Testimonial media

Testimonial Media explores the ways in which the recording methods and material histories of magnetic and antecedent media have shaped witness accounts of traumatic events. This exploration suggests that a medium's influence reveals itself in the figure of the mediated witness, or witness subject. Reading the figure of the witness subject will show that explanations of survival are contingent upon aspects and of the recording, preservation, and distribution media used in their construction.;This reading necessitates the contemplation of diverse and ambitious witnessing projects, as well as the study of more speculative media that have been applied to the problem of documenting survival. The most historically significant of those projects and technologies are the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project Ex-Slave Narratives, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Video Testimony, Yale's Genocide Studies Program's Cambodian Genocide Project, Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope, and Vannevar Bush's Memex.;These projects and technologies, and the contemporary incarnations of the mediated witnesses they produced, were enabled by the development of three figural practices: aggregation, association, and interpolation. Combined, these practices describe the development of the dominant modes of address to traumatic events. Each chapter of this study details one of those figures, and the kinds of witnessing it brought into being.