Zombiemedia Circuit Bending Media Archaeology Into an Art Method

The circuit bended and definitely (re)modified fruits of our collaboration with Garnet Hertz are out. True, "Zombie Media" has been circulating as an unborn living dead text for a longer while, ever since it was part of the Transmediale 2010 Theory Award contest — just now it is finally officially out in Leonardo (vol. 45, no 5)!

Working with someone similar Garnet is  a pure joy, and demonstrates why collaboration is good for you: you learn a lot. A lot lot.

As a teaser to the longer "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archæology into an Fine art Method"-article, please find below the short "manifesto" on "Five Principles of Zombie Media" we co-wrote for the Defunct/Refunct-catalogue (PDF).

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Zombie media addresses the living deads of media culture. As such, it is clearly related
to the before calls to investigate "dead media" by Bruce Sterling and others: to map
the forgotten, out-of-use, obsolete and declared dysfunctional technologies in social club
to understand better the nature of media cultural development. And withal, we desire to
point to a farther issue when it comes to abandoned media: the amount of discarded
electronic media is not but the excavation basis for quirky media archaeological
interests, but one of the biggest threats for ecology in terms of the various toxins they
are leaking back to nature. A discarded piece of media technology is never just discarded
but part of a wider pattern of circulation that ties the obsolete to recycling centers,
dismantling centres in Asia, markets in Nigeria, and then forth – a whole global political
ecology of unlike sorts where one of the biggest questions is the material toxicity of
our electronic media. Media kills nature as they remain as living deads.

Hence, we believe that media archaeology – the media theoretical stance interested
in forgotten paths and quirky ideas of past media cultures – needs to become more than
political, and articulate its relation to design practices more than conspicuously. Nosotros are non the but
ones that have fabricated that call recently – for example Timothy Druckrey writes:
"The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the institution of oddball paleontologies, of
idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain lineages, the excavation of antique technologies or
images, the account of erratic technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient to
the building of a coherent discursive methodology." [2]

We would want to add that in addition to developing discursive methodologies, we
need to develop methodologies that are theoretically rich as well equally exercise-oriented –
where ontologies of technical media meet upwardly with innovative ideas apropos design
in an ecological context.

As such, the other part of the zombie media call is the work of reappropriation
through circuit bending and hardware hacking methodologies – to extend the media
archaeological likewise as ecosophic interest into pattern bug. By actively repurposing
things considered expressionless – things you discover from your attic, the 2nd mitt market, or
amongst waste – the zombiefication of media is to accost the planned obsolescence of
media technologies which is part of their fabric nature. In reference to contemporary
consumer products, planned obsolescence takes many forms. It is non only an ideology,
or a soapbox, simply more accurately takes identify on a micropolitical level of design:
difficult to replace batteries in personal MP3 audio players, proprietary cables and
chargers that are only manufactured for a short flow of fourth dimension, discontinued customer
support, or plastic enclosures incommunicable to open without breaking them. Whether y'all
can open up things – the famous black boxes of media culture characterized by iPhones
and iPads – is one of the biggest political and ecological questions facing our media
theory and practices too.

As a manifesto, five points of zombie media stand out:
1/ Nosotros oppose the idea of dead media. Although death of media may exist useful equally a tactic to
oppose dialog that only focuses on the newness of media, we believe that media never
dies. Media may disappear in a popular sense, but it never dies: it decays, rots, reforms,
remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. Information technology either stays every bit a rest
in the soil and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated through artistic,
tinkering methodologies.
2/ We oppose planned obsolescence. As one corner stone in the mental environmental of
apportionment of desires, planned obsolescence maintains ecologically unsupportable
death bulldoze that is destroying our milieus of living.
three/ We suggest a depunctualization of media and the opening, agreement and hacking
of curtained or blackboxed systems: whether as consumer products or historical
athenaeum.
4/ We propose media archeology equally an artistic methodology that follows in the traditions
of cribbing, collage and remixing of materials and archives. Media archaeology
has been successful in excavating histories of expressionless media, forgotten ideas, sidekicks and
minor narratives, only at present its time to develop it from a textual method into a material
methodology that takes into account the political economy of contemporary media
culture.
5/ Nosotros suggest that reuse is an important dynamic of contemporary civilization, especially
inside the context of electronic waste material. "If it snaps shut, information technology shall snap open." We agree in
that open and remix culture should be extended to physical artifacts.

andersonlielf1979.blogspot.com

Source: https://jussiparikka.net/2012/09/05/zombie-media-in-leonardo/

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