Media Archaeology – Thesis Outline

My thesis will work through the precise nature of the engagement of contemporary projection-based art with media archaeological frameworks, specifically in the work of Peter Alwast, who has recently been awarded the Gallery of Modern Art’s National New Media Art Award in Australia. Alwast’s work, concerned with paralleling analogue and digital takes on signification and the real within local, socially scripted spaces and scenarios, can be shown to equivocally represent and conjure a variegated array of apparatus’ and apparatus effects with diverse cultural takes on the moving image that have been given attention within, but also outside of, art historical analyses. His installations pay tribute to the transformation of the image in post-modernity (Jameson), and the veritable arrival of post-media aesthetics in the art museum (Krauss), but can also be shown to work through many of the concepts and consequences of Kittler’s psychoanalytic media-archaeological theorisations of discourse in the realm of the digital. I will use Kittler’s work, as well as interpretations of Kittler as post-humanist and ‘digital existentialist’, alongside Kraus, and Jameson, to grasp a psychoanalytic reading of the actual aesthetic function and reception of Alwast’s media archaeological art. I am interested, further, in using this single analysis to think through the nature of the relationship between the artist as media archaeologist and media archaeological theory within the academy.

 

Reading List / Bibliography:

Fredrich  Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, with a Foreword by David E. Wellbery. Stanford 1990

- Gramophone Film Typewriter, Stanford 1999

- Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Ed. John Johnston, Amsterdam 1997.

Griffin, Matthew. Literary Studies +/- Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler’s Media Histories

Hansen, March B.N., Media Theory, in Theory Culture and Society, 2006;23;297

Sybille Kramer, The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media, in Theory, Culture and Society. 2006;23;5

Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious (1993)

- A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999)

- Two Moments from the Post-medium Condition, in October, Spring 2006, No. 116, Pages 55-62

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Nicholas Gane, Friedfrich Kittler: An Introduction, in Theory, Culture and Society  2006;23;5

Francastel, Pierre. Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Future Cinema

Sean Cubbitt, The Cinema Effect

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form

Henry Jameson, Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity

Paini, Dominique. “Should we put an end to Projection?” October 110 (Fall 2004)

Roundtable: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003)

Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window

New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2005)



 – Jean-Louis Baudry. ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema’ in Phillip Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 299-318.