Media archeology offers digital visual studies a mode of media criticism and analysis that decenters issues of visual media content and representation in order to concentrate attention on the “intersections of design, implementation, and production of media technologies themselves” (Nakamura, “Media”). Unlike more institutionalized research methodologies, media archeology lacks a clear disciplinary home within the university, and no academic organizations or journals are exclusively devoted to media archeological research. Instead, a loosely affiliated group of researchers, artists, archivists, and practitioners together create media archeology through presentations, publications, citational practices, special issues of journals,4 edited collections,5 labs,6 gallery installations, conferences,7 workshops, and related practices. Such material configurations of media archeology exist alongside a set of common thematics and intellectual commitments, which include a challenge to dominant narratives of media culture and history, the use of the past as an inventional resource8 to produce alternative understandings of the present and new possibilities for the future, a sustained attention to archives and artifacts, and an openness to experimental methods.
With a focus on the past, media archeology holds common ground with media history. However, media archeology differentiates itself from media history by pushing back against dominant narratives of technological progress, universal claims, and tidy periodizations (Huhtamo and Parikka; Parikka; Zielinski; de Vries)9. Similarly, Michel Foucault’s approach to the study of discourse, as outlined in The Archeology of Knowledge, has been highly influential on the development of this methodology. For Foucault, an archeological approach entails using history as a critical means to engage the present; it involves diagnosing a problem in the contemporary situation, working genealogically, exploring the epistemological underpinnings of the discourses of a period, and attending to the ways that a given discourse has been imprinted on machines and systems (Garland, 369–72). As Jussi Parikka explains, “Foucault’s contribution to the archeology of knowledge and culture was to emphasize it as a methodology for excavating conditions of existence” (6).
Media archeology offers an alternative perspective for digital visual studies by reframing the object of study, shifting attention away from the image itself towards the manifold conditions that make the creation, circulation, and even disappearance of images possible. In its deprivileging of content and representation, it broadens our understanding of how images are, or become, meaningful. In so doing, it also pushes digital visual studies to consider how seemingly mundane features of the technological environment, such as web protocols and crawlers, and seemingly remote considerations, such as business models and archival organizations, play important roles in contemporary visual culture. In addition, media archaeology provides multiple ways to engage the idea of materiality, including the materiality of cultural practice, or attention to the situatedness of human activity and affective investments; the materiality of materials, or significance of non-human elements in the construction of social and political worlds; and the materiality of technologies, with practices of tinkering and reverse engineering in order to understand how technologies work (Parikka 163–64). Taken together, these attributes attest to the value of media archeology as a materialist methodology for recovering unconventional aspects of visual culture, complementing existing approaches such as iconographic tracking concerned with the production, reception, and circulation of images.
While media archeologists draw on a diverse set of research methods, including practice or arts-based research, archival research, and object analysis, the method of infrastructural inversion has particularly unique potential for digital visual studies, especially in relation to digitally-born images, like a majority of the Obama Hope remixes. Errors and breakdowns draw attention to aspects of existence that often go unnoticed and are taken for granted. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Starr describe this phenomenon as infrastructural inversion, the ways that “infrastructure comes out of the woodwork” at moments of accident or break down (Peters 35).10 For example, a picture failing to load on a webpage may indicate a problem with a plugin, a problem with a web browser, a problem with the access device, a problem with the network, or a problem with the website or application, among other possible sources. As a method, infrastructural inversion draws attention to such failings as well as to errors, crashes, glitches, and breakdowns that indicate an encounter between different logic systems and structures and, in doing so, makes visible the infrastructural situatedness of media, particularly visual media. As Bowker and Star note, infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are backup mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now visible infrastructure” (Bowker and Star).11 Paste’s takedown of Obamicon.me is an instance of infrastructural inversion, where the sudden disappearance of an image generator tool, an archive, and social network suddenly became unavailable. This moment of inversion draws attention to the networked infrastructure and commercial imperatives that significantly contributed to the circulation of the Obama Hope image. As such, infrastructural inversion can help provide a richer account of the various factors that support digital visual culture.
4. For example: Grey Room No. 43 special issue “Audio/Visual,” Amodern No. 2 special issue “Network Archeology,” View: Journal of European Television History & Culture Vol. 4 No. 7 special issue “Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and –Realities,” and MCD: Magazine des Cultures Digitales No. 75 special issue “Archéologie Des Média.”↩
5. For example: The Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium , Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications, and Siegfried Zielinski’s Variantology series.↩
6. Labs and institutes include the Media Archeological Fundus at Humboldt University, Berlin, the IMA Institute of Media Archeology at Hainburg, the Media Archeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Preservation, Archaeology, Media Art Lab at the Art School of Avignon. For more on the role of labs in research, see the forthcoming THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies from Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Werschler from the University of Minnesota Press http://whatisamedialab.com/.↩
7. For example: the Network Archeology conference at the University of Miami in 2012 and the Media Archaeology Institute Lecture Series at the School of Art Institute in Chicago in 2013. For a list of more events and publications related to media archeology, see the excellent collection put together at Monoskop, a wiki for the study of art, media, and the humanities: https://monoskop.org/Media_archaeology↩
8. I borrow the language of the past as inventional resource from Alessandra Von Burg’s essay “Stochastic Citizenship: Toward a Rhetoric of Mobility.”↩
9. Although scholars who identify with a media archeology approach often use this framing to distinguish it from media history, the distinction is a bit misleading and is more applicable to some of the foundational works in media history research such as Lewis Mumford’s Technics of Civilization. More recent forays in media history often share media archeology’s rejection of dominant narratives, tidy periodizations, and universal claims. See John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds as an example.↩
10. The idea of infrastructural inversion can be productively thought of alongside Martin Heidegger’s distinction between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand. For Heidegger, these phrases refer to particular ways of apprehending tools. The ready-at-hand mode approaches a tool as an object to be used for a particular and pre-established purpose; in so doing, it takes the existence of the object for granted. The present-at-hand mode approaches a tool as a thing in its own right, a fuller experience of encounter. When a tool breaks down or malfunctions, it may prompt one to change from a ready-at-hand orientation to a present-at-hand orientation. The idea of infrastructural inversion gets at a similar change in orientation to the world, but the object of the orientation differs. Where Heidegger is concerned with the relationship between a person and a particular object, infrastructure refers to a larger system that extends beyond any individual object and by its nature affects many people. See (Easterbrook) for a more detailed account of the relationship between infrastructural inversion and Heidegger’s work.↩
11. In bringing the attention to infrastructure from Science and Technology Studies to Media Archeology, I support claims of compatibility between media and information technologies, communication, and science and technology studies (Boczkowski and Lievrouw).↩