2015 | 7 | Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and -Realities

This issue presents archaeological inquiries into the multiple pasts of tele-visions. It aims to assess the many lives of television and highlights from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives what has shaped television as a technical infrastructure, political and social institution, cultural phenomenon and business model.
Co-edited by Andreas Fickers and Anne-Katrin Weber

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
  • Article
    16mm Film Editing for Television: Using Filmed Simulation as a Hands-on Approach to TV History
    Murphy, Amanda; Aust, Rowan; Jackson, Vanessa; Ellis, John (2015-09-09)
    Two television editors who once worked with 16mm film discuss and explore their former working methods and demonstrate how to make a picture cut using film. The method of ‘hands-on history’ used for this simulation is discussed, as are the problems of presenting such data.
  • Article
    Democratic Television in The Netherlands: Two Curious Cases of Alternative Media as Counter-Technologies
    Slootweg, Tom; Aasman, Susan (2015-09-09)
    For this article, the authors retrieved two curious cases of non-conformist TV from the archives of the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. Being made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the two cases represent an alternative history of broadcast television in the Netherlands. Whereas Neon (1979–1980) aimed to establish a punk-inspired DIY video culture, Ed van der Elsken (1980, 1981) strived for an expressive amateur film culture. The authors propose to regard these cases as two different experiments on participation in and through media. By conceptualising amateur film and video as counter-technologies, the discursive expectations around their democratic potential can be explored further.
  • Article
    Digital Media Archaeology: Digging into the Digital Tool AVResearcherXL
    Gorp, Jasmijn van; de Leeuw, Sonja; van Wees, Justin; Huurnink, Bouke (2015-09-09)
    Recently, scholarly works started to turn their interest to the epistemological and methodological challenges that research with new digital tools and technologies do pose. In this article, we would like to contribute to this methodological discussion and to shed light on the role of digital tools for media studies, by taking the tool AVResearcherXL as case in point. AVResearcherXL is a new exploratory tool for media studies research, enabling users to search across, compare and visualize both the metadata of Dutch public television and radio programmes, and a selection of Dutch newspaper articles of the Dutch Royal Library. By tracing the word ‘television’ with the use of the tool, we provide a practical use case of doing media archaeology with digital tools for media archives. Our deconstruction shows the importance of a media archaeological approach to look into the materiality of digital technology as well as the relevance of studying the deep material structure of media technology. AVResearcherXL thus could be seen as an archaeological site in which the user or ‘archaeologist’ decides where to dig and which search lights to use. Using AVResearcherXL to do media (historical) research is not about finding the ‘right’ answers, but about contextualising results, and about finding new, sometimes unexpected, pathways and questions.
  • Article
    Editorial: Towards an Archaeology of Television
    Fickers, Andreas; Weber, Anne-Katrin (2015-09-09)
    Over the last few years, ‘media archaeology’ has evolved from a marginal topic to an academic approach en vogue. Under its banner, conferences and publications bring together scholars from different disciplines who, revisiting the canon of media history and theory, emphasize the necessity for renewed historiographical narratives. Despite, or maybe because of profuse debates, media archaeology remains a loosely defined playground for researchers working at the intersection of history and theory. Far from offering uniform principles or constituting a homogeneous field, its prominent authors – Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinksi, Jussi Parrika and Erkki Huhtamo, to name just a few – distinguish themselves by their heterogeneity regarding methodology and theoretical focus.
  • Article
    Extending the Aerial: Uncovering Histories of Teletext and Telesoftware in Britain
    Gazzard, Alison (2015-09-09)
    Beyond their roles of broadcasting programmed content into the homes of people around the country, Britain’s British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent Television stations delivered additional content via home television sets. This article will explore the history of British teletext and telesoftware in the broader context of microprocessing developments during the late 1970s and early 1980s through a media archaeological framework of the terminology and traits. Situating these developments in the industrial and political climates of the 1970s, the article will outline an alternative history of networks through the aerial, as the ‘hidden lines’ of information become exposed once again.
  • Article
    Novel Televisual Environments: Immersive Spectatorship and the Future of Stereoscopic 3DTV
    Mehrabov, Ilkin (2015-09-09)
    This article focuses on one of the most ground-breaking technological attempts to create a novel immersive media environment for a heightened televisual user experience: 3DTV, a Network of Excellence project that was funded by the European Commission 6th Framework Information Society Technologies Programme. Based on the theoretical framework mainly outlined in the works of Jonathan Crary and Brian Winston, and on empirical data obtained from the author’s laboratory visit notes and discussions with 3DTV practitioners, this article explores the claimed novelty of 3DTV through a focus on the history of stereoscopic vision and addresses the inconsistency between the research project’s expected and actual results.
  • Article
    Picking Up (On) Fragments
    Ellis, Phil (2015-09-09)
    This article discusses the implications for archival and media archaeological research and reenactment artwork relating to a recent arts practice project: Reenacttv: 30 lines / 60 seconds. It proposes that archival material is unstable but has traces and fragments that are full of creative potential to re-think and re-examine past media historical events through a media archaeological approach to reenactment. The article contains images and links to videos from the final reenactment artworks as well as from rehearsals in Vienna and Bradford.
  • Article
    Streaming: A Media Hydrography of Televisual Flows
    Thibault, Ghislain (2015-09-09)
    This paper situates the metaphor of ‘streaming’ in contrast to and connection with fluid analogies and metaphors that have been used to describe different models of media transmission. From the early use of aqueous vocabulary that shaped popular and scientific understandings of electricity transmission to the seminal studies of mass communication concerning the flows of information, images of fluidity have long shaped cultural and conceptual understandings of media. Building on the work of media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo, I approach these metaphors as ‘recurrent topoi’ in media culture and show that the metaphor of streaming serves to keep the remediation of past media forms hidden while simultaneously revealing certain dominant features of digital culture.
  • Article
    The Lessons of Counterpoint: Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology and Practical Archival Research
    Griffin, Ken (2015-09-09)
    The work of German scholar Wolfgang Ernst has become increasingly influential within media archaeology. Ernst has sought to define a border between the field and traditional media history, arguing that media archaeologists should focus on the study of technological artefacts and processes. He places significant stress on the importance of media archives yet his approach to such institutions is primarily theoretical. Meanwhile, the theoretical basis for some types of media archive research is somewhat lacking. This raises the possibility of whether cross-pollination between media archaeology and these fields might prove mutually beneficial. This paper examines aspects of Ernst’s writings alongside material from a recent archival project focused on a Northern Irish television series to provide an overview of the possibilities.
  • Article
    Tom Swift’s Three Inventions of Television: Media History and the Technological Imaginary
    Galili, Doron (2015-09-09)
    The article discusses three fictional narratives of inventions of televisual devices, which appeared in a popular American boys’ books series about a young inventor-adventurer in 1914, 1928 and 1933. It considers these narratives as representations of the ‘technological imaginary’ of television – that is, the ideas about the possibilities of the technology that were entertained before its material realization and informed its eventual formation. A comparison between the three different manners in which the novels depict the fictional inventions demonstrates how the early imaginaries of television were conceived and articulated in response to the continuously changing intermedial context of the early twentieth century.
  • Article
    Without Latency: Cathode Immersions and the Neglected Practice of Xenocasting for Television and Radio
    Hulbert, Adam (2015-09-09)
    This paper discusses a three-year radio project Cathode Immersions, which was aired on 2SER in Sydney Australia. The audio that accompanied free-to-air television was remixed and rebroadcast in real time without latency. It explores the human and non-human aspects of the convergence of these two media, introducing ideas of xenocasting and media adjacency. The weekly xenocast of Cathode Immersions afforded unique translations of cultural narratives, from commentary on the Gulf War to machinic perspectives on the desires that surround commercial broadcasting.