Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice) [Hardcover]

Siegfried Zielinski (Author), Gloria Custance (Translator), Timothy Druckrey (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0262240491 | ISBN-13: 978-0262240499

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 machines that make this connection: 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Siegfried Zielinski has combed the technical history of the media from cave painting to the World Wide Web and arrived at some surprising new insights... A brilliant study on the subtext of European history of technology and science."
— Frank Hartmann, Falter

"Deep Time of the Media is a revealing book that only Siegfried Zielinksi could have written. It is a book that doesn't legitimize our contemporary technological culture as the logical outcome of a long cultural evolution but instead sees media history as a dynamic process shaped by the accident(al) and the imaginative. Zielinski broadens our view by transgressing different time periods and knowledge fields and exploring obscure archives where hermetics and alchemy reveal the genius of misfits and the art of unforeseen events."
—Alex Adriaansens, Director, V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam

"Deep Time of Media is an extraordinary gift. Next to the canonical geniuses of the past, Siegfried Zielinski introduces us to a host of unknown philosophers, visionaries, and inventors who turn out to be great precursors to the world of modern media. His book will not only encourage the revision of received wisdom in the history of ideas and of science, but also inspire the geniuses of the future."
—Zbig Rybczynski, filmmaker

"Zielinski breaks with the continuity of conventional genealogies and refuses to become involved in the facile enterprise of relating contemporary media technology to historic forerunners. Instead, Zielinksi seeks new bearings on the present in the curiosity cabinet of media history."
—Mirko Tobias Shäefer, Institute of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 389 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (January 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262240491
• ISBN-13: 978-0262240499
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,382,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Impressionistic historical ramble among technological dreamers, January 11, 2009

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A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice) (Paperback)

Back when I was an undergrad I use to like to visit my university's design school and visual studies department, for their unique mix of intriguing ideas and stylish, vague 'balderdash' (to put it politely, if quaintly). This book reminded me of those days, since it combines some intriguing ideas with a good mix of stylish vagueness.

The author (SZ) introduces the reader to a variety of visionaries, some of whom will probably be unfamiliar (such as J.W. Ritter, A.K. Gastev, and maybe G.B. della Porta), others vaguely familiar (Athanasius Kircher, John Fludd), and others whose names you may know in different contexts (Cesare Lombroso and J.E. Purkinje). His characterization of some these men as contributing to media history is certainly interesting or at least provocative, since that's not usually how one thinks of physiologist Purkinje (whose earliest studies were of phosphene and vascular patterns visible inside one's own eyes) or criminologist Lombroso, for example.

At first blush, it might seem that a natural audience for this book would be people interested in history of science, history of technology or what's called these days "science studies". I certainly came to it with those expectations. And there are occasionally interesting things to learn if you approach the book from this perspective, such as about Joseph Chudy's 1787 optical telegraph, which was run from a piano keyboard and based on the binary system.

However, SZ is a professor of media studies, and has written more for an artistic audience. The book makes no attempt to dive deeply into the science/technology historical literature in the fields it discusses. E.g., although Ch. 6 includes an interesting discussion of 18th and early 19th Century telegraphy, SZ didn't consult relevant monographs like the richly illustrated _The Early History of Data Networks_ by Holzmann & Pehrson (IEEE Computer Society 1995), which is dedicated to that topic. SZ's examples struck me as somewhat random, but that seems to have been his deliberate intention (see Ch. 2, entitled "Fortuitous Finds Instead of Searching in Vain"). It's not always clear which of the "technologies" described or illustrated ever were physically realized, and SZ mentions that some of them seem to have been physically impossible. This too is intentional, since SZ has a "partiality for a magical relationship to things and the relationships between them" (@257). That partiality is one of the more charming features of the book, and underpins some of the more cogent conclusions in the last chapter: namely, that magical and scientific arts operate on different principles; that "magical, scientific and technical praxis do not follow in chronological sequence;" and that the "collision" of these different points of view in creative work can be fruitful (@258-259).

That said, several of the book's other conclusions seem unsatisfyingly particular (e.g., that Internet artists need a day job, discussed in the book's concluding paragraph), at least if you're more accustomed to books that try to nail down some overarching Big Idea by the end. The main text often rambles, and sometimes it's hard to see the point of both the illustrations and accompanying text, such as the discussion of a highly selective "cartography for anarchaeology" in the last chapter. (SZ's publishers at MIT Press might have been disappointed to learn that the Boston area gets onto that map only because of Harvard, @268.) There are many illustrations in the book, yet there are not quite enough. One wishes especially for more from Kahn's 1929 work, _Das Leben der Menschen_, after seeing his wonderful painting showing little men running film projectors inside your brain and a pipe organ in your throat. (Unfortunately, the few Kahn illustrations that are included are no more than briefly discussed in the text.)

My net feeling was that the book had many interesting tidbits, but wasn't coherent enough to be satisfying overall. Had the illustrations been increased to make up roughly half the book, that might have compensated for the rambling and "fortuitous" structure of the argument -- but that's a bit of "magical" thinking. Maybe the intended readership of media artists and academics will make more of this book than I, or maybe some years from now I'll find some half-recalled spark from this book to be illuminating. For that reason, I'm rounding up somewhat in giving it four stars.