Search the repository

A+ | A- | | SLO | ENG

Abstract: The media archaeologist has been called an experimenter (Fickers and van den Oever), a circuit-bender (G Hertz and Jussi Parikka), a “thinkerer” (Ted Nelson, Lori Emerson, Erkki Huhtamo). With reluctance, sometimes media archaeologists self-designate as a “media/historians.” Rarely does the media archaeologist refer to themselves as “students” of media. However, several texts have appeared recently that suggest that media archaeology as a field is inherently pedagogic, in the sense that it presumes experiential, speculative, and embodied forms of knowledge acquisition (Fickers and van den Oever; Patrick Ellis and Colin Williamson, Wanda Strauven). This paper follows on the call by recent media archaeologists like Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever for a sensorially-engaged encounter with media artifacts. It suggests that, through such methods of experiment and re-enactment, media archaeology might represent a kind of un-learning of toxic subject positions embedded in media technologies themselves. Making the historical self into the field’s most important, but repressed, medium, the paper argues that media archaeology might be indispensable to historical writing because it presents historians and students of history with an opportunity to radically reimagine the self (Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Claudia Rankine). (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art)
Keywords: media archaeology, experimental pedagogy, critical theory
Published in RUNG: 09.10.2024; Views: 142; Downloads: 0
Link to file
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: This paper comes out of a book project examining the emergence of identity recognition practices in the first half of the twentieth century, that is, during the period leading up to the visual (de)construction of identity in a manner no longer verifiable by the human eye. Its focus is on the filmic representation of early institutions of photographic identification and their tactical subversion through fraud, plastic surgery, masks, identity theft, as well as visual occlusions occurring at the level of cinematography, such as techniques of blocking, framing, magnifying, and editing as described by Balázs in his film theory. The paper focuses on practices of opacity and mis(re)cognition such as are practiced specifically by central and east European practitioners in exile, including in the films of Bela Balázs, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Conrad Veidt.
Keywords: film and media studies, east central European regional studies, migration studies
Published in RUNG: 09.10.2024; Views: 121; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: This paper is about the first automated systems developed to recognize identity. While automated recognition in the twenty-first century is widely associated with images of the human face, its roots are to be found in attempts to visualize identity in other, non-figural types of trace left by human bodies, ranging as widely as shadows, astrological signs, handwriting, the prints left by palms and fingers and the acoustics of the human voice. This paper investigates one such system of recognition as it emerged from within the telecommunications industry context in the midcentury U.S. Ostensibly built to reduce human labor and cable bandwidth, Bell Labs developed three different phone devices in the 1950s to photograph, formalize and analyze the sounds of speech as they traveled through the telephony system. And while the device called “Audrey” indeed succeeded in recognizing spoken digits, it was its failure to recognize the speech contents without prior awareness of the identity of the speaker, that is to distinguish between the individuality of the speaking “medium” and their intended meaning, that arguably made the experiment a landmark in the history of machine-driven recognition. Accounting for the “noise” made by the body and the environment from which sound emanated into the device, which the lab’s technicians defined as ranging from “speech defects” to “inflection” and “background interference” proved more important than phonetic analysis in determining the intended message of given speech spectogram. Similarly to a range of experiments with noise by formalist filmmakers such as Tony Conrad, John Cage, Kurt Kren and others, it was on the principle of contingency and irreproducible uniqueness that Bell Lab technicians sought to train machine-driven intelligence.
Keywords: History of computer science, machine learning, Bell Labs, history of telecommunications, sound studies
Published in RUNG: 19.02.2024; Views: 1143; Downloads: 8
Full text (31,80 MB)

Abstract: Eszter Polonyis Vortrag behandelt frühe Systeme automatisierter Identitätserkennung. Einen Fokus bilden Experimente zur Stimmerkennung, wie sie in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts von US-amerikanische Telekommunikationsunternehmen unternommen wurden. Sie geht dabei auch den Verbindungen zur Arbeit mit „noise“ von Medienkünstler*innen nach, darunter Tony Conrad, John Cage und Kurt Kren.
Keywords: media studies, surveillance studies, art history, critical data studies, avant-garde and experimental art
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 1384; Downloads: 8
Link to file
This document has many files! More...

Keywords: media studies, art history, new media art, archival studies, restoration studies, museum studies
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 1903; Downloads: 9
Link to file
This document has many files! More...