This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order ...to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field.The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.
The book Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency is a very important piece of work in the field of digital currencies development. ...The author applies the media archaeology method of research and points out the most important ideas, projects, but as well barriers and beliefs that influenced the way of thinking about digital currencies and their development. This includes description of political agendas of different stakeholders, and furthermore processes of setting up a basis for robust and reliable currency, but independent of governmental forces (like Bitcoin). The book surprisingly offers several positions for the reader, in the introduction and conclusion of the book the form is rather popularly educational, sometimes reflective, the middle part is, on the contrary, a very dense academic body of work filled with theories and facts from actual research and the author's independent historical work.
The emergence of media artivism over the last decades constitutes a new and relevant field of study for researchers of digital culture and social change, digital art historians and media ...archaeologists. Since the inception of the new millennium and the spread of electronic culture, media artivism has grown into a field of its own with distinctive organizations, artists, curators and critics devoted to engaged practices that are close to political antagonism and far from the concerns of the elitist art world. Considering the worsening environmental and political crisis around the globe, the spread and conscious use of new technologies becomes essential to update the concept of artivism, intended as a kind of action-taking art devoted to social issues. By establishing an epistemological framework along the lines of media archaeology and digital art history, the research highlights the role of media artivism in the context of recent historical and societal developments, as well as its potentially leading role for behavioral and social change. From pioneering experiences to current practices, the paper explores how a growing number of practitioners are tackling societal concerns through digital strategies and thus drawing attention to several critical topics, such as: gender issues, environmental delinquency, racial discrimination, social injustices, political corruption, abuse of power, invasive technologies and surveillance abuse. In the course of the analysis, a relevant role is given to practices based on hacktivism, public engagement and intercreative procedures that aim at highlighting, disclosing, or spreading the state of affairs which are still uncovered in traditional media and thus expanding the role of investigative art/journalism in the Postdigital Age. The case studies presented show how media artivism emerges as an autonomous field shaped by practitioners acting on the premise of a vocation on the fringe between society and the art world.
The emergence of the alphabet in ancient Greece, usually heralded as the first step in the inexorable march toward reason and progress, in fact signaled the introduction of a chance technology that ...hijacked the future, with devastating consequences for humanity. By investigating an array of cultural artifacts, ranging from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Oracle at Delphi to Luther's challenge to the Church, this book demonstrates how the apparently benign emergence of writing made possible far-ranging systems of organized domination and unprecedented levels of violence. The Violence of the Letter considers how a twenty-six-letter code changed the face of the world, and not always for the better.
Data increasingly drive our lives. Often presented as a new trajectory, the deep immersion of our lives in data has a history that is well over a century old. By revisiting the work of early pioneers ...of what would today be called data science, we can bring into view both assumptions that fund our data-driven moment as well as alternative relations to data. I here excavate insights by contrasting a seemingly unlikely pair of early data technologists, Francis Galton and W.E.B. Du Bois. Galton, well known for his contributions to eugenics, was first and foremost a tinkering technician of measure. There are numerous domains of science over which Galtonian conceptions retain considerable influence, presumably without his pride in racial inequality. A more viable, because more egalitarian, alternative for the present can be found in the early data work of Du Bois.
Cosmoramas are beginning to be understood as a new form of visual entertainment especially conceived for the bourgeois public. This article focuses on the configuration of the cosmorama’s device and ...the modifications it introduced with respect to the traveling peepshows. In this context, we will examine the first reception and integration of cosmoramas in Barcelona’s visual landscape, where the optician Felipe Maglia played a fundamental role during the 1830s.
This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a ...diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed to assimilate and influence a new medium: a project emerging from the world of amateur science before taking new directions into industry, art and politics. Through an interdisciplinary approach—in dialogue with social history, print history and media archaeology—it also transforms our theoretical understanding of what a film society was and how it operated. Far from representing a mere collection of pre-formed cinephiles, film societies were, according to the book’s central argument, productive social formations, which taught people how to nurture their passion for the movies, how to engage with cinema, and how to interact with each other. Ultimately, the study argues that examining film societies can help to reveal the diffuse agency by which generative ideas of cinema take shape.
Mobile media beyond mobile phones Frith, Jordan; Özkul, Didem
Mobile media & communication,
09/2019, Letnik:
7, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
In this introduction, we argue for an expanded focus in mobile media and communication studies (MMCS) that accounts for the many types of mobile media that affect our lives. We begin by pointing out ...that mobile phone/smartphone research has dominated MMCS as a field. That focus makes sense, but it runs the risk of MMCS essentially turning into “smartphone studies,” which we argue would limit our impact. To make that case, we identify a few examples of the types of oft-ignored technologies that could add to the depth and breadth of MMCS research (e.g., RFID radio frequency identification tags, the Walkman, barcodes). We then summarize the articles in this special issue to categorize the breadth of this research, which ranges from analyses of mobile fans to autonomous cars to mobile infrastructure.
The mass distribution of advertising and information via radio propelled capitalism into a new logic of accumulation, penetrating private spaces with the collection and distribution of commodified ...information. Archaeological, ethnographic, and archival evidence about the heterogenous ways radio has been deployed, received, resisted, and adopted reveals that our system of monopolized mass media and surveillance capitalism is not an inevitable extension of technological advancement. Rather it is a choice, accommodation, and contingency brokered by hegemonic forces and diverse publics. Examples of radio usage from throughout history, however, demonstrates that cracks in the capitalist disimagination machine have been present since the beginning.
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