What is media archaeology, 10 years later

Abstract

Around 2012, one part of my research into media archaeology came to a temporary conclusion – the book What is Media Archaeology? represented one summary of what I saw as the key parameters of this broad field. Yet, I was constantly emphasizing that this was only a temporary summary: there would be a multitude of other stories, histories, or theoretical emphasis that could be written and told. In 2011 we had already published our joint edited book with Erkki Huhtamo – Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications that gathered a range of key writers across different fields: from film studies to new media studies, artists and scholars. Said book provided an early take on the range of approaches and themes that truly populated the field in the early 2000s. That, too, was only a temporary archaeology of media archaeology – itself a fragment ---- but not a fragment as self-imposed limitation or romanticization but a reflection of the way historical knowledge and knowledge formations had been thought at least since new historicism (a key influence to some parts of media archaeology) as well as the sort of “reading through fragments” of the likes of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. “Total systems of knowledge” seemed impossible and undesirable.