Animate archaeology: New media and the aesthetics of history

This project addresses the fate of history in the age of information. Beginning from the position that writing enables historical experience, it considers the challenges posed by the massive infrastructural transformation of writing in the wake of the proliferation of information technology. New writing demands a new account of history. Digital information technologies are multi-layered writing systems to which users, even programmers, have only partial access. If, as many philosophers contend, history depends upon the phenomenal encounter with the evidential traces of the past, then the displacement of human perception from digital inscription and the many abstract layers of computer code underlying computational activity radically unsettles the conditions of possibility for history itself. This situation grants credence to the persistent characterization of computers within contemporary theory as anti- or a-historical. It is unacceptable, however, to abandon inquiry into historical experience insofar as it constitutes a core value of humanistic inquiry. At the same time, it is impossible to deny the impact of new media on contemporary life. Confronting this impasse entails the fundamental re-examination of history specific to the digital revolution. Animation provides crucial inroads for revising the media archaeology of historical experience. The significance of animation resides in its capacity to refigure and effectively phenomenalize otherwise unavailable dimensions of computational writing. Animation in new media art thus plays a pivotal role in the elucidation of historical experience. A variety of moving image in new media from William Gibson and John Cayley's kinetic poetry to Cory Arcangel's glitch art and Phil Solomon's experimental cinema provides the catalyst for investigating the changed and changing status of history in concert with digital writing.;Investigating the problem of history in the age of information necessitates an encounter with what philosopher Bernard Stiegler terms, "the deep opacity of contemporary technics." This phrase captures the experiential divide between the scriptural and executable aspects of digital writing. That is, humans do not have access to digital writing in its execution, or runtime. Such a lack of perceptual access to the time-based operation of computational processes leads to the commonplace sensation of computers having "lives of their own," a sensation instantiated by such phenomena as computer viruses or even the autocorrections feature in Microsoft Word. The "life" of information technology refers to its operation in excess of human agency. Contrary to the sub-field of software studies, I argue that our experience of such phenomena may not be accounted for by exhaustively clarifying the mechanistic basis for computational behavior. The "deep opacity" of information technology does not denote a problem of ignorance but rather of articulating human experience in relation to the dynamic operation of information technology. Animation respond to this problem in its capacity to refigure the asymmetrical relation of humans and technology as moving images in a way that captures the processural dynamism of computational writing. Specifically, animation emerges as the privileged term that instantiates what David Wellbery terms the "exteriority of writing," or writing in its material eventhood beyond the presupposition of sense. The power of animation to express the exteriority of computational writing resides at the core of its engagement with the technological specificity of new media and thus for its aesthetic negotiation of the conditions of possibility for history.