Digital Memory and the Archive (Volume 39)

Electronic Mediations

by Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka (Editor)

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites. In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive , the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society. Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

Genres: Art, Theory, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Wolfgang Ernst is a German media theorist. He is Professor for Media Theories at Humboldt University of Berlin (HU Berlin) and a major exponent of Media archaeology as a method of scholarly inquiry.

Ernst studied History, Archaeology and Classics at University of Cologne, University of London, and Ruhr University Bochum. He wrote his dissertation on the aesthetic history of collections and work as an assistant at the Studienstiftung. He held positions in Leipzig, Kassel, Rome, Cologne, Weimar, Bochum, Paderborn and Berlin. Wolfgang Ernst collaborated with bootlab Berlin and developed alternative formats of theory with Till Nikolaus von Heiseler.

In 2001 he finished his Habilitation about institutions of remembrance and memory in the 19th and 20th century. Since April 2003 he is a full professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. 2015-2017 Wolfgang Ernst has held the position as director of the Department for Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Ernst is internationally known as a theorist of archives and the media practice of archiving and as an exponent of Media archaeology. His latest work focuses on media-time, time-critical media, and the "sonic" as a form that connects technical and musical practices. He is the founder of a unique operative collection of technical media at Humboldt University Berlin - the "media archaeological fund".

Reviews

[Travis Wagner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The front half of this text is absolute brilliance, but it recedes into some repetition and loose speculation that just doesn't register.

[Val · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is so unfortunate that the themes that this book tackles are really intriguing and present strong premises questioning contemporary media issues within the framework of Foucauldian writing. Yet, I'm not sure whether it is the writing of the author or the order of the chapters that make the book sounds repetitive, and instead of articulating answers to the proposed questions, it ended up tangling itself in self-explaining points regarding basic concepts such as archeology or memory that should have been cleared up as the foundation in a chapter or two.

[Paige]

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-divisi... || http://jussiparikka.net/2013/01/04/di...

[Coco Gelato · Rating 2 out of 5]

not sure what was really going on, but media archives are intriguing