Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method

Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garnet Hertz ◽  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Waste ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Planned Obsolescence ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Media Discourses

This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgotten media discourses, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking and other hacktivist exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology. The concept of dead media is discussed as “zombie media”—dead media revitalized, brought back to use, reworked.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

scholarly journals Media archaeology-based Visual Music

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Alberto Novello
Keyword(s):  
Frame Rate ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Geometric Properties ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Beam Movement

This article describes the intersection of Media Archaeology and Visual Music in my artistic practice that repurposes obsolete devices to investigate new connections between light and sound. I revive and hack tools from our analogue past: oscilloscopes, early game consoles, and lasers. I am attracted to their aesthetic difference from the ubiquitous digital projections: fluid beam movement, vibrant light, infinite resolution, absence of frame rate, and line-based image. The premise behind all my work is the synthesis of both image and sound from the same signal. This strong connection envelopes the audience in synchronous audiovisual information that reveals underlying geometric properties of sound. In this text I describe the practice and the aesthetic potentials connected to few analog and digital hybridized systems to generate new sonic and visual experiences.

The Sounds of Zombie Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-252
Author(s):  
Lauren Flood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Electronic Waste ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Multimedia Art ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Tools And Techniques

This chapter investigates how do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures in New York City and Berlin make sound and music with “zombie media,” or physical materials rescued from obsolescence that are recycled, repurposed, and reanimated. In situating DIY repurposing practices within a context of conspicuous production, or the tendency to obsess over constant invention and fabrication, it explores zombie media as experimental instrument building, sound art, and multimedia art. Through solo tinkering, group workshops, concerts, and exhibits, participants employ the DIY ethos present in underground and experimental music and art scenes, as well as maker and hacker cultures, to explore the aesthetic, material, and cultural value of electronics at various life stages and afterlives. Some of their tools and techniques of repurposing include: circuit bending, hardware hacking, scavenging electronic waste, and repairing broken audio equipment. Drawing on discussions of the zombie, ranging from its original Haitian context to its widespread use as a symbol for the anxieties of late capitalism and overconsumption, the chapter shows how participants engage infrastructures of waste through an ethic of aversion, cultivating sustainability skills that demonstrate “productive” uses of time and materials, but which nevertheless embody conspicuous production. The lure of zombie media is its reanimating power—a resourcefulness-through-resistance that operates via sincerely held beliefs about labor, frugality, and conserving material goods.

scholarly journals Abject Digital Performance: Engaging the Politics of Electronic Waste

Leonardo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniël Ploeger
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Electronic Waste ◽  
Electronic Devices ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Planned Obsolescence ◽  
Digital Devices ◽  
Digital Performance ◽  
Symbolic Structure

Building on anthropologist Mary Douglas’s writing on the ritual function of dirt, this article presents a strategy in digital performance art that engages with electronic waste (e-waste). It is suggested that planned obsolescence in electronics is of a particular nature that facilitates the representation of consumer technologies within the logic of a “symbolic order of technological progress,” where digital devices act as mere signifiers for abstract notions of connectivity, well-being and innovation. Conceptualizing discarded electronic devices as abject technology that is positioned outside this symbolic structure, a performance practice is proposed where abject body parts and abject technologies are connected to challenge this techno-ideology.

Growing Ourselves to Death? Economic and Ecological Crises, the Growth of Waste, and the Role of the Media and Cultural Industries

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81
Author(s):  
Trish Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses

Since the financial crash of 2008, large sectors of capitalist economies have been enveloped by a crisis that is typically represented by media discourses in purely economic and financial terms. However, the crisis is also ecological. Yet, while media discourses frequently embrace and propose small-scale environmental remedies, it is rarely pointed out that such calls stand at odds with the consumer capitalist system under which the media industries operate. Adopting a ‘business as usual’ approach to consumption, the media industries encourage the public to shop their way out of recession, despite crippling austerity measures that have been imposed on them. This is in the face of an unprecedented ecological crisis which is now largely accepted as due to anthropogenic factors. In light of this ecological crisis, continued growth-based economic paradigms are increasingly deemed unsustainable. Yet frequently, media discourse uncritically takes growth and waste as two aspects of an unchanging and necessary paradigm. Against this backdrop of economic and ecological crises this paper draws on a set of critical cross-disciplinary literature from Harvey's political economy, to Foster and Moore's political ecology to Baran and Sweezy on waste, through to Adorno, Bourdieu and Garnham, to identify and engage with the strategic role of the media. It outlines crisis theories of economy and ecology, moving on to discuss crucial, if neglected aspects of the role of the media and cultural industries with respect to these crises. This paper advances the view that the role of the media in construction of norms with respect to consumption practices and waste is of significance and arguably needs to be incorporated into crisis theory of both economy and ecology.

The Transformation of Theory – from Distraction to Recombinant Poetics

Tekstualia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (35) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Ewa Szczęsna
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
The Status ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
Theory Of Literature

The article examines the status of the theory of literature in the contemporary humanities. Today, literary studies are epistemological representations of literatu re, with blurred or fl exible distinctions. The fundamental differences among arts, media, discourses, especially between the theory of art and artistic practice, creates a new ontology of the texts of culture. Recombinant texts require a recombinant poetics and a new theory established through dialogue. The analysis of trans-semiotic, trans-medial and trans-discursive texts shows the necessity of an open theory of text. This theory is shaped through the interplay of various domains (e.g. semiotics, comparative studies, media studies, literary studies).

Transhumanism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pilsch
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
History Of

This book argues that transhumanism should be taken more seriously as a Utopian force in the present. Combatting the widespread idea that transhumanism is a naive and dangerous reframing of the most excessive forms humanist thought, this book situates the contemporary transhumanist movement within the longer history of a rhetorical mode Pilsch calls "evolutionary futurism." Evolutionary futurism is a way of arguing about technology that suggests that global telecommunications technologies, in expanding the geographic range of human thought, radically reshape the future of the human species. Evolutionary futurist argumentation makes the case that we, as a species, are on the cusp of a radical explosion in cognitive, physical, and cultural intelligence. Transhumanism surveys the varying uses of evolutionary futurism throughout the 20th century, as it appears in a wide array of fields. This book unearths evolutionary futurist argumentation in modernist avant-garde poetry, theosophy, science fiction, post-structural philosophy, Christian mysticism, media theory, conceptual art, and online media culture. Ultimately, the book suggests that evolutionary futurism, in the age of the collapse of the state as a unit for imagining Utopia, works by highlighting the human as the limit that must be overcome if we are to imagine new futures for our culture, our planet, and ourselves.

scholarly journals Electronic Waste & The Production Of Space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Philipp Noble
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Waste ◽  
Waste Stream ◽  
Planned Obsolescence ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Public Value ◽  
Urban Mining ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City

The future of waste is electronics. The conditions of planned obsolescence combined with our throw away culture of capitalistic consumption has created the largest and fastest growing waste stream responsible for spatially transforming environments. Through the process of reclaiming precious materials contained within our dysfunctional electronics, urban mining becomes a form of resistance to the economics of consumption by recognizing electronic waste as a resource and turning its perceived detritus into value. If waste is central in the processes of capitalist urbanization, can architecture improve the condition of configuring industrial form to create ecology between e-waste, culture, and urbanity? Are there opportunities for e-waste and its architecture to have a public value and legibility in the city? Within this space of speculation, this thesis will explore the untapped architectural possibilities associated with the management of electronic waste and the production of space.

scholarly journals Memory Machines: Infrastructural Performance as an Art Method

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Samir Bhowmik ◽  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Public Library ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Walking Tours ◽  
A Performance

Through a performance tour conducted in a public library, the authors analyze multi-sensory methods, including immersive performance and walking tours, as probes into cultural infrastructures. Combining discussions of media theory and artistic practice, the authors present infrastructural performance as an art method for creative infrastructural research.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document