Monday 29 March 2010

Sonic Archaeology

A quick heads up on the work of Shintaro Miyazaki, and the Institute for Algorhytmics on sonic archaeology. The work consists of an approach to the operational nature of media technologies especially in terms of their sonification -- how their sonic qualities can be used to understand that specific temporal materiality of digital culture from hard drives to ethernet traffic (hence related to packet sniffing).

Wendy Chun (in her Control and Freedom, p. 17) has briefly defined media archaeology in how it makes a difference to visual culture studies that is more focused on the screen - its interfaces, representations and even content at times. Media archaeology is in its Berlin vein however focused on "the machine" which means all the technical layers that govern and allow for the existence of the screen as a sensual experience for the human. However, what sonic archaeology does is move further away from the visual onwards to the sonic and especially the sonic as a rhythmic and temporal regime.

See (or actually listen) for algoRHYTHMIC noise of our everyday gadgets .

And for an elaboration of their methodology, see here on Sonic Archaeology.

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