Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Hardcover)

Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development -- dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history -- fractures in the predictable -- that help us see the new in the old.

Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machinesthat make this conncection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.

Siegfried Zielinski, a founder of the new field of media archaeology, is Founding Director of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where he is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and is developing a workshop for a variantology of the media. He has published more than a dozen books and many articles. Deep Time of the Media is the second of his books to appear in English.

 

Foreword
Timothy Druckrey vii
 
 Acknowledgments xiii
 
1 Introduction: The Idea of a Deep Time of the Media 1
 
2 Fortuitous Finds Instead of Searching in Vain: Methodological Borrowings and Affinities for an Anarchaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means 13
 
3 Attraction and Repulsion: Empedocles 39
 
4 Magic and Experiment: Giovan Battista Della Porta 57
 
5 Light and Shadow--Consonance and Dissonance: Athanasius Kircher 101
 
6 Electrification, Tele-Writing, Seeing Close Up: Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Joseph Chudy, and Jan Evangelista Purkyně 159
 
7 The Discovery of a Pit, a Camera Obscura of Iniquity: Cesare Lombroso 205
 
8 The Economy of Time: Aleksej Kapitanovich Gastev 227
 
9 Conclusions: Including a Proposal for the Cartography of Media Anarchaeology 255
 
 Notes 281
 
 Bibliography 322
 
 Credits 363
 
 Index 365