la materialización del saber técnico que caracterizaría al caso, esbozando así, potencialmente, su alcance cultural.

Discovered during a media-archaeological investigation into optical illusions, trick photography and discarded memorabilia, the photo-multigraph technique opened the door to an enchanted world of cloned appearances orbiting in a self-reflective solar system. Shapeshifting into our preferred artistic medium, this turn-of-the-century photographic technique becomes the video-multigraph.

It is bizarrely noteworthy that self-isolation would become not only the subject of the piece, but also—due to the unforeseen spread of a recently mutated virus—the prevailing circumstances under which the work was to be completed.

In Verfünfungseffekt, we use the medium of video to create a kaleidoscopic portrait-in-motion where the perspective-shifting shards of ego are recorded in a synchronized performance of solipsist intersubjectivity. The video-multigraph allows for the compositing of tiny offsets in time-shifting delays applied to one, or several, of the mirrored selves—shattering the cloned perfection, as well as the conformity, of the multiple presences. This optical illusion necessitates reflection on how media alters our perceptions of time and space; it thereby arouses wonder about our place in existence.

Der österreichische Photochemiker und -historiker Josef Maria Eder (1855-1944) verkörpert in mancher Hinsicht die Summe der photographischen Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Er wird in "Photographie als Wissenschaft" mit eigenen programmatischen Texten sowie Beiträgen seiner Zeitgenossen vorgestellt, die seine Position als Schulgründer, sein Verhältnis zur Idee der Photographie als Kunst und sein Konzept der Geschichte der Photographie beleuchten. Im Zentrum steht dabei die nach Eders Entwurf 1888 eröffnete "K. k. Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproductionsverfahren", die ein äußerst breit gefächertes Spektrum von Aus- und Weiterbildungsmöglichkeiten für Hochschulstudenten wie Lehrlinge, Amateure und Professoren ebenso wie für Angestellte photographischer und druckgraphischer Betriebe bieten sollte. Als weit über Österreich hinaus beachtete Institution von enzyklopädischer Perspektive war sie die Plattform, von der aus Eder Wien um 1900 als Zentrum der wissenschaftlichen Photographie und anderer moderner Bildtechnologien etablierte.

This paper examines artistic works that use “generative systems” such as copy machines as examples that can incite melancholic experience in the audience. The works of Stevlana Boym, Sonia Sheridan, and Timm Ulrichs are discussed in this context. The theoretical framework for this analysis draws from Svetlana Boym’s concept of “broken-tech arts” (2001), as well as Laura Marks’ model of “haptic visuality” (2002). With the proliferation of copy machines since the 1960s in the US and other parts of the world, artists began producing new work through inventive uses and creative manipulations of copiers. Copy machines allowed distinct effects such as stretching and degeneration in image-making and specifically resulted in the generation of haptic images. This paper argues that such images can trigger melancholia as an aesthetic experience in their viewers.

Der Artikel geht an die Anfänge des Internets zurück und nimmt seine Pioniere und Partisanen, die ersten Hacker, in den Blick, die als die Urahnen heutiger Social Media gelten können. Diese lassen sich letztlich zurückführen auf den digitalen Nachfolger eines Schwarzen Brettes in einem Plottenladen in Berkeley, Kalifomien, Ende der 1970er-Jahre.

Techniques applied to description of hand-press-era literary works can be turned toward popular duplication processes. Close examination of material objects tests other forms of evidence and aids in identifying potential concerns regarding handling and care by special collections professionals. The initial issues of "The Ladder," produced by the Daughters of Bilitis from 1956 to 1972, suggest a route for identifying duplication methods during a period in which many reproduction technologies were available. That diversity points to a greater variety of papers and inks that need to be assessed for best care of materials. It also testifies to the pragmatic approaches that the Daughters of Bilitis took in establishing a publication that proved to be a foundation for the American LGBT movement. The article includes a historical section on the A.B. Dick Company and Mimeograph technologies, comparative images for identifying selected 20th-century duplication techniques, and a bibliographical essay noting technical and historical sources for forensic analysis of print.

Relying on media archaeology of Friedrich Kittler, this article examines a large-scale installation, Self-Portrait. Structure. Report. 9.6.72 (1972), by Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (b. Iquitos, 1935) in comparison with the structuralist underpinnings of the dominant formulations of Conceptual art. I argue that in Self-Portrait, Burga mobilizes the logic of the media in order to open up closed, disciplinary system inscribed within both tautological/linguistic and so-called critical currents of Conceptual art. Under a familiar concept, Burga’s project combines diagrams, blueprints, photographs, medical records, light, and sound. Thus, it functions at the critical juncture of language, media, and material experiences. On the one hand, through text-based proposals and diagrams, Burga asserts the role of the artist as a creator of ideas—the paradigm of Conceptual art. On the other, she puts forth encounters with highly experiential structures, prevalent in minimal, postminimal, and technology-based art. I investigate how the artist deploys the logic of the media to transpose the content of the documents, which at first seem to constitute a repressive, police-like, archival system. I maintain that as a consequence of the transposition, Burga manifests that in reality the discourse and the media are not equivalent. In her Self-Portrait there are impassable gulfs between every single element of the piece, even if they are all supposed to encompass just one body. Therefore, by exposing self-contained and self-referential limitedness of discourse, Burga decenters the subject and opens up spaces of freedom in the closed systems that captured the imagination of her generation.

Technischer Fortschritt in der Medienindustrie wir in der Regel mit der Benennung scheinbarer Vor- und Nachteile einzelner Methoden, Vorrichtungen oder Materialien definiert. In so einem Bezugsrahmen erscheint es naheliegend, Patente als Beschreibung und Schutz relevanter Innovationen zu betrachten. Aber wie nicht zuletzt die Science and Technology Studies (STS) gezeigt haben, sind die Rollen, die Patente einnehmen oder die ihnen zugewiesen werden, ambivalenter und vielfältiger. Ein Patent kann nicht nur eine Innovation schützen, sondern es kann auch Bestehendes neu interpretieren oder ein Territorium für mögliche zukünftige Entwicklungen abstecken.

Als Fallstudie werde ich dies am Übergang vom sog. Dunning-Verfahren (einem Vorläufer heutiger Blue Screen Techniken aus den 1920er Jahren) zur Praxis der Rückprojektion in den frühen 1930er Jahren untersuchen. Diese Verschiebung von Produktionspraktiken war nicht alleine begründet in technischen Vorzügen des neueren Verfahrens, sondern auch in juristischen Konflikten zwischen Hollywood-Studios und Dienstleistern. Ich werde im Folgenden ausführen, wie mit den dort entstandenen Konflikte umgegangen wurde und wie dies den Umgang der Studios mit Patenten allgemein geändert hat.

"Cinema is the most powerful weapon " – Benito Mussolini's motto loomed in capital letters over the 1937 inauguration of the massive production hub being built in the outskirts of Rome, reminding the film industry what was expected of it. Notwithstanding the effort to deploy cinema as a key technology for governing the nation and the empire, in the early 1940s film became a battlefield for the Regime. This excavates from the closet of memory the story of the Cinema cell, the group of young film enthusiasts who, in fascist Italy, engaged in what today we would call " media activism " : they put their lives on the line, infiltrated the film industry, and shouldered the movie camera as their initial weapon of combat against a defiant totalitarianism. Here, I focus on how the underground formation elaborated an iteration of filmic realism that countered the implantation in the body politic of racialized fantasies of national identity. In tracing the cell's efforts to develop a gaze on the nation that would oppose the race-driven realism advocated by Mussolini's son Vittorio, among others, I establish a genealogy for Visconti's 1943 Ossessione and its display of queerness as the authentic alternative to fascist life. By way of conclusion, I disentangle the system of intimacy and affectivity harnessed by this film from the one that postwar neorealism contributed to securing.

Since the rise of radio and television, we have lived in an era defined increasingly by the electronic circulation of images and sounds. But the flood of new computing technologies known as haptic interfaces—which use electricity, vibration, and force feedback to stimulate the sense of touch—are promising to change this situation, offering an alternative way of mediating and experiencing reality.

In Archaeologies of Touch, David Parisi offers the first full history of these increasingly vital technologies, showing how the efforts of scientists and engineers over the past 300 years have gradually remade and redefined our sense of touch. Through lively analyses of electrical machines, videogames, sex toys, sensory substitution systems, robotics, and human-computer interfaces, Parisi shows how the materiality of touch technologies has been shaped by attempts to transform humans into more efficient processors of information.

With haptics becoming ever more central to emerging virtual reality platforms (immersive bodysuits loaded with touch stimulating actuators), wearable computers (haptic messaging systems like the Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine), and smartphones (vibrations that emulate the feel of buttons and onscreen objects), Archaeologies of Touch offers a timely and provocative engagement with the long history of touch technology that helps us confront and question the power relations of giving touch its own set of technical media.

Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “network society.” From the letter-writing networks of the proto-Italian aristocracy to the electrical networks that facilitated industrialization; from the spread of woodcuts, pamphlets, and ballads that supported the Protestant
Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced
as instantaneous and simultaneous.

This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable.
Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this
introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.

This essay explores the disputed origins of the first karaoke machine and explains how karaoke eventually evolved into a term of judgment in star- making media such as reality vocal competition shows. What Tongson calls the double- edged “karaoke standard” — whether a competitor’s performance sounds like a direct imitation of the original and thus, according to judges, “like karaoke” — was famously invoked by Simon Cowell during the early seasons of American Idol. Karaoke has often been imagined as a technology that enables the everyman or everywoman to experience, if only for the length of the song, the power that comes with commanding the stage as a star. And yet, this essay argues, instead of verifying the wide chasm between celebrity and mere imitation, the karaoke standard reminds us of how narrow the gap actually is between amateur recreation and pop prowess.

Sumário Este artigo propõe uma análise ao Álbum Etnográfico da expedição portuguesa ao Muatiânvua, potentado Lunda, no interior de Angola. As fotografias foram produzidas durante a expedição, chefiada pelo major Henrique Dias de Carvalho, entre 1884 e 1888. Procura-se situar a atividade fotográfica no contexto desta expedição, nas suas diversas dimensões políticas e científicas e compreender as políticas de imagem e algumas das retóricas visuais que foram usadas neste contexto colonial. Dado o amplo uso das fotografias para produzir as gravuras da extensa obra científica de Henrique Dias de Carvalho, examinamos as suas propostas metodológicas no campo da etnografia. Este artigo apoia-se sobretudo em conceitos semióticos, na teoria e história da fotografia, na epistemologia das ciências e em pesquisas da documentação da expedição e do seu contexto. Contudo, deve ser lido à luz dos debates em Cultura Visual sobre as imagens como construções políticas. De facto, mostramos que a defesa vigorosa e sincera que Henrique Dias de Carvalho atribui ao estudo das culturas africanas, e até ao respeito por elas, existe tendo subjacente um desígnio colonial, mais abrangente e inquestionado: o de conhecer para melhor dominar. Summary This article proposes an analysis of the Ethnographic Album of the Portuguese expedition to Muatianvua, potentate Lunda, inside Angola. The photographs were produced during the expedition, led by Major Henrique Dias de Carvalho, between 1884 and 1888. The article intends to place the photographic activity in the context of this expedition, in its various political and scientific dimensions as well as within the politics of the image and its visual rhetorics that were used in the colonial context. Given the wide use of photographs to produce the prints included in the extensive scientific work of Henrique Dias de Carvalho, we examine his methodological proposals in the field of ethnography. This article relies primarily on semiotic concepts, as well as in the theory and history of photography, the epistemology of science and in the research of this Expedition's documentation and historical context. However, it must be read in the light of the discussions in Visual Culture on the images as political constructions and as constructions of the political. In fact, we show that no matter how vigorously Henrique Dias de Carvalho defended the importance that should be attached to the study of African cultures, and the respect for them, this defense was understood under an unquestioned colonial design: that of knowing in order to dominate.

In questo saggio si è voluto fornire un panorama diversificato dei contributi teorici del settore, per scongiurare il rischio di un’interpretazione dell’archeologia dei media come contenitore onnicomprensivo di tutta la mediologia contemporanea. Si è cercato di contestualizzare il discorso “archeologico” nell’ambito di una polifonia di ricerche ed interpretazioni sulla storia dei media, sulle analisi culturali degli oggetti mediali e sulle tracce di un vasto discorso sui dispositivi e i loro significati.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. A...

This dissertation analyzes the cultural dynamics of home movies in the twentieth century. It investigates how various generations have recorded their family memories on film, video and digital media, and, more specifically, how changes in these “technologies of memory” have shaped new forms of home movie making and screening. Covering the period from the invention of the film camera in the late nineteenth century, the introduction of 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm small-gauges and Super 8 film technologies for amateurs, via home video to digital media technologies, this study addresses the complex interrelations between the materiality of film, video and digital media technologies, their social usages and cultural meanings from a long-term historical perspective. Focusing on specific periods of transition, it becomes clear that different media technologies, user practices and discourses not only succeed each other in time, but also increasingly interrelate, interact or even transform each other. Maintaining both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective on media transitions, this dissertation proposes an alternative form of media historiography that rethinks media histories beyond the frameworks of change and continuity by perceiving hybridity as a constant factor in media historical development.

‘Rare Earth’ challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with a post-internet cultural condition, exploring how emergent (artistic) myths, identities and cosmologies issue from advanced applications of material scientific knowledge. It is the lead essay in the edited volume of the same name, featuring seventeen essays by artists, curators and  scholars, published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna). The collection bridges the domains of Science Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy and Curatorial Theory while exploring the technologies and attendant cultural and ecological conditions associated with the exploitation of Rare Earth elements. Other contributors include Iain Ball, Erick Beltrán, Jane Bennett, Benjamin H. Bratton, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Erik Davis, John Durham Peters & Paul Feigelfeld, Mircea Eliade, Boris Groys, Marguerite Humeau, Timothy Morton & Emilija Skarnulyte, Boris Ondreička, The Otolith Group, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nadim Samman, Charles Stankievech.

Recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Immersive and interactive virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the perceiver a strong feeling of being incorporated in a new and autonomous world. In doing so, they negate themselves as " images-of-something " , as icons: they are veritable " an-icons ". This kind of picture undermines the mainstream representationalist paradigm of Western image theories: " presentification " rather than representation is at stake here. My paper will address this challenging iconoscape, arguing for the necessity of a specific methodological approach—namely, an-iconology.

Véritable enquête sur les origines du cinéma criminel en France, Cinéma, premiers crimes explore son formidable essor, de la Belle Époque aux années 1920. En trente ans le cinéma, dernière invention du XIXe siècle, est devenu la grande machine à fabriquer de l’imaginaire du XXe siècle. Et des vieux bas-fonds de Paris, ses fictions se retrouvent projetées à l’ombre des gratte-ciel d’Amérique. Quelque temps après l’invention du cinématographe, les premières représentations de crimes au cinéma baignent dans l’univers des Mystères de Paris d’Eugène Sue et se nourrissent de la peur des apaches de la grande ville, à travers les faits divers amplifiés par les couvertures illustrées de la presse à sensation. Le cinéma muet, nouvel objet d’attraction, s’empare de l’imaginaire social et de ses figures – le bourreau, la victime, le justicier –, pour élaborer à partir de stéréotypes visuels, un nouveau vocabulaire en images peuplé de génies malfaisants – Fantômas, Zigomar, Rocambole et autres vampires des bas-fonds. Il devient la chambre d’écho de l’actualité policière, transpose la réalité urbaine sur le mode de la fiction. Il se fait le révélateur des hantises d’une société captivée par le spectacle de ses propres peurs, avant que le film de gangsters américain ne vienne imposer sa définition du film criminel comme genre.
200 documents spectaculaires et rares, issus des exceptionnelles collections des bibliothèques de la Ville
de Paris et de prestigieuses archives cinématographiques, nous font revivre les frissons des spectateurs, durant cette période fondatrice d’un art majeur, avec lequel s’invente notre modernité.

Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field.
    The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:

"Decentring Classical Cinema"
"Questions of Industry"
"Intermedia as an Approach"
"The Object Life of Film"

This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of two hundred years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty first century.
    This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies and cultural studies more broadly.

Published August 2020
Copyright 2021

Walkman and iPod devices have often been discussed in quasi-cinematic terms. This typically implies an analogy between the personal stereo user and the transcendental subject of film theory, who is allowed to see and hear without being seen or heard. This chapter offers an alternative route. Taking as starting point a cinematic moment in which iPod listening is turned into a first-person voiceover, it suggests that cinematic and personal stereo listening share not only an orientation towards privatization and individualization but also a fantasy of communication: one that blurs the lines between “self” and “other” and between listening and speaking. Analyzing a wide range of films and historical marketing campaigns by Sony and Apple, the chapter shows how mainstream cinema—through its representational tropes and modes of spectatorial address—feeds into a broader cultural construction of personal stereo listening as a highly individualized activity that is always imaginatively open-ended.

Videogame history is not just a history of one successful technology replacing the next. It is also a history of platforms and communities that never quite made it; that struggled to make their voices heard; that aggravated against the conventions of the day; and that never enjoyed the commercial success or recognition of their major counterparts.

In Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Benjamin Nicoll argues that 'minor' videogame histories are anything but insignificant. Through an analysis of transitional, decolonial, imaginary, residual, and minor videogame platforms, Nicoll highlights moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. From the domestication of vector graphics in the early years of videogame consoles to the 'cloning' of Japanese computer games in South Korea in the 1980s, this book explores case studies that challenge taken-for-granted approaches to videogames, platforms, and their histories.

The nineteenth-century ‘panstereorama’ was an urban relief model placed on display as a public spectacle. In this article, I consider first two affiliated forms that help to explain the genre, namely panorama paintings and plans-reliefs. I then go on to consider urban regional practices of city modelling in London and Paris before examining in detail panstereoramas representing Paris and New York. It is argued that this form of model urban cartography served as proxy for the view obtained from the increasingly popular balloon trip and that it accordingly provided virtual travel to, and a map of, the cities depicted.

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced ‘new’ media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need to be preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.