Media Archaeology

Italy’s most successful ballet of the late-nineteenth century was Luigi Manzotti and Romualdo Marenco’s _Excelsior_ (1881). Its subject was the technological progress of modern times; its principal characters were allegories of “Civilization” and “Obscurantism,” which featured alongside further nonhuman actors such as the steam engine and manmade electricity.

Yet _Excelsior_’s projected meanings evolved throughout the 19th-century. A marionette production opened in 1884, its emphasis on the accurate reproduction of dance gestures, as well as on the music’s powers to kindle lifelike animation. Other modifications followed in subsequent revivals: at La Scala in 1909, the ballet was updated to incorporate the airplane and cinema, even though faithfulness to Manzotti’s original choreography remained crucial. More significantly, in 1913 the same production was made into a film, billed at the time as a novel experiment in _cine-fono-coreografia_ (this has recently been restored at Rome’s Cineteca Nazionale, with Marenco’s music re-synchronized to the moving image). The film offers a rare glimpse of nineteenth-century ballet in motion, as well as raising new questions about audiovisual interplay and the cultural interpretation of gesture.

My paper traces a twin concern with technological progress and the reproduction of gesture in _Excelsior_’s reception history from its premiere into the early-twentieth century. Drawing above all on writings stemming from Siegfried Kracauer’s canonical essay “The Mass Ornament,” which argued that contemporary dance reflected modern factory conditions along the production line, I argue for a political approach to the analysis of gesture: one that aims to reestablish a persistent link between _Excelsior_’s bodily movements and its technological ideology.

The concept of 'media' can provide an anchor point for developing organizational theories about information and communication technologies, materiality, communication, and organizational change. However, to date, organizational research often takes the meaning of the term media for granted. This article therefore explores various conceptions of media, outlining how such theories can be used for advancing the conception of media in organizational research. Using three ideal-typical branches of conceptions of media, we explore key concerns regarding media in existing literature outside of organizational research. First, the culture and power branch problematizes how cultural practices and power structures are inscribed through media; second, the technology and infrastructure branch emphasizes the inherent 'eigenlogik' of media technology; and third, the process and change branch explores how existing economic and aesthetic conventions in media persist over time. Using organizational media in general and enterprise social media in particular we discuss how each of these three ideal-typical branches offer pathways for organizational research. Specifically we argue for shifting the use of the term media beyond merely describing tools for communication as media theories offer insights for understanding the long-term consequences of materiality and ontological co-constitution within sociomaterial assemblages.

Algorithmic search is entangled with a positivist ideology biased towards the assumption that neutrality can only be provided when search is performed by computational processes while shielded from human agencies. This article critically examines the ideological nature of algorithmic search, by showing how, between the mid-1970s and late-1980s, long before the birth of algorithmic search by search engines in the 1990s, a transformation from human interfaces to menu interfaces in online search helped encourage and normalise algorithmic ideology at the expense of a more humanistic ideology of search connected to library traditions. Based on a study of a broad corpus of archival materials in which online search appeared as a central object of description and discussion, it argues that the rise of menu interfaces in the 1980s encouraged the positivist nature of algorithmic search by decoupling a democratic service function at the front-end from the editorial function in the back-end, and by discouraging the use of human selection power and intellectual labour in the search process.

Through an archaeogaming framing and an objectinventory method, the purposes and meanings of video game bathrooms are put forward with a framework. The framework assesses each video game bathroom based on its immersive qualities, ludic affordances, and ideological commentary. By analyzing games and establishing the framework, this article addresses how designers employ these affordances to use bathrooms as representative spaces. While bathrooms in video games contribute to a sense of place through environmental storytelling, they also represent situated perspectives on privacy, cleanliness, dirt, gender, and other ideological concepts. This article places video game bathrooms in a larger history of bathroom representations in media. However, unlike other media, video games enable players to view themselves in different bodies within bathrooms, engage in potentially taboo behavior, and interrupt conservative or traditional understandings of bathroom use. This enables designers to take spaces that are political, in some cases even dangerous and antagonistic, and make them playful.

English: Street lighting forms the densest existing urban infrastructure, which is why it is considered a core element of future smart cities. Against this background, the article discusses the ‘becoming media’ of the streetlamp that today illuminates urban flows of all sorts. Based on a historical overview, I argue that street lighting facilitated the circulation of goods, people, and money in the modern city by becoming static infrastructure. In the physical asset of the streetlamp, urban infrastructures of traffic management, communication, market and governance overlap. However, its constitutive contribution to these processes is rendered anesthetic by its primary function of providing light. Previous cultural studies research has thus often treated the streetlight as an ensemble consisting only of visible lamp and invisible gas or electricity network. The lampposts connecting these two elements and their specific affordances were largely ignored. However, for the urban internet of things, the lighting function plays only a subordinate role compared to the numerous sensors, antennas and other devices mounted on these masts. The article closes with a small case study on the planned introduction of smart lamps in Miami, discussing possible consequences of this ‘becoming media’ of street lighting and the resulting new business models.


Deutsch: Straßenbeleuchtung bildet die dichteste bestehende urbane Infrastruktur, weshalb sie als Kernelement zukünftiger Smart Cities gilt. Vor diesem Hintergrund diskutiert der Artikel das ‚Medien-Werden‘ der Straßenlaterne, die heute alle urbanen Ströme gleichermaßen durchleuchten soll. Ausgehend von einem historischen Überblick wird argumentiert, dass die Straßenbeleuchtung die Zirkulation von Waren, Menschen und Geld dadurch erleichterte, dass sie selbst statisch wurde. In ihr überlappen sich verschiedene urbane Infrastrukturen der Verkehrslenkung, der Kommunikation, des Marktes sowie der Gouvernementalität. Ihre eigene „konstitutive Beteiligung“ an diesen Prozessen tritt jedoch hinter der Primärfunktion des Spendens von Licht zurück. Die bisherige kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung hat die Straßenlaterne daher vornehmlich als technisches Ensemble aus der sichtbaren Lampe und dem unsichtbaren Gas- bzw. Stromnetz behandelt. Die diese beiden Elemente verbindenden Laternenmasten und deren eigene Affordanzen wurden weitgehend ignoriert. Dabei spielt die eigentliche Beleuchtungsfunktion in Zeiten des Internets der Dinge nur noch eine untergeordnete Rolle gegenüber den zahlreichen Sensoren, Antennen und anderen vernetzten Vorrichtungen, die an diesen Masten angebracht werden. Die mit der Straßenlaterne als „analytischem Gehirn des urbanen Lebens“ aufgekommenen neuen Geschäftsmodelle und die sich daraus ergebenden Konsequenzen werden ausblickend kritisch am Beispiel der Stadt Miami diskutiert.

This volume is the product of the WAC-6 session, ''Experience, Modes of Engagement, Archaeology'', which was part of the conference theme, ''Archaeological Theory? Legacies, Burdens, and Futures.'' The following contributions embrace emergent, analog, and paper-based media and move on from the worn observation that these media can be important tools towards active interventions that demonstrate how they affect practice and theory when employed critically and reflexively. This introduction orients the focus of the volume through a discussion and case study that place theoretical emphasis on experiences documented through multimedia. Important questions are raised throughout concerning: archaeology and digital representation, the creation and destruction of archaeological information, authenticity in representations, the construction of archaeologists' identities, and the non-linearity of archaeological practice. The studies in this volume approach archaeology through the lens of experience and multimedia engagement. In doing so they blend or altogether question the traditionally divided realms of theory and practice. Consequently, these contributions work with the interrelated agendas of the present between media ecologies and archaeology, and the changing pace and character of archaeology in the 21st century.

While ‘screen’ is usually considered a word with a Nordic origin, its older and forgotten classical root shows that its semantic field is more curious than media archaeology commonly thinks. Above all, this proves the existence of a long-lasting connection between the screen and the act of seeing, and the very notion of spectacle in its broader sense. Such a different – Latin, Epicurean – etymology of ‘screen’ can put the idea of separation at the heart of the concept of spectacle. From this perspective, the value of a spectacle stems from a vision of difference – the act of spectating being both detached and detaching, as it enables the spectators to take themselves out of the picture, and thus to draw a morale from what they regard as other than themselves. If we bring this understanding of ‘screen’ to the field of film theory, we deal with an idea of experience that has less to do with the notion of engagement adopted by contemporary approaches focusing on affect, emotion, cognition (and neuroscience), and more to do with the disengagement of the spectator from whatever is represented, and even more to do with the added value that such disengagement brings forth.

Relating evidence from the mythological to the contemporary in both historical and media-archaeological registers, this article explores how techniques of sonic generation and representation shuttled between what might be defined as digital and analog domains long before the terms acquired their present meanings—and became locked in a binary opposition—over the latter half of the twentieth century. It proposes that such techniques be conceptualized via the “digital analogy,” a critical strategy that accounts for the nesting of techno-musical configurations. While the scope of digital analogies is expansive, the focus here falls on a particular interface and mode of engagement. The interface is the keyboard; the mode of engagement is the play, both ludic and musical, that the keyboard affords. Operations at the keyboard have been integral to ludic communication and computation as well as to the practices of composition, performance, and improvisation. To map out this genealogy and to show how it continues to inform loci of musical play from sound art to digital games, the article draws on an array of critical and theoretical texts including Friedrich Kittler’s media analyses, Vilém Flusser’s writings on technology, and post-Foucauldian discourses on cultural techniques.

This article traces the impact of popular culture and visual technology on eighteenth-century neoclassicism. It considers the crucial influence of the waxworks on the work of Jacques-Louis David. David was connected to the waxworks through his friendship with Philippe Curtius, Marie Tussaud's uncle and the most renowned impresario of wax entertainments in pre-revolutionary Paris. With its connection to a newly professionalized medicine, the waxen effigy (the most advanced recording technology of the time) provided David with a model of the integrated body and docile subjectivity at a moment when he was turning away from the face as the key locus of expressivity to a 'corporal aesthetic' that emphasized the expressive potential of the body in general. Influenced by a sensationalist epistemology that stressed the formative power of images on the human mind, David believed that these idealized neoclassical simulacra would help to create the 'new man' of the Revolution. Displayed in large outdoor festivals, these icons would function as transparent lessons in virtue that would wean the people from their uncivilized archaic traditions and induct them into revolutionary values and proper behavior. Yet, paradoxically, by introducing the instability of representation so feared by eighteenth-century commentators, his innovations had precisely the opposite effect. Far from demonstrating some sort of mechanistic technological determinism, David's use of media opened the possibility of resistance to the disciplinary agenda of the festivals and facilitated the reinforcement of longstanding popular values.

Media technologies are structuring time and space in crucial ways. Especially the temporal aspect has been of interest lately, which is expressed in a growing commentary on media-related time in terms of speed and acceleration. Taking this discussions as a starting point, I problematize the consequences of temporal structuring by media technologies for civic participation and more specifically protest movements. Drawing on two case studies – the unemployed workers movements of the 1930s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011/2012 – I explore the changing regimes of time that are related to dominant media technologies. The main aim is to disentangle the relationship between temporal regimes suggested by media technologies and their appropriation by protest movements that emerged in major economic crises. Combing archival materials with in-depth interviews I discuss the importance of media practices for the two movements and uncover a shift from mechanical speed to digital immediacy having crucial implications for democracy and civic participation.

By the early 19th century increased optical deceptions, like the phantasmagoria shows that could conjure up ghostly illusions, challenged biological and spiritual vision in novel ways. Ghosts also circulated with unprecedented ubiquity in printed stories of spectral appearances, from Gothic literature to spiritual visions. Within this constellation of developments Joseph Smith’s turn to print media to disseminate his own spectacular vision(s) should be understood as a cultural project to train vision and render it reproducible. The turn to publishing visionary accounts and instructions on avoiding deception coupled late romantic thought with modern practices of observing for early Mormons who were unsure if they could trust their eyes. Through a media archaeological approach to the religion’s initial reading network, this article argues that early Mormon texts taught readers how to properly see, discern, and become vigilant observers as a spiritual and modern necessity.

This article reviews and compares historical approaches to the study of digital media. Its focus is an examination of how biographical methods for the study of media and the research tradition known as media archaeology can be usefully combined as part of a research methodology for the study of media software. After introducing Igor Kopytoff's concept of the cultural biography of things, I assess how some scholars have applied this concept to the study of the domestication of media technologies in everyday life. I argue that such research deploys a particular type of historical construction of the media and its contexts in order to frame its cultural biographies. The following section details how this approach encounters a number of challenges when applied to digital media. In order to address this problem, the latter sections of the article detail how some media archaeological research methods may function as a helpful complement to the initial approach.

Since the rise of radio and television, we have lived in an era defined increasingly by the electronic circulation of images and sounds. But the flood of new computing technologies known as haptic interfaces—which use electricity, vibration, and force feedback to stimulate the sense of touch—are promising to change this situation, offering an alternative way of mediating and experiencing reality.

In Archaeologies of Touch, David Parisi offers the first full history of these increasingly vital technologies, showing how the efforts of scientists and engineers over the past 300 years have gradually remade and redefined our sense of touch. Through lively analyses of electrical machines, videogames, sex toys, sensory substitution systems, robotics, and human-computer interfaces, Parisi shows how the materiality of touch technologies has been shaped by attempts to transform humans into more efficient processors of information.

With haptics becoming ever more central to emerging virtual reality platforms (immersive bodysuits loaded with touch stimulating actuators), wearable computers (haptic messaging systems like the Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine), and smartphones (vibrations that emulate the feel of buttons and onscreen objects), Archaeologies of Touch offers a timely and provocative engagement with the long history of touch technology that helps us confront and question the power relations of giving touch its own set of technical media.

This essay is concerned with a critical but under theorized practice of modern society – official identification. It makes two arguments about modern identification technologies: they develop within an archival problematization of identity, and secondly, they should be critically analyzed as practices of verification. Although the essay is historical in focus these two arguments are intended as an intervention in debates about contemporary practices of identification and surveillance. The essay examines the emergence of the passport in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. The contested development of the conviction that the identity in a passport is in “fact” someone’s identity is the subject of this history of the passport. The passport is used to argue that official identification, as a modern problem was rethought as the collection, classification and circulation of information through new bureaucratic logics of objectivity. The subsequent assemblage of modern identification practices formed what is best understood as a documentary regime of verification that produced identity as a stable object critical to the governing practices of the modern state. The passport as a technology of verification foregrounds that the modern production of this “official identity” through documents is collapsed into a truth claim, which presents that identity as self-evident.

In this chapter, I argue that film profited from an insistent reference to hypnosis. If in early depictions, hypnotists were pointing their fingers at the subject in order to hit him or her with a shot of magnetic fluid, by the early twentieth century, subjects were induced into a hypnotic state as the hypnotist’s hand waved repeatedly in front of the eyes. This new gestural format repeatedly staged by the movies of the same period, was instrumental in mirroring and shaping in imaginary terms the film’s screening conditions and the viewer’s experience. At a moment when a nascent cinema might have been defined in a number of ways, the anachronistic figure of the hypnotist’s hand worked to establish the screen (rather than the film or the projector) as the essential element of an emerging dispositif / assemblage.

Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of " little media " were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of " little media " and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.

The development of new interface technologies involves re-imagining perceptual processes.  Grounded in histories of perception, this paper examines the discursive framing of touch in the advertisements for Nintendo’s Dual Screen portable gaming system, explaining the way that the ads posit the DS as a means of reconnecting with a lost and repressed mode of perception.  In the process of technologizing touch, the ads paradoxically assert a nostalgic memory of a pretechnological sensorium that can be restored using technology.  However, in doing so, the ads displace older models of touch and attempt to redefine what it means to touch.  I argue that the DS ads, in addition to demanding new body habits, call for a reconfiguration of perception that brings it into accord with the limits of the present technology.  A new “touching subject” emerges out of this process; the DS interface serves as sensory armor that allows the subject to touch without feeling, to manipulate without sensation.

A technologically armed peeping Tom, the creeper is the most recent incarnation of the video voyeur of the late 1990's, disseminating and sharing non-consensual sexual photographs via the Internet. Alongside revenge pornography and upskirting, creepshots are a recent and harmful iteration of sexual images that are captured and distributed without consent online. In order to understand the evolution of the creepshot and its current status as a major form of online misogyny, we have to excavate the past, and analyse the technological developments that have enabled this behavior to proliferate today. Whilst we are concerned with the present state of creepshots and online misogyny, we situate these forms of technologically facilitated violence against women against a backdrop of developments in audiovisual media that have altered the gendered regimes of visibility women are entangled in. We therefore conduct a media archeology that examines the technological preconditions for both producing and disseminating creepshots online.

In the prehistory of mobile devices, the hand-fan plays a crucial role. Extending well beyond use as an airconditioning tool, the hand-fan has evolved across centuries and cultures to become a portable screen, a game console, an artistic medium, and an elaborate communication device. Drawing on the scholarly, literary, and art history of hand-fans in North Asian and European contexts, this paper excavates a deep history of hand-fans and connects them to contemporary mobile communication devices. This research develops two key aspects of the hand-fan as a communicative apparatus: first, the fan as an optical image surface to store and transmit information, constituting the earliest portable screen, and second, the fan as a haptic and gestural object from which distinct vernaculars arise. This paper maps a radical new trajectory in how we conceptualise the hand-fan in history and the mobile phone in the present.

Nanna Verhoef considers recent screen-based public art installations that extend from their architectural site into surrounding urban space in order to engage techniques of 'remote sensing', interactivity, and public display. In these installations, Verhoef identies a genre of artwork that aims to raise awareness of urban social issues by visualizing and making 'present' otherwise invisible crises relating to the meeting of the social and the environmental. These installations compel one to look past the surface of the screen to its surrounding situation. Verhoef thus reorients cinematic concepts of the dispositif towards a broader spectatorial territory, which she identies by its building-scaled interfaces that reach beyond their location to remake, create, and inuence the physical context by sensibly linking it to other, more distant spaces.

In the emerging 'video-first world' of the last decade, global fashion brands have made the moving image an integral component of their digital marketing strategies. As a result, both the industry and popular perceptions of fashion film have been increasingly colonized by the notions of branding and promotion. Recent scholarship on fashion film too has put the fashion brand at the centre of analysis. This article argues against any such premature fixing of fashion film's identity. Instead, it proposes shifting the existing perspective by reframing fashion film as not only a product of the fashion industry and associated media but also one of the cinema industry and culture. Drawing on media archaeological models of 'excavation' and 'parallax historiography', the article examines contemporary digital fashion film in parallel with fashion film of the early 20th century-a juxtaposition that helps to recapture the phenomenon's remarkable diversity and open possibility in both periods.

Amid the many forms of aerial display presented during San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 – barnstorming demonstrations, giant relief maps, printed bird’s eye guides, and many others – one stood above the others in prestige and demand. Designed by the future engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, Joseph Strauss, the ‘Aeroscope’ was a curious machine, occupying a position somewhere between a tethered balloon, a movie theater, and an industrial crane. The Aeroscope offered fairgoers an aerial panorama of the exposition grounds, and functions as an axial point with which to survey the debate over the place of aerial vision. Although the objectives and effects of this device were, to its ultimate detriment, diverse, what was most widely commented upon was its unique helical arc, which perpetually shifted the rider’s perspective and distance from the subjects of the view, and further toyed with any appreciable scale markers. The Aeroscope, arguably a centering monument of the exhibition, promised cartographic information, but delivered instead an interpretive dizziness.

T HE following essay explores how Charles Dickens's approach to representing history in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his historical novel of the French Revolution, is influenced by the Phantasmagoria and other related nineteenth-century optical technologies. The Phantasmagoria was an optical ghost show popularized in Paris in the 1790s by the Belgian physicist-turned-showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson. 1 In a darkened room, images of ghosts and other frightening creatures were projected onto a screen by a projectionist operating a hidden magic lantern. By mounting the lantern on rollers, so that it could roll toward and away from the screen, spectral forms seemed to surge into the audience. Trick slides created the visual effect of projected forms in a state of perpetual transformation. While it advertised "apparitions of Specters, Ghosts and Revenants, such as have appeared in all times, in all places and to all people," 2 Robertson's Phantasmagoria also regularly projected images of revolutionary figures such as Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. Tom Gunning, Terry Castle, and Max Milner have read the Phantasmagoria as a drama of perception that plays out the dialecti-cal relation between Enlightenment rationality and superstition. 3 As the choice to exhibit slides of revolutionaries makes clear, Robertson's Phantasmagoria also played out a historical drama for its audiences. Robertson exploited the affective charge of the recent history of the French Revolution to create an aura of terror. At the same time, the Phantasmagoria's rendering of this history through ghosts and optical tricks commented on the uncanny nature of historical memory and experience. I argue that Dickens's approach to historical fiction in A Tale of Two Cities is informed by the Phantasmagoria's medium-specific effects and its association with history and historical memory. A Tale of Two Cities has never fit comfortably within the paradigm of the nineteenth-century historical novel first developed by Georg Lukács and more Amanda Shubert is an associate lecturer and research associate in the Departments of English and Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book-in-progress explores the relationship between realist fiction and precinematic optical media in Victorian culture.

The book’s body emerges as a topos in narrative fictions at the interface of print and digital cultures. These fictions may or may not be born digital, but they insist on being engaged in print, which, in turn, reinstates the relationship of printed books with the bodies of readers who physically hold them and turn their pages. Depending on the manner in which such reconfigurations of the textual form inflect the reader’s
overall narrative experience, these narrative fictions risk coming
across as gimmicky, fetishizing an older media object, or end up being successful examinations of the affordances of the book’s body in the face of emerging media technologies. In this article, after briefly enumerating narrative fictions that experiment with the book’s body and outlining the scholarly attempts to study them, I use the rhetorical approach, which understands narratives as acts of purposive communication
from authors to readers, to analyze Chris Ware’s graphic novel, Building Stories (2012). Ware’s experimental and unique “book” is made up of fourteen printed documents, ranging from booklets to broadsheets, enclosed in a box. The novel-in- fragments follows the overlapping lives of several characters who once lived on the different floors of a multistoried
brownstone apartment in Chicago. The different documents
cannot be satisfactorily arranged to establish any singular narrative order. Thus, Ware’s graphic novel presents itself as a prominent candidate among fictions that subvert the conventional relation of the book’s body with narrative discourse. In comparison with the theoretical models used to examine such experimental books thus far, the concept of  progression from the rhetorical approach, as I will show, attends more thoroughly to the resulting narrative form. Additionally, while former analyses of Ware’s graphic novels argue that architecture remains fundamental to his narrative design, my study asserts the centrality of “body” as a structuring analogy. I chart the manner in which Building  Stories’ narrative progression enlists interpretive and aesthetic responses for the book’s body through reflections on the human body.

This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that Charles Chesnutt’s two coinciding writerly practices—stenography and fiction—are more than merely coincidental. The connection of writing to stenography and stenography to writing, far from being limited to the singular professional development of Chesnutt (the first major black American novelist), reflects some of the shared anxieties and contradictions of the racial and literary imaginations of the nineteenth century. Stenography, as a writing system that claims to record and preserve the inflections of human speech, and literary realism, a form of writing that claims to register the vicissitudes of human experience, both participate in a form of mimesis that was, by the end of the nineteenth century, the primary site of critical discord surrounding American fiction.

However, that discord was not only literary. Rather, debates about the role of mimesis in literary production, while they found their mute brother in the technology of stenography, also shaded into debates about the nature of imitativeness and, more specifically, whether or not imitativeness was an epistemic quality rooted in race.

In this introduction, we argue for an expanded focus in mobile media and communication studies (MMCS) that accounts for the many types of mobile media that affect our lives. We begin by pointing out that mobile phone/smartphone research has dominated MMCS as a field. That focus makes sense, but it runs the risk of MMCS essentially turning into "smartphone studies," which we argue would limit our impact. To make that case, we identify a few examples of the types of oft-ignored technologies that could add to the depth and breadth of MMCS research (e.g., RFID [radio frequency identification] tags, the Walkman, barcodes). We then summarize the articles in this special issue to categorize the breadth of this research, which ranges from analyses of mobile fans to autonomous cars to mobile infrastructure. Keywords drones, infrastructure, media archaeology, media history, RFID For a relatively new field, mobile media and communication studies (MMCS) has a rich, interesting history. A major part of that history involves the creation of this journal in 2013, which helped solidify MMCS as a subfield distinct from other media and communication subfields. But MMCS developed in other ways as well, with Campbell (2018) tracing that trajectory through the analysis of a multidisciplinary set of publications along two primary axes: spatiality and sociality. While the sources Campbell analyzed were diverse in terms of authors, methodological approaches, and journals and book publishers, one thing stood out to us when reading his analysis: The vast majority of MMCS research focuses on the mobile phone. That focus makes sense. The mobile

Chapter VII
This chapter discusses the way that new video game interfaces such as those employed by Guitar  Hero™, Dance Dance Revolution, and the Nintendo Wii™ are being used to invoke the whole body as a participant in the game text. As such, new video games involve more than cognitive education; they impart a set of body habits to the player. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s concept of “bodily technique,” I  propose a new vocabulary for understanding these devices, referring to them as bodily interfaces. Next, I discuss three aspects of bodily interfaces: mode of capture, haptics, and button remapping. In order to help educators take advantage of these developments, I conclude by pointing to theoretical literature on the relationship between the physical and mental aspects of the learning process that may be useful in rethinking electronic games."

This article seeks to analyse the Parque del Pasatiempo (Pastime Park) complex (1893–1914) located in the city of Betanzos, in north-western Spain. As an architectural and sculptural complex, the space provides an interesting case for studying the cultural history of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the emergence of museum and recreational complexes. The aim is to contextualise the Park’s specificity in light of the colonial dynamics of the north of Spain, and also, through visual studies literature, establish the connection between the complex and an entire range of practices and artefacts that existed, both in Spain and internationally, at the end of the 19th century, such as world expositions, public parks and amusement parks. Through this constellation of meaning, we shall try to understand how these exhibitionary complexes have a place within the tensions inherent in enlightened dialectics, between discipline and instruction and the release of bodies.

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops, nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives. While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier’s cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative self-contradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

Anna Sten was a Russian émigré star who, thanks in great part to an aggressive promo- tional campaign, became a household name for the four years she was contracted to Sam- uel Goldwyn during the 1930s, only to fall into obscurity by the end of the decade. This article considers her ethnicity as a significant reason why she failed as a Hollywood star. I do this by means of a textural analysis of the various promotional texts (film stills, glamour portraits, press articles and fan magazine features) that shaped Sten’s cumulative star persona by casting her in relation to contradictory stereotypes of ethnicity. The archived correspondence documents written by Samuel Goldwyn and members of his publicity department are another important source. These are illuminating in terms of the strategies employed by the studio in their marketing of Sten as ‘foreign’. This article builds upon the work of scholars such as Diane Negra, Christian Viviani and Linda Mizejewski on the representation of foreign stars in America during the first decades of the 20th century, as well as Philip Gleason’s work on the assimilationist drive of the era. As the failure of Sten’s ethnicity coded persona during the xenophobic 1930s suggests, during this era Hollywood and American society were apt to conceptualise ethnicity only in relation to a limited number of rigidly defined ethnic types.

Verhoeff has produced one of the most original and imaginative works on early cinema. She offers a witty and insightful approach to the relation between the scholar and the archive and the nature of historical research. While most authors decry the fragmentary nature of our holdings of early film, Verhoeff dives into a profound consideration of the fragment and the nature of historical research.
---Tom Gunning (University of Chicago)

In this ambitious book, Verhoeff argues that early westerns have a unique significance because they emblematize modernity (urbanization, industrialization, mass consumption) and its accompanying anxiety over what has been lost (the “wild,” “uncivilized,” “natural” past). Highly original in its methodology, the book offers a “kaleidoscope” of key concepts or topoi homologous with the “bits and pieces” experience of early 20th-century film exhibition, a method that links our current interest in hypertextual organization with the historicity of visual culture. Indeed, Verhoeff has created a book that bears comparison with Raymond Williams’ Keywords.
---Richard Abel (University of Michigan)

The Salvation Army lecture Soldiers of the Cross (1900) is famous in Australia for incorporating some of the earliest fiction film shot in Australia into an integrated 'feature-length' production. However, it was predominantly a life-model lantern-slide lecture; and a close analysis of the slides in sequence, correlated with contemporaneous reports, indicates that it made significant innovations on nineteenth-century modes of narrative, and deployed different modalities of time and realism into a highly affective whole. Soldiers of the Cross was therefore an even more important event in Australia's media history than has been perceived hitherto.

En una de les sales més famoses del Neues Museum de Berlín s’exposa ininterrompudament des de 2009 el bust de Nefertiti que un equip d’arqueòlegs alemanys va trobar a Egipte el 1912. La peça va arribar a la capital alemanya fruit d’un dels nomborosos espolis que es van portar a terme els últims anys del segle xix i principis del xx, i que van donar contingut als museus occidentals de la modernitat. Actualment, la sala on es troba l’escultura de Neftertiti té unes normes que limiten l’entrada d’espectadors i prohibeixen l’ús de càmeres fotogràfiques i de vídeo. La vigència dels patrons normatius que marquen aquesta mena de museus es va posar en dubte quan l’octubre de 2015 els artistes Nora Al-Badri i Jan Nikolai Nelles van piratejar l’escultura de Nefertiti: la van escanejar, en van elaborar un model digital 3D i el van publicar a internet en domini públic. Així, l’escultura ha adquirit el potencial de ser reproduïda, reinterpretada, transformada, recontextualitzada i resignificada.

En aquest estudi descrivim el projecte d’Al-Badri i Nelles, anomenat Nefertiti Hack, i ens hi basem per a analitzar la figura dels autors del projecte com a arqueòlegs del museu del segle xix i traductors del bust de Nefertiti. Els artistes han traslladat la peça d’un format a un altre, actuant com a potenciadors de futures resignificacions, i han emprat aquesta traducció per a efectuar una revisió des de la crítica postcolonial de les narratives sobre les quals s’ha construït el museu vuitcentista.