Open AccessMedia Archaeology: a viable discipline or a valuable symptom?
Author(s) -
Thomas Elsaesser
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
artnodes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1695-5951
DOI - 10.7238/a.v0i21.3204
Subject(s) - movie theater , perspective (graphical) , subject (documents) , contingency , transparency (behavior) , discipline , photography , field (mathematics) , trace (psycholinguistics) , history , sociology , visual arts , epistemology , art , computer science , social science , art history , philosophy , linguistics , computer security , mathematics , library science , pure mathematics
For nearly one hundred years, the moving image has been discussed primarily from the perspective of photography, by organising our questions and theories around cinema as an ocular dispositif, based on light, projection and transparency, or as a recording dispositif, based on index, imprint and trace. In the age of digital imaging technologies, some of which have little to do with optics, such a history of the moving image seems too narrowly conceived.The broadly based, if loosely defined research field of “media archaeology” not only locates cinema within more comprehensive media histories, it also investigates apparently obsolete, overlooked or poorly understood past media practices. The expectation is that by once more “opening up” these pasts, one can also enable or envisage a different future. The question then arises: is media archaeology a (viable) disciplinary subject or also a (valuable) symptom of changes in our ideas of history, causality and contingency?