up new histories: new ways of sorting, sifting, and seeing the past. The past, which was once scarce and relatively inaccessible from the present, is suddenly and inexorably visible and accessible in an emergent “post-scarcity” culture. But the connective turn is far from being some benign phase in the evolution of media and memory; rather, it devalues scarcity as the once universal currency of museum culture. Museum content, simply put, is everywhere.
But how museums use or can use media to represent the past and shape memory of media and media’s pasts – the subject of this chapter – has been deeply affected, and indeed infiltrated, by the media of the day. Media have long entwined the personal and the public, locating the unfolding details of everyday life in terms of the events of the larger society. But the difference today is that digital connecting, networking, and archiving is a qualitatively different force of media memory from previous transformative media in that it simultaneously makes present multiple pasts, while captivating the present.
As the key dynamic of the shifting relationship between media and memory, digital connectivity offers an immediacy and fluidity, ushering in a new set of opportunities and challenges to how the past is represented and representable through contemporary media forms. Databases organize, classify, and make accessible the past in new configurations that transcend and translate time and space. For example, the Crimes against Humanity exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, does not contain a single artifact or museal object. Instead it uses a 30 minute documentary film projection onto a large screen and six touch-screen consoles which provide database access. And it is here that the database, which is updated with ongoing and emergent crimes against humanity, is open to reflect the incoming present. Thus it is as much future as past oriented.
It is through this open and continuous connectivity that Peter Lunenfeld sees cultural memory as “warped”: “When image, text, photo, graphic, and all manner of audiovisual records are available at the touch of a button anywhere in the unimodern wired world, the ordered progression through time is replaced by a blended presentness” (2011, 46).
An influential factor here is the impact of different media in shaping an experience of proximity (in time and space) to events deemed “historical.” For example, “historical distance,” according to Mark Salber Phillips, is manifested “along a gradient of distances, including proximity or immediacy as well as remoteness or detachment” (2004, 89). But digital devices and networks have seized and short-circuited precisely these “manifestations” of distance and not least in their deliverance of immediacy as one of the defining – and compulsive – experiences of their use. And the conditions of remoteness or detachment seem inexorably dissolvable through the equivocations of the digital: the reduction and reproduction of all-things-past in the fluidity of digital data. Digital networks and databases don’t just bridge historical distance: they crush it. And yet these are precisely the media that are being brought in to represent, organize, and manage the organizational, archival, and official memory of museums.
How then to respond to these transformations, in terms both of the uses of media in the museum and of a theoretical framework that can best interrogate the warping of cultural memory, in Lunenfeld’s terms? To both these ends, we offer media archaeology. Media archaeology is an emerging approach that departs from traditional methods of media history. It implicitly opposes the simple construction of linear narratives that follow the history of specific forms and their economic, political, and social developments. Instead, media archaeology reconsiders objects, technologies, media, techniques, and processes in their historical specificity and singularity. According to Bolter, media archaeologists “examine earlier media and media forms in both their technical and their cultural contexts. They are particularly concerned to get behind the ossified narratives that are told about the development of such media” (2007, 108). So, media archaeology looks for discontinuities and disruptions while also considering nonlinear lines of descent. This entails interrogating the forms, processes, and phenomena of media, especially how they are rediscovered, remade, and reappear in later eras and media. However, within media archaeology there are different strands of emphasis. For example, Wolfgang Ernst (see Chapter 1 in this volume) sees media as process rather than as object or design oriented, and thus the challenge for museums is how to show media in operation rather than merely as a display object. More broadly, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka encapsulate the work of media archaeology as “a cruise in time.” They explain: “The past is brought to the present, and the present to the past; both inform and explain each other, raising questions and pointing to futures that may or may not be” (2011, 15). While Ernst and others employ media archaeology as an analytical model, here we want to propose it as a model for museum practice.
The museum then is inevitably caught up in media archaeology, both as a version or form from a macro-historical (or antihistorical) perspective, and in the uses of media archaeology as a curatorial strategy in responding to not only the transformations of the digital outlined above but, at the same time, a deep dissatisfaction with the novelty from which discourses on the digital are frequently hung. Furthermore, it is precisely in this space and time that artists have flourished, intervening to construct alternative or hypothetical media histories to challenge both the inexorable immediacy of the present and its post-scarcity digital futures.1
In what follows we explore some cases of media archaeology in practice – both implicit and explicit – and consider their effectiveness in offering alternative medial times and spaces amid the onslaught of the connective turn.
Media archaeology and the memory booms
The Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition, which ran at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the spring of 2007, was composed of the work of 26 artists from Europe, North America, and the Middle East who were each asked to imagine what a memorial to the Iraq War might look like. Amid the frustration and exhaustion of the seemingly perpetual flux of news images that characterized much Western mainstream coverage of this war, the exhibition sought to dig into an alternative future. This future is one in which the traditional forms of memorialization seem more uncertain, given the current era in which wars and conflicts deemed to “need” memorials appear perpetual and horizonless rather than of fixed duration and of unambiguous conclusion. The exhibit shown in Figure 2.1, Roman Ondák’s Snapshots from Baghdad, 2007, is a disposable black camera on a white plinth. Notably, this camera is a one-off: it is already antithetical to the insatiable appetite and seeming perpetual reproducibility of digital photography today as an unsatisfactory basis for remembrance.
The camera supposedly contains an undeveloped film of shots from present-day Baghdad. The unexposed images trapped inside permit a future that is both imaginable, in relation to what the photographs may contain and their impact, and unimaginable, with regard to the contingency of the indeterminable moment of their exposure. In this way the intact camera challenges the highly media-saturated imagination of the 2007 aftermath of war in Baghdad, instead making it contingent on the moment and context – the emergence – of the exposure and mediation of the unseen images.
But the camera, placed as it is in a cabinet on a pedestal, “evokes the eventual ossification of the circulation of both people and images” (Galerie Martin Janda 2008). In this way, Snapshots from Baghdad, 2007 speaks to James E. Young’s notion of a “countermonument” (1992; 2000). Notably, it simultaneously draws attention to both the possibilities and the limitations of the traditional memorial. It challenges the notion of the monumentality of images in the unknowable future and the content of the photographs inside the camera; in other words, it reflects a profound uncertainty of future media memory. At the same time, the exhibit is ossified both in its truncation of the process of photographic recording, exposure, circulation, and through its form of display. The temporal delay of the analogue photographic process is stalled and that “spark of contingency” (Benjamin 1999, 150) characteristic of the photographic image is arrested and preserved within the plastic shell of the camera. It is doubly sealed, first within the plain black plastic case and then within a glass
