Traces of Media Histories

The online world often appears to us as a space of timelessness, where artifacts of the so-called past are accumulated, recycled, remixed or upscaled, demolished and deconstructed, or rescued from oppression and oblivion - often at the expense of their original context and life course. The present seemingly dominates, but at the same time it is ever more clearly breaking down under the pressure of planned and unplanned obsolescence, requested and unrequested updates, or more or less transparent algorithmic work. There are cautious signs of the future, or even utopia, resurfacing (at least in certain circles)  ,  but there is rarely a plan to deliver one’s vision with “care” to those outside of one’s filtered safe space.

How can media history - and by extension the approach we have long termed “media archaeology”  - be pursued in these conditions? Can we, through the rediscovery of obsolete, displaced, or incomplete media, artifacts, interfaces, and applications, grasp something like a contemporary “regime of historicity” - meaning a way of relating the past, the present, and the future together  ?  And can we enter into these traces of the past in a way that enables us to circumvent or rethink the regime(s) of historicity woven into (post-)digital reality?

The aim of this series is to manifest the online space as a labyrinth of fragments and impressions of analogue and digital histories that can be speculatively deconstructed and reconstructed, thus playing out novel exchanges between “then” and “now” or bringing into being alternative or unrealized futures. A discipline called “videographic criticism” and the creation of audiovisual essays offer us ways to set these processes into motion. The artistic milieu is, of course, intimately familiar with the format of the audiovisual essay (or video-essay), referring to the work of “big names” such as Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki, or Hito Steyerl (or, in the Czech context, Zbyněk Baladrán) but also to a certain ethos that emphasizes a distinctive and centrifugal view of images and sounds in cultural, political, economic, and technological contexts. In recent years, the essayistic impulse has also permeated the academic sphere, for example, in the form of videographic criticism, which, through the creative manipulation of images and sounds, reveals meanings that would be difficult or impossible to communicate in a traditional written study of film and audiovisual phenomena  .

The videographic approach combines a sense of movement across boundaries (between research, art, fandom, and journalism), authorial engagement (emotional and political), and the inherent mutability and unfinished nature of audiovisual research objects. If our aim is to resurrect and examine artifacts that are lost in the boundless “virtual” space, videographic criticism allows them to (re)gain material form as objects that bear the traces of different times and technologies, observable in detail and from possible and impossible angles and amenable to shaping in digital software or with the help of a printer, scissors, and glue  .  Letting the “old” and the “new” collide with one other, even by resurrecting seemingly marginal, random, or forgettable elements and artifacts of audiovisual culture, and seeing how these collisions give rise to novel forms of perception - this is precisely how audiovisual essays can help us navigate the convoluted temporalities of (post-)digital reality.

We selected a total of six audiovisual essays that bring back into circulation artifacts and interfaces of various historical and technological origins. Whether they are about film prints and negatives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Digitální Kříženecký v paralelních světech), video art practices of the 1970s (Metaleptic Attack), VHS recordings from the 1980s (Pan Scan Venkman), teletext (Teletext Revival 2.0), computer wallpapers (Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_ofmy_Computer.mov), or the almost contemporary web-based videogame GeoGuessr (GeoMarkr), the primary goal of the essays is not to restore the objects to the time of their creation, but neither is it to adapt them completely to the present audiovisual regime. They spread audiovisual artifacts across the temporal spectrum, confront familiar user interfaces with phenomena that do not fit into them, and search in obsolete media for modes of experience no longer included in navigating a computer or mobile screen. For example, through a proto-internet medium used for information transmission, Teletext Revival 2.0 offers us something that is missing in the logic of online search engines - patience while waiting for desired content, a shared information horizon for the general public, and greater user-friendliness for older generations. However, this essay goes beyond reminiscing - which is simulated, for example, by dubbing over television presenters from the turn of the century - and speculatively reconstructs how contemporary information content could function in teletext, including memes or Tinder.

What kind of historical object does an artifact that belongs neither to the past nor to the present become? The term “trace” may evoke something fragmentary, incomplete, merely surviving, or even dead. However, videographic treatment reveals a different principle in traces, something close to what the German philosopher Ernst Bloch called a “belated fragment.”  Instead of a remnant or a ruin, in the imperfection and untimeliness of past phenomena we can see their essential unfinishedness and incompleteness, their openness to “a future that will never be present but which, paradoxically, we are already building.”  According to this principle, for example, the prints and negatives from the estate of the pioneer of Czech cinema Jan Kříženecký have a utopian value precisely because of all the lapses and deformations they contain - not as a reminder of age but as evidence that, regardless of original intent, unpredictable human and non-human actors continually enter into the creative process, and even the conversion to zeros and ones cannot prevent the materials from continually entering into new connections with the surrounding world, whether online or offline.

At other times, the belated character of fragments can be explicitly political: the desktop essay Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_ofmy_Computer.mov demonstrates the extent to which even the constantly rearranging computer desktop can become a tool used to anesthetize and commodify temporality. We think of the official wallpapers of the Mac and Windows operating systems as neutral, soothing, and purely functional backgrounds, but they were created by someone photographing real places with their own distinct histories, memories, and ecologies and preserving them as smooth, decontextualized fetishes. When the authors appropriate online apps against the grain to track down the original locations, their aim is not to travel back in time but rather to restore the historicity of these places and landscapes - their existence across the analogue and the digital, past, present, and future. If we wish to build an alternative to a cannibalizing and dehistoricizing online capitalism, we must again and again discover the belated fragments in the interfaces of our devices, patiently crumbling them and folding in the remaining “raisins in the pudding”  so that the black boxes are gradually replaced by interfaces that we shape together.

Curators: 

Jiří Anger & Veronika Hanáková

Authors: 

Andrea Rüthel & Megan Dieudonné: Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_ofmy_Computer.mov

Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková & Jiří Žák: A Tale of Two Desktops

Chloé Galibert-Laîné & Guillaume Grandjean: GeoMarkr

Karin Spišáková & David Scharf: Teletext Revival

Cormac Donnelly: Pan Scan Venkman

Johannes Binotto: Metaleptic Attack

Translation:

Brian D. Vondrak