A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-230
Author(s):  
Whitney (Whit) Pow

In 1978, queer and transgender programmer Jamie Faye Fenton created the first piece of experimental video glitch art, Digital TV Dinner, using the Bally Astrocade, a home computer and game console of her own design that was, for six months, the cheapest home computer available. Digital TV Dinner stands as a record of computational failure: it was created by Fenton through a pointed misuse of the computer system that caused the screen to dissolve into waves of pixelated glitches. What might it mean to center the glitch as a historically trans mode of media production? And how might we write trans media history as a history of unmediation—that is, a history of undoing mediation? A history of things that cannot be documented, or that evade or dismantle mediation, in which the fullness of trans life and history exceeds the images presented in the screen itself?

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-104
Author(s):  
Friedrich Kittler

Der Vortrag schlägt vor, nicht mehr den Menschen als letzte Referenz und vertrauten Maßstab der Architektur zu setzen, sondern Architekturen als Mediensysteme zu denken. Eine noch ungeschriebene Mediengeschichte der Architektur sollte daher auch und gerade in historischer Absicht nach formalen Entsprechungen zwischen Techniken des Entwerfens und solchen der Bauten suchen, in denen Praxis und Produkt zusammenfallen. </br></br>The paper proposes the consideration of architecture(s) as a media system, instead of imposing man as its ultimate reference and known measure. A media history of architecture – which remains to be written – should therefore search for formal correspondences between techniques of drafting and those of buildings, in which practice and product coincide.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110086
Author(s):  
Siao Yuong Fong

There is a long history of television and film research that highlights the essential roles audiences play in everyday production decisions. Based largely on Western media industries, these studies’ investigations of producer–audience relationships have revolved predominantly around the market concerns of liberal media models. So how do producer–audience relationships work when it comes to illiberal contexts of media production? Using Singapore as a case study, this article argues that existing approaches to producer–audience relations largely based on liberal media industries like Hollywood are insufficient for thinking through audience power in everyday media production in illiberal contexts. Drawing on insights from affect theory, I examine the materials gathered during an immersive ethnography of the writing process of a Singaporean television drama and propose conceptualizing audiences as an ‘affective superaddressee’, as a productive way to think about the work that situational audiences do in everyday media production in illiberal contexts.


2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document