Breaking Open the Black Boxes: media archaeology, anarchaeology and media materiality
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 9y7z9
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1177/1461444814532193
- Title of journal
- New Media and Society
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 1761
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 11
- ISSN
- 1461-4448
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This is a methodological essay on media archaeology and 'anarchaeology', situating its distinctiveness and value for contemporary studies of digital media. In particular, Goddard argues that media archaeology brings a much-needed focus on the materiality of digital media, as opposed to approaches based on ideas of digital immateriality. Hence, as a method, it has the potential to open up the black boxes of digital media, especially in the contemporary proprietorial regime. The essay provides an exposition of what it calls, following Siegfried Zielinski, an ‘anarchaeology’ of media archaeology, and it presents case studies of e-waste and 1990s vernacular web design to emphasise the materiality of digital media.
Goddard’s essay clarifies media archaeology’s potential contribution to digital media studies, doing so by following its creative development from a strain of German media theory influenced by Foucault to a more internationally recognised approach to digital media, capable of addressing some key issues in scholarship in the field, especially questions of media development and materiality. Goddard emphasises the more critical and creative currents of media archaeology, focusing on the work of Zielinski and Jussi Parikka, and shows how the materiality of media archaeology can form the basis for a politically and artistically engaged media theory, especially in relation to the ecologies of digital media and the field of media archaeology.
Goddard has presented this research at invited talks at Ryerson University, Canada and at Unisinos and other universities in Brazil. The proposition of the essay informs the methodologies of his monograph Guerrilla Networks: An Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies (submitted).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
