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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
