Media Archaeology
False Positive, a mobile performance and workshop on dataveillance (Mark Shepard and Moritz Stefaner, 2015)
Media do not simply have a history; they are also embodiments of historical change. Media archaeology examines the ways in which media formats and technologies have both contributed to and in turn been influenced by broader societal shifts. This practice can take many forms.
Whether by analyzing the low-level operation of technical media such as photography, television, magnetic tape, or integrated circuits; creating new artworks out of supposedly obsolete technologies; uncovering the workings of old software; fabricating alternate histories of mediatic development; or documenting the rise, decline, and even resurgence of analog media formats ostensibly supplanted by digitization, it places the specificity of individual media forms in dialogue with cultural and political developments. We pursue these lines of inquiry across analog and digital media, theory and practice, and a variety of critical approaches ranging from affect theory to psychoanalysis, queer theory, critical race theory, and Marxism.
