This symposium, which will be the culmination of Dr. Michael N. Goddard’s visiting fellowship at UBC, will explore the ways that audiovisual and other media can be considered as time machines and to function as media archaeologies of the future. This carries on from Goddard’s previous development of this project resulting in a special issue of MAST journal on Media Arts as Time Machines.
Program of Events
Audiovisual Media as Time Machines or the Media Archaeology of the Future
by Dr. Michael N. Goddard (Goldsmiths, University of London)
2:00-3:00 PM
And then there is the matter of the highly improper manipulation of time. The shameful tricks, the penetration of time’s mechanism from behind, the hazardous fingering of its wicked secrets! Sometimes one feels like banging the table and exclaiming, “Enough of this! Keep off time, time is untouchable, one must not provoke it! Isn’t it enough for you to have space? Space is for human beings, you can swing about in space, turn somersaults, fall down, jump from start to start, but for goodness’ sake, don’t tamper with time!” (Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles, 259).
This talk will explore the ways that audiovisual and other media can be considered as time machines and to function as media archaeologies of the future. In the spirit of the Bruno Schulz citation above, all time-based media work on time in a variety of ways, whether through combining past and present material traces, generating rhythms, flows and durations, or speculating about potential futures. In the case of both cinematic and sound recording technologies, these emerged at the exact same movement of the invention of time travel as a concept, and several scholars have noted the synergies between the two and posited cinema in particular as the original time machine (See Antonio Somaini ed. Time Machines: Cinematic Temporalities. Media archaeologists are well aware of the temporal effects of such phenomena as time axis manipulation facilitated by recording and playback devices, and how ‘media cross each other in time, which is no longer history’. Or in other words, modernity, since the late 19th century at least has been an experience of time being ‘out of joint’ and time-based media technologies have played a key role in facilitating this situation.
This talk will therefore investigate these temporal deformations and alterations generated by a range of time-based media. It will pose the following questions:
- If media technologies are time machines, are they limited to conjugating multiple pasts and presents or, do they also have speculative and futural effects of discerning and hyperstitionally generating alternative futures?
- What archaeologies of the future might be made possible via both analog and digital time based media, as well as speculative fictions in any media?
Speaker Bio
Dr. Michael N. Goddard is Reader in Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He is also a media theorist, especially in the fields of media ecologies and media archaeology, as well as in digital media. In media archaeology, his most significant contribution is the monograph, Guerrilla Networks (2018), the culmination of his media archaeological research to date, which was published by Amsterdam University Press. His previous book, Impossible Cartographies (2013) was on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations (2012) and Resonances (2013). He is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil, and a new research project on genealogies of immersive media and virtuality.
The Media Concept in Ada Lovelace’s ‘Notes to “Sketch of the Analytical Engine.”‘
by Dr. Roger Whitson (Washington State University)
3:00-4:00 PM
Ada Lovelace’s notes to Luigi Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” (1843) constitutes a significant development in the history of what John Guillory calls “the media concept.” Standing in contrast to her mentor Charles Babbage, who saw mediation as that which is in between input and output, Lovelace distinguishes the material operation of the machine from the digital simulation performed by its manipulation of numbers. Her image of computing is a musical composition, in which mathematical processes are seen as various materials and temporalities orchestrated together. I link Lovelace’s work to the “algorhythmics” of Shintaro Miyazaki and the “time-criticality” of Wolfgang Ernst. I also perform a grammatological analysis of her program for computing Bernoulli numbers as a demonstration of how she sees the distinct but orchestrated domains of material and number working together. The Bernoulli program, along with her reflections on the media implications of the Analytical Engine, enabled Lovelace to develop her own media concept decades before the publication of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Speaker Bio
Speaker BioRoger Whitson is an associate professor of English at Washington State University. He is author of William Blake and the Digital Humanities and Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities, as well as several articles on Blake, Charles Babbage, media archaeology, nineteenth-century science, and the digital humanities. He’s currently working on a short volume about time-travel and time criticality; as well as a co-authored monograph exploring deep time and the media concept in nineteenth-century literature and science.
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