Media Archaeology

I have an article on media, psychosis, and the "influencing machine" in a new anthology edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka.  Below is a description of the book and a full table of contents.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

1. Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology

Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka

Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary

2. Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study

Erkki Huhtamo

3. On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media

Eric Kluitenberg

4. On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine

Jeffrey Sconce

5. Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock

Thomas Elsaesser

Part II: (Inter)facing Media

6. The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern

Machiko Kusahara

7. The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch

Wanda Strauven

8. The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports

Claus Pias

9. The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Part III: Between Analogue and Digital

10. Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation

Paul DeMarinis

11. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media

Wolfgang Ernst

12. Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance

Jussi Parikka

13. Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium

Casey Alt

14. Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

15. Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past

Vivian Sobchack