Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance

Deep Time of the Theatre

Nele Wynants

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319995762
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced 'new' media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need tobe preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.

© The Author(s) 2019

Nele Wynants (ed.)Media Archaeology and Intermedial PerformanceAvant-Gardes in Performancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99576-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Media-Archaeological Approaches to Theatre and Performance: An Introduction

Nele Wynants^{1, 2}

(1)

Free University of Brussels (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

(2)

University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

Nele Wynants

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced “new” media. Literally “a place to observe”, the theatron has often been a favoured platform for trying new technologies and scientific objects, including mirrors, electric light, the magic lantern, the théâtrophone, and, more recently, cameras, digital projection devices, and mobile media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers have always been ready to adopt state-of-the-art techniques and technologies, and in doing so they have playfully explored and propagated a knowledge of mechanics, optics, and sound to live audiences. Similarly today, in this digital era, performance and media artists are showing a renewed interest in both old and new media and technologies—by experimenting with these media, they explore the potential and limits of scientific and technological developments. In this way, their performances continue the scientific tradition of experimental inquiry, which has traditionally tended to exploit the potential for spectacle of its experiments. Theatre history thus reflects the history of science, technology, and media.

This volume proposes media-archaeological approaches to contemporary theatre and intermediality. The aim is to trace and revive the histories of intermedial theatre, examine its historical roots in terms of both scientific novelty and spectacle, and, in doing so, historicize prevailing notions of performance and intermediality. Recent studies of intermedial theatre have discussed the ways in which digital technologies refocus, enhance, and/or disrupt established theatrical practice by involving the spectator and playing with narrative and representational conventions (Giannachi 2004; Kattenbelt and Chapple 2006; Bay-Cheng et al. 2010). These authors focus mainly on the integration of analogue and digital technologies into the live context of the theatre and discuss the consequences of this hybridization for the ontology, aesthetic categories, and reception of digital performance (Auslander 1999; Dixon 2007). The growing need for a thorough historicization of contemporary accounts of digital performance and intermediality has only recently been acknowledged (Reilly 2013; Vanhoutte and Bigg 2014; Wynants 2017). This volume proposes media archaeology as a promising but as yet undeveloped approach to intermedial theatre and performance. By examining the interplay between present performances and their archaeological traces, the authors intend to revisit old, and often forgotten, media approaches and technologies in theatre. This archaeological work will be understood not so much as the discovery of the past but more as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need to be preserved, we aim to stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.

Deep Time?

The title of this volume is borrowed from Siegfried Zielinski’s seminal Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. In this book, Zielinski introduced a particular approach to media studies, an approach that came to be known as his “anarchic” form of media archaeology. Characteristic of this approach is Zielinski’s adoption of a geological perspective. The idea of “deep time” is in particular inspired by James Hutton, a Scottish physician, often considered as the “Father of Modern Geology”. Deep time is the concept of geologic time and its measurement by analysing the strata of different rock formations. These strata do not form perfect horizontal layers, as we can see in some of the beautiful illustrations made by Hutton on the basis of his geological fieldwork. Below the horizontal line depicting the Earth’s surface, slate formations plunge into the depths, which refer to much older times. Based on his observations, the Scotsman did not describe the Earth’s evolution as a linear and irreversible process. Instead, in his Theory of the Earth of 1778, its evolution is described as a dynamic cycle of erosion, deposition, consolidation, and uplifting before erosion starts the cycle anew (Zielinski 2006, 4–5).

Zielinski thus draws an analogy between the idea of geological deep time and the evolution of technical media. Both share irregularities, ruptures, and endless variations in their development. The history of media is indeed not the product of a predictable and necessary advance from primitive to complex apparatus, nor does the current state of the art necessarily represent its best possible state. Cinema and television, for instance—the predominant industries of the audio-visual media in the twentieth century—are considered as entr’actes, rather than finished stages, in a longer period of mediated ways of looking. What Zielinki and his fellow media archaeologists attempt is to uncover vibrant moments in the history of media, and in doing so, media archaeology aims to reveal a greater diversity of media forms, which either have been lost because of the genealogical way of looking at things or have been ignored by this view. Zielinski’s ultimate goal is to collect a large body of lost, forgotten, or hitherto invisible media and events, which would constitute a “variantology” of media (2006, 7) that escapes the “monopolization by the predominant media discourse” (1999, 9).

The “deep time” analogy is a good fit for the theatre as well. After all, the history of the theatre is also full of ruptures, irregularities, and dead ends, as well as full of recurrent patterns and mechanisms. Moreover, the histories of theatre and media are closely intertwined, which is why this volume aims to translate these media-archaeological analogies to theatre historiography, theatre practice, and theatre studies. The adoption of technological media is after all not restricted to contemporary performance. Even in early modernity, state-of-the-art developments in science and technology were eagerly integrated into spectacular live shows. Some authors have convincingly argued that the history of media in the theatre can be traced back to Antiquity, where it offered “a try-out space for new experiences, emotions, attitudes, and reflexions” (De Kerckhove 1982, 149). Moreover, the theatre has been an enabling environment at every critical juncture in the history of media and technology (ibid.). This holds true for the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, the invention of perspective and the printing press, but also for the more recent mediatization and digitization of Western culture (Boenisch 2006). Given the close relationship between theatre history and media history, a rereading of contemporary intermedial theatre from a media-archaeological point of view can give rise to illuminating alternative histories. Here then we have the reason why we should historicize the current trends in our contemporary arts and media landscape: not only to find forgotten or dead-end paths in the history of theatre but also, and especially, to gain an improved understanding of our contemporary mediatized culture, where the communication media are omnipresent. Our objective is to look beyond the “new” of new media, because, as Lisa Gitelman has rightly pointed out, all media or methods of mass communication are “always already new” in their original historic moment (2008).

Media Archaeology

The domain of media archaeology is extremely heterogeneous and scholars within this relatively young field use multiple sources and various methods. However, authors such as Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser, and Wolfgang Ernst share Zielinski’s view that the central premise of media archaeology is to posit alternative genealogies for the development of technology over time. They share a suspicion of the dominant teleological narratives of media and technology histories and propose an alternative approach, namely by emphasizing the heuristic capabilities of forgotten or extinct media devices and practices, they can highlight alternative possibilities in contemporary media development. Here we may refer to the media-archaeological dictum, “history is not only the study of the past, but also of the (potential) present and the possible futures” (Strauven 2013, 68).

Notwithstanding the growing number of key media-archaeological publications and several edited collections, the field has not become more defined. On the contrary, as Michael Goddard has rightly pointed out, “each addition to this archive in many ways only increases its complexity” (2014, 1762).¹ Media archaeology does not offer a clear-cut methodology, but is necessarily a “travelling discipline” to use Mieke Bal’s phrase, cited in the introduction to Huhtamo and Parikka’s Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011). Remarkably, the different practitioners of the discipline provide different definitions. Media archaeology is therefore more a range of approaches than a single well-defined method.

As pointed out above, Zielinski’s media anarchaeology or variantology seeks the new in the old to expose what has been neglected or hidden in the dominant media history narratives and in doing so safeguard the “heterogeneity of the arts of image and sound” (2006, 8). Erkki Huhtamo, another key author in the field, who published at length about a number of recurrent practices in media culture, likewise looks back at the past from the perspective of the present, but with a somewhat different take. He focuses on recurring cyclical phenomena that “(re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again and somehow transcend specific historical contexts” (1996, 300). Huhtamo calls this the recurring topoi/topics of media culture. For Huhtamo, the task is “identifying topoi, analysing their trajectories and transformations, and explaining the cultural ‘logics’ that condition their ‘wanderings’ across time and space” (2011, 28). The emphasis on their constructed and ideologically determined nature gives Huhtamo’s approach a culture-critical character. By demonstrating how the past(s) of various media live(s) on in the present, the topos approach helps to detect novelties, innovations, and media-cultural ruptures as well.²

Other authors in the field have developed their own definitions and methods, mainly from the angle of film and media history, and often focusing on early visual media devices foreshadowing the invention of film. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, focuses largely on the past and future of cinema, which he considers to be “firmly embedded in other media practices, other technologies, other social uses” (2016, 25). Jussi Parikka’s emphasis is on techno-hardware. He considers media archaeology as a particular theoretical opening for thinking about material media cultures in a historical perspective, similar to Wolfgang Ernst’s “media materialism”, both associated with the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Ernst polemically argues that media archaeology should be less about writing a narrative human history of media than about excavating the material modes of inscription inherent in technical media such as phonographs (in Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). Nonetheless, the live theatrical context and the performative features of early media shows are often ignored³; a media-archaeological study of intermedial theatre has yet to be published.

Archaeology of Intermedial Theatre

Considered to be more of an approach than a method, the roots of media archaeology can in fact be traced back to authors outside the academic field of media research. Philosophical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, and art historians Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Curtius are recurring references in the development of this domain. Furthermore, the more prominent voices in media studies, such as Marshall McLuhan, are a major influence. McLuhan’s seminal analyses of both the “Gutenberg Galaxy” and electronic media clearly have media-archaeological resonances. All these approaches share a critical deconstruction of historical narratives that represent history as a teleological process. Conversely, these authors propose a contrasting approach, an examination of the past as if in a rear-view mirror and emphasizing the heuristic capabilities of forgotten or extinct media devices and practices for the understanding of today’s media society.

Working within this broad framework, Deep Time of the Theatre brings together essays that approach the object of intermedial performance from a media-archaeological point of view. The aim is not to “apply”—if such might be possible—methods from media archaeolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Media-Archaeological Approaches to Theatre and Performance: An Introduction
• Part I. Stage Scenery and Technology
• Part II. Embodied Technics
• Part III. Expanded Theatre
• Back Matter