Media increasingly screens itself. To extend the understanding of our media-ontic world, we need to observe inside, behind, and through the medium’s surface effects. The trace of a medium, if followed between the poles of immutable representation and unstable mutable symbolic work, becomes of interest as medium in itself. This thesis highlights articulations of ‘trace’ that traverse assemblages of analogue-digital media couched in network culture and asks: How does the trace of a medium survive transversal analogue-digital media assemblage and what qualities of the trace hold potential in thinking about media cultures and practice?
My PhD is complete and available online through the University of Wollongong’s thesis collection
Abstract: Media increasingly screens itself. To extend the understanding of our media-ontic world, we need to observe inside, behind, and through the medium’s surface effects. The trace of a medium, if followed between the poles of immutable representation and unstable mutable symbolic work, becomes of interest as medium in itself. This thesis highlights articulations of ‘trace’ that traverse assemblages of analogue-digital media couched in network culture and asks: How does the trace of a medium survive transversal analogue-digital media assemblage and what qualities of the trace hold potential in thinking about media cultures and practice? The answer presented hererests on the development of a concept of ‘analogue-trace,’ which is a concept built upon a combination of theories in the writings of Walter Benjamin and various authors on media archaeology and cultural techniques, the ‘deconstructionist’ philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Bruno Latour’s ‘circulating reference’ in ActorNetwork Theory. Images and diagrams are addressed as articulations of the trace throughout the thesis. The key focus is how an investigation of ‘analogue-trace’ as cultural technique informs a media archaeology of the analogue-digital converter(A/DC). The A/DC facilitates three main forms of material-symbolic trace and these are analogue-digital affordance, analogue-digital feedback as an interdependence, and signal ‘distortion’ from reproducing ‘nothing.’ Thus, the thesis uses a broad media archaeological method associated with creative practice and critique, suggesting that, as an operator in an analogue-digital assemblage, the trace is a useful pointer helping to ‘make visible’ and unbox the hidden operations of media technologies that are at work inscribing the ‘analogue-trace’.
