ABSTRACT
Materiality has been among the most widely resounding conceptual refrains in media and cultural studies over the past two decades. While our digital lives and media landscapes ostensibly became more virtual, placeless, and weightless, we – media and cultural scholars, artists, and designers – turned our attention to our gadgets’ guts; to the chemistry, physics, and even geology behind their construction, operation, and disposal; and to the heavy infrastructures undergirding our supposedly ethereal existences. Media archaeology, in particular, by emphasizing the materiality of media – the stuff, the institutions, the infrastructures, the labor practices, the code, the algorithms – has given rise to new, non-teleological modes of historiography that aim to trace media’s peripheral routes and forgotten paths (see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Parikka 2012). Caleb Kelly (2009), Mara Mills (2011), Jentery Sayers (2013), Jacob Smith (2015), Jonathan Sterne (2003), and Siegfried Zielinski (2006) have re-sounded such historical audio artifacts as musical automata and songbirds, hearing tubes, stethoscopes, phonautographs, shellac discs, magnetic recording devices, hearing aids, and audio-cassette tapes.
