1. Poučevanje medijske arheologije : od-učenje in ponovna predstava o zgodovinskem jazuEszter Polónyi, 2024, published scientific conference contribution abstract 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: 1059; Downloads: 2
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2. Mobility media : an archaeology of the photographic ID documentEszter Polónyi, 2023, published scientific conference contribution Abstract: Mobility, in the sense of freedom of persons choosing to move or reside in a state in which they have no prior citizenship, was one of the four original “freedoms” defined in the treaty that ratified European Union member states in 1957.1 In the past decade, this particular freedom, the freedom of movement, appears to have become significantly eroded. Mobility in the sense of migration, that is, mobility of persons for reasons of residency or employment, has become a point of contention among member states that it has divided more than unified, with measures affecting immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers featuring at the core of recent electoral agendas. Certain member states’ deterrence of the mobility of migrants from outside the EU has resulted in the return to protocols and practices of controlling movement into and out of sovereign territories, among the most conspicuous of which has been the re-establishment of a – by now largely defunct – network of nation-state borders. And while the reappearance of new walls, barricades and barbed wiring alongside certain nation-state borders since the mid-2010s have made headlines, there have been other measures with less press and physical visibility that have been set in place to manage and enforce mobility.2 The photographic identity document, meaning a document of state-issued identity certification, has become one such mobility management measure.
Keywords: cultural history, migration studies, history of art, history of visual culture, media archaeology, media studies
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 2602; Downloads: 0
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3. Between graphic arrangement and film: Thom Andersen’s FlickerPolonyi Eszter, 2021, published scientific conference contribution abstract Abstract: When the California-based filmmaker Thom Andersen made his documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer in 1973-4, he recovered an aspect of Muybridge’s work that most viewers had not seen before. Projected on the screen at the top of the theater, these iconic nineteenth-century chronophotographs were allegedly first seen in movement. Viewers could watch as his half-clad and nude subjects lifted water buckets, walked up and down stairs, ran, stood, heaved, threw, jumped, crawled and kicked. Throughout the film, Andersen shows each action multiple times, so that an athlete, for instance, leaps his hurdle firstly slowly, then at increasing speeds. Almost none of the sequences appear in the tempo in which they might have taken place in front of the camera. And, despite this being omitted from reviews, many of the passages drop to frame rates below the minimum necessary to sustain the illusion of motion, dissolving Muybridge’s images in a pulsing, jagged flicker. If Andersen’s recovery of Muybridge’s image sequences continue to appear spectacular, this is because watching the motion studies suddenly lurch into moving images proves just how little their “movement” can be explained by a history of the “movies.” This paper examines Andersen’s film as a way into an alternate genealogy of the moving image provided through the phenomenon of the flicker.
As has become increasingly clear with the publication of a recent anthology of his critical writings (Visible Press, 2017), Andersen was part of a generation of North American filmmaker whose practice and writing resonated with the academic critique of the film apparatus as it began to emerge from France in the 1960s and 1970s. The fixed temporal parameters of film consumption constituted a recurring consideration for Andersen, for whom “clocked” time literalized the destructiveness of capitalism’s “eternal present” (review of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2011). His recovery of Muybridge, for which a frame-by-frame projector allows Andersen to reconstruct what were this pre-cinematic recording systems’s famously arbitrary time intervals, is read within the context of such a critique but also of an emerging tradition of expanded cinema practice. To this effect, comparison is made between Andersen’s process and the efforts of Tony Conrad in the 1960s to research the frequencies at which human vision registers photocelluloid film’s flicker. Conrad’s ability to produce the flicker is ensured not by modification of the projector’s microtemporalities, which would have restricted the number of projectors on which he could show his flicker film, but through alterations at the level of the photocelluloid. Both Andersen and Conrad are shown to turn the basic apparatus into a rhythmic instrument by accessing its frame rates through what I argue is a graphic rather than filmic method.
Keywords: History of American cinema, avant-garde art, media archaeology, Eadweard Muybridge, Thom Andersen
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 2467; Downloads: 0
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9. Béla Balázs and the Eye of the MicroscopeEszter Polonyi, 2012, original scientific article Abstract: This study explores the significance of the cinematic close-up to one of the earliest theories of film, produced by Béla Balázs, on the basis of a widespread technique of microscopy in the life sciences, notably in the work of his brother Evin Bauer, a theorist of microbiology. Balázs imagines that silent film records life in its immanence and spontaneity by virtue of what he calls the “physiognomic” nature of its signs. Rather than generating signs that must be passed through an alphabetic cipher, as had been required under the regime of the written or literary, Balázs presents film as liberating our access to the flow of optical data. Interestingly, however, Balázs retains the need otherwise characteristic of scientific analysis for dividing up the image into semiotic units, what he describes as “atomization.” He insists on returning the real to a symbolic order and making film into a language.
Keywords: film history, media studies, science and technology studies, Weimar cinema, media archaeology
Published in RUNG: 10.12.2020; Views: 4042; Downloads: 0
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