ABSTRACT
Via the gonzo spirit of clockpunk, this chapter links Renaissance efforts to orchestrate history by theatrical means to the media environments that curate historical culture in the digital age. The cosplay, hardware hacks, and retro-gizmodification that characterise clockpunk exemplify how the past can serve as a style of experience rather than as a set of events that demand understanding. Yet the automaticity of its workings makes history a set of motions that do not so much carry the player away as carry obsolete routines and processes into the present, rewiring the path from age to age. By examining the retro-technologies central to the Renaissance theatre work of Giulio Camillo, Stephen Gosson, and William Shakespeare, this chapter shows that the clockpunk disposition of history has a long and vibrant practice, continuing into digitally based museum exhibits. Counter to common expectation, digital environments are neither a cure for ephemerality nor a scientific resolution to the uncertainty of historical facts, but bring out as an effect of their own buggy, uncanny, and artificial modes of appearing a sense of the past that stymies linear forms of history-making.
