Interview Series: “Media Memories: Media Archaeologies and Digital Society”

Thank you for, accepting this interview. I read your, digital medias and methodologies article and I prepared a few questions for you. So my first question to you what is media archaeology?

What is media archeology? Oh, this is, of course, a difficult question because I would suppose that not everyone agrees on that. There are different interpretations. I see it as a historical method that is used in media studies to understand why is certain, given media technology has become the way it is and not differently and what this implies in terms of politics, for example.

And I think this is important, and this is basically not very different from different forms of the history of technology, which, produced perhaps without the fashionable term media archeology. Although in the approach of media archeology often relies much on the, as you of course know, notions developed by Michel Foucault which especially addresses the point, the that the role of power relations play in the forming of a technology and the power relation of technology exerts. There are other interpretations of media archeology. But this is the way I would define it.

Thank you. So. My other question to you is how can researchers determine a meaningful starting point of media archaeological study and what defines the beginning of a medium?

That is a very interesting and very difficult question. I mean we that we and I mean that was me and several colleagues from the former special special research unit Media Upheavals we wrote a book in 2011 about a meeting on this issue. Unfortunately, it exists only in German right now. In English, it would be theory of Media Upheavals, and we tried to answer this question besides others in that book, and we argued the following way. We said. First, you need, as we call it, a sufficient high level of recognition that one begins to ask, what is the history of this medium? You need, for example, nowadays we have AI. Everybody is talking of AI. So we begin to ask, where doesA I start? You need this level of recognition in the present, and then you go back. Then people begin to ask, where does it start? Then you go back and search an event in the past that you can name the beginning of the medium. And of course, it’s true. You can find for every point you can find points before in time that were causally responsible for, that point you’re imagining or you are searching for. But what is helpful is what what we call the point of emergence. And that means when there is in discourse at the time, historically already a notion of medium or a notion of that medium pointing to a presence that means for AI for example, you go back and then you see the conference of conferences, 1956, where the term was coined. And then you can say, this is the starting point. Of course, it has a pre-history.

Everything has a prehistory. But then you have an argument. You say, well, we know it has a prehistory, but there is the point where the first time this notion emerged like artificial intelligence, and that’s why we start there. Of course, this is contingent, but this is a way to solve the problem, because basically you can back go back to the Big bang.

Yeah. That’s true.

And it’s not really going linear. This is a difficult question. This is a difficult and second question because that means, of course, when you say we go back to the doc last conference and say 1956, this is the starting of AI. This sounds very linear, but actually it isn’t. Actually it isn’t you would find on your way when you start. Then in 1956, reconstructing the history of that with what is known as AI, which is of course only a very vague umbrella term you would find all way, all the way different. Historically, what I call it in my book, three different series with Foucault, you have different series of historical events and discourses that sometimes overlap, sometimes connect, and you try to should try to trace this network of lineages and series that lead to the present. But nevertheless, you have to start somewhere. And so you go back. It sounds linear, you start there, and then you go from the past back to the present, and then you find on your way that it’s differentiated in lots of different series.

So, the other question to you is do you think it’s valid to stop, any archeological study at the point where imaging becomes standardized or commercially mainstream as class? Yes. Does or should?

The analyzes extend beyond I think the argument back to the is valid. I mean, you need the point. You need an argument to stop the analysis at some point, because that’s the same problem with going back. I mean, you can go back and you can go back indefinitely and okay, you can only go to the present up to the present right now. Okay. We perhaps talk about the future later. But, it can go to the present. And when you need an argument to stop your analysis that you have a kind of, over seeable analyzable archive to make it operation pragmatically doable, then it’s a good argument to say we stop when it’s, getting commercially mainstreamed, and you only do the research on the question.

Where does the medium emerge? And when it gets commercially interesting, you stop. It’s a good argument. The other thing is, the only problem is, I would say, is that, you have to be clear about that not every medium that is important and successful is commercially mainstream in the sense that it’s part of the entertainment industry in the widest, widest sense. And so you might need another argument then commercially so successful to stop your analysis. But basically that’s a good idea.

I mean like pantelegraph I think, I mean it is the the how they say the roots of a facsimile, it’s the first thing that created with, with the idea of How can we transport a writing or the image from one place to another without carrying it as a message, in a electrical way, but we don’t really talk about pantograph nowadays. We only know facsimile because it was more mainstream. Yeah, but it’s interesting because as a media archeologist, you would discuss the pantograph.

I suppose. Yeah. I mean, it’s an important invention.

But the inventions after that become more, very well known, I guess. Yeah, but that’s our our job as media archeologists. I mean, that’s why it’s called archeology in the way we, uncover, we dig and we uncover things that are not very well known. Because what is very well known, there is no research needed basically.

Yeah another question is, media archeology more powerful? It highlights historical, ruptures and forgotten alternatives. Do you think that it is more strong like that, or when it reveals long term continuities in media developments?

This is also a very good question and a very difficult question. I mean, basically I would say that history cannot be described neither without discontinuity, because if there was no discontinuity, there would be no change at all and therefore no history. But you also cannot do without continuity, because without continuity there would be just a heterogeneous jumble of disconnected events. And also no history.

So basically history can only understood as both discontinuous and continuous at the same time. And this of course makes it quite difficult. Because you can say this, but what does this mean? And so because you cannot imagine when we have just one event and then you have another event is and then you ask, is this continuous or discontinuous?

And you say, yeah, it’s both. Hey, this is not so easy to understand because I mean, how can it be both? And I would suggest again that it’s helpful to go back to the notion of serious as developed by Foucault in Archeology Of Knowledge, because then you don’t have you have the problem.

If you imagine history to be on the line, like events on one line, and then you and when you then ask is is more discontinuous or continuous, and you come to the conviction that it has to be both, then it’s difficult to describe it. But when you have lots of parallel series at the same time, then some can be discontinuous and just end or changed abruptly, or others can stay the same. So then you can easily answer what it means to have continuity and discontinuity at the same time. Having said that, it’s true that media archeology in the past month more focused on, the invention and the new and the discontinuous.

What, by the way, is nothing really radical. For example, for compared to histories of invention, which are quite standard in, in the history of technology, as for example, David Edgerton pointed out, but, I would say to have, plausible description you need continuity and discontinuity at the same time, and you can only resolve this paradox by going away from the idea that you have one line of development and instead argue that you have a layering, a layering of different series.

The number might be open. It’s hard to say how many they are, but but they are in of many series in which discontinuity and continuity exists at the same time on different levels. That’s my point of view. The best solution to do that.

I agree.

And my next question is, your work. Your work emphasizes historical contingency and discontinuity using case studies like card stunts, holography, and CD players to show how media could have developed differently. Why is it important to highlight these alternative paths, and how do they help us understand why media became what they did? Well, I think that, I think it is also related to the previous question.

Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I, I mean, this, especially card stands and holography, quite eccentric examples. But I did also other things like the graphic inks and so on and simulation, which are not that, eccentric. But coming back to your question, I mean, first of all, I would say holography and CD players, of course, by no means alternative paths in themselves. I mean, holography is a widespread, widely established technology as measurement technology in the sciences, in materials testing and the security technology. I mean, you have holograms right now, at the moment, with you on your banknotes and your credit cards as a security technology, because they can’t be copied. And the interesting thing is that that shows although it’s established as a technology, it is not a commercial success and it is a commercial success for the companies that produce security holograms, so to speak. But it’s not commercial in the sense that it’s part of a big entertainment industry. And this is very interesting because a lot of produce can produce depends how you use it can produce absolutely stunning three dimensional images. And actually in the 80s, there was a flurry of exhibitions. You could buy, shrill holograms in gift shops as an unusual gift.

But that’s gone. And that’s an interesting case, because that coming back to your question relating to PS when it’s commercially successful. Holography is an interesting example. In that sense. It’s not commercially successful in the sense that it’s central to the entertainment industry or the mass media or even the art system, but it’s successful nevertheless, and this is something interesting you can learn from the history of holography.

It’s super important today as media of the state, as a medium of the warfare, as a medium in medicine, but it’s not visible in as commercial medium, but for example, like computer games and this is the different you can learn from a rock CD Players are interesting in themselves for different reasons. First thing is they were the first digital medium in the home. Besides home computers. I learned the notion of digital in the 80s when I was 12 because there was this new hot shit called the CD player. I never heard of that before. Before I was 12, I only knew vinyl record players, and then it was digital and I couldn’t even. I didn’t understand what that means, but I heard that word that the first time that and it introduced that into the home. This is historically interesting. And the other thing that is interesting about CD players is that it’s in a way interesting.

It’s connected to a larger feet in the way both use laser light, and laser is one of the most important technologies of the 20th century in the media history because CDs, DVDs, Blu rays, that’s why it’s called Blu ray are written and read with laser light.

Holography are written with it produced with laser light. The chips in our computers are written with laser light. And what you can learn from this is that not the shift from analog to digital is the most important change in media history of the 20th century. But the emergence of modern physics, of quantum mechanics, or the theory of relativity, these are the conditions for our whole digital media culture. And this is what you can learn from the CD player, basically. And card stands, of course, there are really nerdy and eccentric. That’s true. And although the practice is still very widespread today, it’s of course a niche niche phenomenon. That’s true. But there’s one is interesting thing about it when you go back, and that’s what I wrote about an article, is that you can see that this was one of the first experiments in pixilated computer graphics, long before it was done on screens. It was done with people on tribunes. And this is interesting because that shows that when you go back into media archeology, you sometimes find origins of technologies you wouldn’t have expected at all. And this is honestly, this is something about the fun of media archeology, because it’s like being Sherlock Holmes. You go back and all of a sudden you find things you wouldn’t have expected. And this that’s interesting in itself, at least for me.

It is definitely exciting. It is fun to dig. Yeah, especially to dig the old strange stuff is not counts as a main media history. As you know, Andreas Huyssen looked to the past and memories and, he mentions about a cultural memory crisis. And my question to you drawing on Andreas Huyssen’s concept of the “cultural memory crisis” from his book Twilight Memories, do you consider older media forms to be significant for what we might call “technological memory”? How important are these “forgotten” or “obsolete” media technologies in shaping our understanding of technological memory today?

Again, very, very good and very, very difficult question. I’m really impressed. There’s really interesting questions. Thank you for that.

Thank you.

And I really, I mean, this is really difficult. I mean, one thing we could say is, We could ask what we mean by technological memory.

You have, on the one hand, technologies that were always niche technologies, like holography or card stand that were, at the seemingly what’s actually not true for holography on the margins of attention or, if you mean technologies that were central for, media history but then were superseded by new technologies, for example, the vinyl record player. Yeah. I mean, it was the central technology in the 70s to reproduce music besides the tape deck. And then the CD player came and, all of a sudden the new was deemed to be obsolete. But interestingly enough, it never really disappeared. And it comes back with the regions, the sales and revenue, increasing. I mean, many bands and even people that are doing electronic music, digitally producing electronic music like to publish it on vinyl again.

And nowadays, the city, the CD is threatened, the people do vinyl and on the other hand downloads and nobody does CDs anymore. So in a way you can say that many seemingly outdated technologies can come back and there is a certain media nostalgia, even if they are outdated, many people still cultivate them in Vinyl record player if my students told me that it’s nowadays fashionable again to have a tape recorder and never would have imagined this in my wildest dreams, that all of all things tape technology would have have come back. It’s so clumsy and has so many disturbances and malfunctions and is so noisy and, so in that sense that the technologies of the past are seldom forgotten because they are also a part of a technology, memory, pop culture, so to speak, as part of the pop culture, be now being fancy.

And so we need tape decks again, although this is a really, really clumsy technology and like, what I’m really waiting, that video tape is making its comeback. That would be the strangest thing I ever had. The other thing, the other question is not memory of technology, but the memory through technology. That means what can we store and how can we remember the past? And how does this change with difficult and with different technologies? And this is interesting because in a way, our tech storage media become more and more fragile and fleeting. I mean, digital technologies are so fragile. I mean, as you know, I mean, you have some discs from 5 or 10 years ago, you cannot even there is no machine with it. You can read it to then even if you could read it, you don’t have the software to, play the files and and and in such a disk, I mean, when you just let it lay around for several years, you can’t read it anymore. And the denser you pack the data and the more they are encoded by different software and OS and hardware layers, so to speak, the more difficult they are to read in the future. And and in that sense, I mean, writing your texts into stone with the sizzle is the better way to make them readable in the future than to store it on a USB stick, because any USB stick will be defunct in a few years. And even if it’s not, nobody can read it anymore. But. So if you want to be read in 1000 years, but do it late into stone, this is the best way to do so.

Starting from C.W. Ceram’s Archaeology of the Cinema and tracing its influence through Friedrich Kittler’s work, media archaeology seems to have grown within the tradition of German media theory. Thinkers like Ernst Kapp, Siegfried Zielinski, and others have also contributed to this genealogical line. What is your view on the role of this specifically German intellectual heritage in shaping media archaeology as a field?

Although I don’t think that this kind of, archeology of media archeology works that way. The first thing is that as far as I can see,Ceram, for example, isn’t mentioned in Kittler at all. It is mentioned I had to look and I was on steam and it is mentioned and I’m all for fame. Typewriter. So I’m not sure if Kittler knew this book at all. I’m not. I haven’t yet studied all his papers on that. Basically against the notion of archeology. And Kittler comes from Foucault, and Foucault was more influenced, and kittler was more influenced, for Foucault was always in the background, but he was first more influenced by Derrida and then Lacan. And so I guess this is, the, the source for the notion of archeology in Kittler’s and I guess Ceram’s notions of archeology is completely different. Yeah, same word basically. But it’s it’s coming really from, the study of antiquity. This was his background partially. And so therefore he has perhaps the use, the notion of archeology, but I guess it has no relation to the use of archeology. And Kittler the other thing is Kapp.

I mean, Kapp is also a different thing because this was the early for philosophy of technology in the 19th century, and it was one of the first authors to describe technology as an extension of the body. And there is a lineage going from Kapp through Freud, through negative anthropology, looking up to McLuhan. For example. But this is exactly what Kittler rejects. I mean, he said explicitly, I have a quote media. It’s my translation. Please excuse the weird translation. Media are not pseudoparts that human body extends the follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and the history of riding behind. End of quote. And I you one doesn’t have to agree to that quote, but basically that means that, this whole lineage of extension of the body going from Kapp to McLuhan is, history that Kittler knows very well. But he rejects this theoretical lineage because this is too anthropocentric for Kittler. So in that sense, I would say there is no homogeneous, German, origin of media archeology. What is called media archeology today is more influenced by French theory than by either Ceram or the media as extension line going back to Kapp, these are totally different things. Having said that, there is one very German thing about media studies as such.

I mean, we still use their words, when we want to create some works, at least I do use, their words when I want to create something maybe about media archeology. And I have, I have suspicions that some media archeologists use at least inspire from Ceram

Why not, why not, why not, why not? This is not, this is not a problem. Of course. I mean, you can use serem and Kittler and mix it at the same time. Why not? I wouldn’t just say that there is a line going from Ceram to Kittler. I think this, I guess, doesn’t work. But why not work with both? I mean, I don’t see a problem with that.

In your article “Digitale Medien und Methoden — Jens Schröter zur Medienarchäologie der digitalen Medien”, in the section titled “Anfang und Ende der Medienarchäologie?”, you state that “at the latest, one must stop with the present” when it comes to media archaeology. Considering the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence today, do you think it is possible to extend media archaeology as a methodology toward future media technologies—perhaps by integrating it into theframework of speculative or imaginary media?

Yes, I would say, yeah. And I would even say that that is necessary. We have worked on this in our book Media Futures, which appeared in 2021 with Palgrave. The thing is that when you go back and look at the history of a certain medium media technology, you always find that in this whose line of development there are always imaginations on what will this technology be in the future? Very many practitioners from computer science did that. For example, there is this famous paper by Licklider and Taylor from 1968. The computer is a, what’s its name, communication device or communicative device. And this is this is developing some future scenarios, how computers will be used in the future. And this is and this is of course, also very basic commercial reasons, because if you want to get funding, let’s say for development or if you even want to get private investors that invest money in your technology, you have to tell them what what it’s coming out of it. You can’t just say, well, we do. You just for its own sake. No, you have to tell them what it’s coming out in the future. So sometimes it has simply economic reasons for why there are these future projections in the history of technology. At every point, and sometimes is the basic reason that you have to sometimes to coordinate many people in the development of something, and you have to give them as a certain type of German sociology has called it. You have to give them a light build a leading image, so to speak, to say this is what we develop. I mean, you can see this in early VR research, for example, virtual reality research that they have recurring, ever recurring motif is the holodeck from Star Trek as the super, extreme, most extreme realization of a realistic and medium as a kind of this is what we strive for.

Finally, the holodeck. Although as far as we know today it’s impossible to do. But, this is the leading image. And so, if you do media archeology, you cannot avoid, in a way, to confront yourself with the imaginations of the future state of a technology that is developed at a certain point in history that is, in a way, it’s even unavoidable to talk about future imaginaries of technology. When you do media archeology, you cannot separate it from researching the way how a technology became, because you always have the question, why is it that it became that way? And in in this process, you have always this discussion, let’s say in the 60s, what do we think, what this will be in the future.

Of course, this can turn out to be completely wrong. Yes. This can turn out to be completely wrong. But it’s inseparable. Inseparable from, the historical development of such technologies. I mean, a very famous example is Ivan Sutherland. He develops in 1968. I guess the head mounted display, which, you know, let’s say from Oculus Rift and so on. And in 1966, he writes this weird short paper, the ultimate display, about absolutely. At that time, non-existing and as we think today, forever non-existing technology like the holodeck, which can produce real objects. And he even writes, you know, a bullet fired at you with the ultimate display would kill you because it’s like the real object.

Why does Sutherland write such a paper in 1966? He’s. I mean, he’s not a writer, is not a novelist. He’s not a speculative philosopher. No, he’s an engineer. He’s a computer scientist. But he writes such a paper and you cannot, for example, write the media archeology of the head mounted display without reading this paper, where Sutherland speculates about a futuristic medium that sounds exactly like the holodeck. 30 years later on TV and, perhaps I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys from Star Trek have this idea from Sutherland, but I have no proof of that. But but I would trust. So yes, if you do media archeology, the future is always with you. But one last sentence. But you can only do this in retrospect. AI, for example, at the moment is a problem because AI is too much in flux. It’s too much moving it in a way it is. In a way it’s a bad idea to do now in media archeology of AI, because you don’t know how this will go and how it will move. It’s easier to write such archeologists on phenomena that, closed in a way. So you see that and that came out. And now you can go and write in media archeology, but as we see in the vinyl record player, perhaps these histories never end.

And so there is never a point where it’s really close. But AI is really in flux at the moment.

Yes, it’s not stable. It evolves very fast. It’s continuation and usage gets advanced very fast. I mean, and no one knows where it will go, where it’ll evolve in the future. So it’s very unstable technology to me.

Yeah it is, it is because it is in flux. It is in development. New approaches are emerging. New uses are emerging. It’s hard to say where it goes. So at the moment I would be careful with historical. Okay. You can of course do historical analysis and say well 1956, there was the first conference where the notion was coined. This remains true regardless of what happens now. Okay, that’s given, but any further diagnosis, research how it which implication it has or with which politics it’s I guess it’s too early to do so.