In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of experimental approaches to the study of media histories and their cultures. Doing media archaeological experiments, such as historical re-enactments and hands-on simulations with media historical objects, helps us to explore and better understand the workings of past media technologies and their practices of use. By systematically refl ecting on the methodological underpinnings of experimental media archaeology as a relatively new approach in media historical research and teaching, this book aims to serve as a practical handbook for doing media archaeological experiments. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory, authored by Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever.

This book offers a plea to take the materiality of media technologies and the sensorial and tacit dimensions of media use into account in the writing of the histories of media and technology. In short, it is a bold attempt to question media history from the perspective of an experimental media archaeology approach. It offers a systematic reflection on the value and function of hands-on experimentation in research and teaching. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice, authored by Tim van der Heijden and Aleksander Kolkowski.

This book offers a plea to take the materiality of media technologies and the sensorial and tacit dimensions of media use into account in the writing of the histories of media and technology. In short, it is a bold attempt to question media history from the perspective of an experimental media archaeology approach. It offers a systematic reflection on the value and function of hands-on experimentation in research and teaching. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice, authored by Tim van der Heijden and Aleksander Kolkowski.

This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the emerging field of media archaeology. It explores the relationship between theory and practice and the relationship between media archaeology and other disciplines. There are three sections to the collection proposing new possible fields of research for media studies: Media Archaeological Theory; Experimental Media Archaeology; Media Archaeology at the Interface. The book includes essays from acknowledged experts in this expanding field, such as Thomas Elsaesser, Wanda Strauven and Jussi Parikka.

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.

Designing Experimental Research in Archaeology is a guide for the design of archaeological experiments for both students and scholars. Experimental archaeology provides a unique opportunity to corroborate conclusions with multiple trials of repeatable experiments and can provide data otherwise unavailable to archaeologists without damaging sites, remains, or artifacts. Each chapter addresses a particular classification of material culture-ceramics, stone tools, perishable materials, composite hunting technology, butchering practices and bone tools, and experimental zooarchaeology-detailing issues that must be considered in the development of experimental archaeology projects and discussing potential pitfalls. The experiments follow coherent and consistent research designs and procedures and are placed in a theoretical context, and contributors outline methods that will serve as a guide in future experiments. This degree of standardization is uncommon in traditional archaeological research but is essential to experimental archaeology. The field has long been in need of a guide that focuses on methodology and design. This book fills that need not only for undergraduate and graduate students but for any archaeologist looking to begin an experimental research project.

West's material experiments in film and art explore Southern California's changing geography This debut monograph brings together nearly a decade of "analogital" experiments in film, sculpture and installation by Jennifer West (born 1966)--one of the most committed artists working on the West Coast today. Saturated in a history of avant-garde and Third World cinema (not to mention HIV/AIDS activism and the incipient Riot Grrrl movement) since she was an undergraduate at Evergreen State College, West's work today treads similar ground: challenging the utopianism of new media adoptees as well as the nostalgia of analog-only film adherents. The 11 projects reproduced in the book, all produced between 2014 and 2021, fall under the heading of Media Archaeology, and reveal the historical and material promiscuity of West's experiments in film and art, often tied to the changing geography of Los Angeles and its surrounds.

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.

A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated. Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.

With Experiments Past the important role that experimental archaeology has played in the development of archaeology is finally uncovered and understood. Experimental archaeology is a method to attempt to replicate archaeological artefacts and/or processes to test certain hypotheses or discover information about those artefacts and/or processes. It has been a key part of archaeology for well over a century, but such experiments are often embedded in wider research, conducted in isolation or never published or reported. Experiments Pasts provides readers with a glimpse of experimental work and experience that was previously inaccessible due to language, geographic and documentation barriers, while establishing a historical context for the issues confronting experimental archaeology today. This volume contains formal papers on the history of experimental methodologies in archaeology, as well as personal experiences of the development of experimental archaeology from early leaders in the field, such as Hans-Ole Hansen. Also represented in these chapters are the histories of experimental approaches to taphonomy, the archaeology of boats, building structures and agricultural practices, as well as narratives on how experimental archaeology has developed on a national level in several European countries and its role in encouraging a wide-scale interest and engagement with the past.