Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging

media Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...

through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called

dead media ''Dead Media'' is the fourth, and currently final, album by British indie rock band Hefner. It was originally released in 2001 on Too Pure. A reissue was released on 4 July 2011, which included all the tracks from ''The Hefner Brain'' EP, th ...

, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge. The theories and concepts of media archaeology have been primarily elaborated by the scholars and cultural critics

Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser (22 June 1943 – 4 December 2019) was a German film historian and professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was also the writer and director of ''The Sun Island'', a documentary essay film abou ...

Erkki Huhtamo Erkki Huhtamo (born 1958) is a media archaeologist, exhibition curator, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Departments of Design Media Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media. Research Huhtamo was born in He ...

Siegfried Zielinski Siegfried Zielinski (born 1951) is a German media theorist. He held the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts, he is Michel Foucault Professor for Techno-Culture and Media Archaeology a ...

, and

Wolfgang Ernst Wolfgang Hermann Wernher Ernst (born 1956 in Bonn, Germany) is a German lawyer and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford. Life Ernst studied from 1976 to 1980 at the University of Bonn and the Goethe University Frankfurt ...

, taking off from earlier work by

Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...

on the

archaeology of knowledge ''The Archaeology of Knowledge'' (''L’archéologie du savoir,'' 1969) by Michel Foucault is a treatise about the methodology and historiography of the systems of thought (''epistemes'') and of knowledge (''discursive formations'') which follow ...

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...

on the culture of

mass media Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets. Broadcast media transmit information ...

, and film scholars such as C.W. Ceram on the archaeology of cinema. Other writers who have contributed to the discipline's emergence include Eric Kluitenberg,

Anne Friedberg Anne Friedberg was chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. An author, historian and theorist of modern media c ...

Friedrich Kittler Friedrich A. Kittler (June 12, 1943 – October 18, 2011) was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military. Biography Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His fami ...

, and

Jonathan Crary Jonathan Crary is an art critic and essayist, and is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His first notable works were ''Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century'' (1990), and ' ...

. New media theorist

Jussi Parikka Jussi Parikka (born 1976) is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor iDigital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University Denmark. He is also (visiting) Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of ...

defines media archaeology as follows: :Media archaeology exists somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s. I see media archaeology as a theoretically refined analysis of the historical layers of media in their singularity—a conceptual and practical exercise in carving out the aesthetic, cultural, and political singularities of media. And it's much more than paying theoretical attention to the intensive relations between new and old media mediated through concrete and conceptual archives; increasingly, media archaeology is a method for doing media design and art.

References

{{reflist, refs= Natale, Simone. "Understanding Media Archaeology". ''Canadian Journal of Communication'', vol. 37 (2012), pp 523–527

/ref> Parikka, Jussi
"'With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be': An Interview with Zoe Beloff"
Electronic Book Review, 24 October 2011. "CTheory Interview: Archaeologies of Media Art"
Conversation between Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz, ''ctheory.net'', 1 April 2010. Archaeological sub-disciplines Media studies Cultural studies

Further reading

References