Envisioning Feminist Media Archaeology

What does, or could, feminist media archaeology look like? This panel explores the feminist potential of media archaeology through the lenses of artistic practice and art history. Media archaeology’s approach to antiquated technologies and neglected techniques seemingly lost to history is often motivated by a critical scrutiny of the progress narratives that underly mainstream media. Though media archaeology resists dominant media histories and technological determinism, a critique of the gendered and patriarchal dimensions of such progressivist ideologies, as well as of media technologies themselves, has been elusive. If media archaeology has been called a “boy’s club” by one of its foremost practitioners, what happens when we consider artists as media archaeologists, and invite them to gatecrash? How do “new media” artists (working at whichever historical stage) invoke bygone technologies and cultural techniques toward feminist ends, revealing, for instance, marginalized histories and power differentials that saturate everyday media and are perpetuated by their normative uses? This question could open onto obscured pathways within more well-known territory, such as Surrealist notions of the outmoded and avant-garde filmmakers’ engagement with early cinema, as well as emergent practices within the realms of digital media, (post-)internet art, and A.I. that intentionally conjure, or are haunted by, analogue formats, forgotten uses, and dormant techniques. How might art history shed light on media archaeology’s blind spots, and vice versa? The panel invites papers and projects from the fields of contemporary artistic practice, art history, feminist theory, media studies, and other intersecting disciplines.