Core Post - Waste! A Creative Proposition

The Dead Media Research Lab (Medianatures) is a rabbit hole of ingenuity, obsolescence, and delight. It “proposes creative research into the intelligent repurposing and reuse of [abandoned] devices” and provides as inspiration an expansive archive of past media examples. Keeping its definition of media broad enough to include British postal fraud and Chicago freight tunnels (an entire section called “pigeons pigeons pigeons!”), this taxonomy of dead media claims the offshoots and outgrowths that died on the vine or thrived and were forgotten—creating a vast space in which to imagine so much more from the raw materials now poisoning the global South in huge heaping piles of e-waste.

I mentioned the postal cypher, and another favorite were the Flower Codes, which in the 18th Century used different flora to communicate messages of romance and intrigue, e.g. “Mistletoe - difficulties, I surmount,” “Holly - Am I forgotten,” and “Christmas rose - relieve my anxiety” (I went with a holiday/end-of-semester theme). It’s interesting to think of language itself as medium and/or to question whether it’s the material substrates on which it travels that are the medium. Could the codes, cyphers, phonemes, sounds be those substrates as well?

And how can these media be perverted toward alternative ends, such as allowing the poor to send messages postage free? How do subversive infrastructures always form on or in spite of sanctioned infrastructures? Can the more ethical, queer, kind, ecological ones be scaled up? Or are they necessarily antagonistic to but a barnacle on the extractive, late-capitalist systems? In relation to this week’s theme and the project’s stated aim, how does looking back at this cabinet of media curiosities change how one might relate more creatively to contemporary media before it becomes e-waste?

Fisher Price Pixelvision cameras could be a model for how to work with media before labeling them obsolete, because it shifted its own codes of use in a couple different ways. Marketed as a children’s toy camcorder, it was a dud in that market but was taken up by adult professional film makers. Additionally, it uses audio cassette tapes run at high speed as its recording medium, lending “a distinctively hazy, dream-like quality to almost everything it shoots.” By design it distorts the original purpose of its materials and then its unexpected users found additional ways to take advantage of its shortcomings as affordances, distorting them to their own purposes. What digital objects surrounding us might we imagine doing the same with now?

Also of particular interest, thinking about different kinds of archiving and the impulse to digitize: The data from archeological digs preserves less than the ground itself preserved those objects before they were dug up.