Thompson, John B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity.
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Vershooren, Karen. 2010. “Art – A Place for Internet Art in the Museum of Contemporary Art.” In The Weight of Photography: Photography History, Theory and Criticism, edited by Johan Swinnen and Luc Deneulin. Brussels: Academic and Scientific.
Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
1
MUSEUMS AND MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY
An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst
Michelle Henning
Professor Wolfgang Ernst is Chair of Media Theories at the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he also runs the Media Archaeological Fundus, a collection of historical technical media artifacts. The collection is intended to support media studies teaching and research by grounding it in the material history of developments in electronic media hardware, through the examination of working media technologies (as opposed to “dead,” unworkable radios, televisions, etc.). Ernst has written several books (in German): M.edium F.oucault (2000), Das Rumoren der Archive (The rumbling of the archives, 2002), Im Namen von Geschichte (In the name of history, 2003), and Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses (The law of memory, 2007), and many articles and book chapters, including several English-language articles, which outline his approach to media theory. An English-language collection of his writings, entitled Digital Memory and the Archive, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2013 (Ernst 2013a).
My own interest in Ernst’s work came out of a broader interest in German media theory, particularly the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, who held a chair in media aesthetics and history at Humboldt from 1993, and Siegfried Zielinski, currently chair in Media Theory: Archaeology and Varientology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts: both of these writers, though their approaches are quite distinctive, are influenced by the French historian Michel Foucault, especially his notion of history as “archaeology,” as outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 2002). Kittler, in particular, was also influenced by the Canadian media theorist Harold Innis, who distinguished between media according to how their material properties oriented them in terms of time and space, and attempted to trace the impact of this on the social and political development of different societies (Innis [1951] 2008). Kittler has become well known in anglophone media studies for his materialist approach to media, emphasizing the significance of the forms and technology of media over questions of representation.
Ernst also engages with Foucault’s ideas in his books and through the practice of a distinctive kind of “media archaeology” which addresses questions relating to archives and museums. Like Kittler, Ernst emphasizes not just the transmission and broadcast aspects of media, but data storage and machine memory, media as recording devices. His English-language writings include a chapter in Susan Crane’s anthology Museums and Memory (2000), in which he noted the ways in which information-processing technologies are reshaping museums, and also the ways in which museum display and collection management techniques follow the logic of database technologies in doing away with the separation between storage and display and replacing it with a model of data processing and retrieval (Ernst 2000, 25–26). German media archaeology is usually characterized as focusing on hardware over symbolic meaning, on machinic agency over human agency (Winthrop-Young 2006; Parikka 2011, 54). In Ernst’s case there is also a strong emphasis on temporal media processes, on data flows and electrical signals (Parikka 2011, 54). For me, Ernst’s writing on museums and history suggested new ways of thinking about museums. Media become more than objects for the media archaeologist to research, they are themselves machinic “techniques of remembering” that are very different from the practice and discourse of history (Ernst 2005, 595). This machinic memory nevertheless has cultural implications, reconfiguring the very cultural constructions on which museums depend, as in the case of photography: “the improved technologies of visual reproduction led to the availability of arts and artefacts which André Malraux praised as a condition for the thinkability of notions such as a cross artistic ‘style’ in his celebrated photo-based musée imaginaire of 1947” (Ernst 2005, 599). Media archaeologist Jussi Parikka summarizes the relevance of Ernst’s work for museums as follows:
The implications for the wider set of cultural institutions and museums are radical: the need to think museums and archives as nonplaces, and as addresses and hence as modes of management of protocols, software structures and patterns of retrieval which potentially can open up new ways of user-engagement as well, and where data storage cannot be detached from its continuous searchability and distribution. (Parikka 2011, 58).
However, this corresponds more to Ernst’s understanding of the archive (which becomes transformed into software structures) rather than of the museum, which he views as quite distinct. In the following interview, conducted in his office in Humboldt University in February 2011, Ernst’s materialist approach to media leads him to insist on the resistance of the material object (which cannot be completely absorbed by digitalization). Thus, he envisages the museum as something that cannot be understood along the lines of electronic media, as something that is not immune to the effects of technological change, but that needs to maintain its own distinctive quality, centered around the thing that sets it apart from electronic media: the physical presentation of material objects.1
MH: Could you explain what media archaeology is, in your version of it?
WE: Media archaeology refers to the well-known discipline of archaeology in the sense that it takes the media first of all as material objects, even in our so-called virtual world and information society. All this information flow is still based on real cables, real transmitters, real technologies. So media archaeology tries to take the point of view of the media as technological object, which means, for example, to look at what a television image is, not in terms of content. The question of what the political or whatever manipulated message of the video or the television image is has been taken care of by communication studies and other related disciplines – and it has to be done – and, to a certain degree, cultural studies interprets this semiotics and coding and decoding of the television image. Media archaeology is in this respect closer to Marshall McLuhan’s approach and looks at what the television image means, which makes it different from the cinematographic image, or the photographic image, or the digital image (McLuhan [1964] 2003).
Now, how is the electronic image different from the digital image, what difference does it make? First of all, one has to look at it technically, and technomathematically, to know how it is made, for example, what the electronic image does to our eyes, which is of a completely different nature to the projected screen image of cinema. How does it subconsciously influence our perception? The cathode ray, the light, the speed of lines of television: these are processes where the medium works on our perception although we are not conscious of it.
So media archaeology tries to uncover or discover these processes. In order to discover it, media archaeology has to know how your own perception works in terms of neuro-biology and physiology, and at the same time how the medium actually works, because it makes such a big difference whether it is electronically driven or driven by software, which has a completely different cultural power and mechanism and technique behind it. So, to take the example of the most popular medium of today, which would be the computer as laptop (most people now have computers as laptops or similar devices): whereas most people know the computer from the interface, media archaeology looks behind the interface. Like the open software movement,