Today it is a truism to contend that networks become more useful as they expand.  We even have a phrase for it:  “network effects.” The early history of the telegraph and telephone network in the United States raises questions about this common assertion. In the period before 1900, telegraph and telephone managers had good reason to keep their networks small and to define access narrowly. In his presentation, communications historian Richard R. John explains why telegraph and telephone managers changed their minds, hastening the popularization of the electrical communications networks that have become a hallmark of modernity. To document this transformation, John analyzes a variety of oft-neglected visual materials that includes satirical cartoons, newspaper advertisements, and magazine covers.  His presentation re-envisions from the standpoint of media theory certain themes that he explored in his prize-winning monograph, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

Richard R. John is professor at the Columbia Journalism School at Columbia University, where he teaches the history of communications in Columbia’s Ph. D. program in communications.  He is the author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

Richard R. John presents "Network Effects?" at the "Network Archaeology" conference.

With the rise of the information economy has come the development of an industry devoted to policing that economy. It is a hybrid enterprise, composed of both public institutions like the FBI and private companies marketing protective and detective services. Its primary focus is the defense and extension of intellectual property.  But its scope extends far beyond the upholding of copyrights and patents themselves, and, although it remains largely unknown to the public, this industry has substantially shaped many of the everyday practices that constitute our culture of information. This paper will suggest a first account of how the history of the information defense industry and that of information infrastructures have shaped each other since the Enlightenment.  In doing so, it should throw new light on the nature of the controversies that continue to dog this field today.

In 1992, at the onset of today’s digital networks, publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and science-fiction novelist William Gibson issued their collaborative artist book Agrippa (a book of the dead), whose last pages contained a self-encrypting, “vanishing” poem on a diskette. The poem went viral on the networks. Starting with a look at Agrippa and The Agrippa Files archive site, this talk speculates on the principles of “network archaeology” needed to extend the contemporary approaches of the “history of the book” and “media archaeology” to past and present media (whether print or digital) that behave as networked phenomena. The talk concludes with a presentation of the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) software system being developed on a NEH Digital Humanities Start-up grant (directed by Liu). RoSE models networks of past writers and works on an interactive social-network model.

Alan Liu is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author ofThe Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004) and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008).

Alan Liu presents "Remembering Networks" at the "Network Archaeology" conference.

This talk investigates topologies of publicness in relation to real time networking.  By engaging with H. Sackman’s “A Public Philosophy for Real Time Information Systems” (1968) and other 1960s and 1970s sources, I will firstly engage with then new notions of software and network publics, articulated across a continuum of human and non-human agencies. Indeed, key concerns for such a philosophical inquiry relate to the microtemporalities (Wolfgang Ernst) of computer networks, and the need for temporal synchronization, ordering and negotiation of publicness already on the computer network traffic level.

Secondly, what this media archaeological investigation leads into is a different sort of excavation, and the other pole of the talk: the Weise7-studio exhibition at Transmediale 2012, and how some of the works, including Bengt Sjölén and Gordan Savičić’s Packetbrücke, Sjölén’s Tempest and Julian Oliver’s Transparency Grenade, address levels of network topologies and topographies that often escape attention in discussions of publicness. This involves looking into the public nature of datanetworks through techniques such as data sniffing, data capture as well as ‘geo-hijacking’.

Engaged with the complex network topologies and hacktivist methodologies in exposing such multiple publics, such art projects represent another sort of media archaeology. This one does not go back in time, but goes “under the hood” as critical engineering and addresses the ways in which hacktivist methodologies can create new relations to the public data networks, real time and temporality.

Transparency Grenade Map.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), and author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications (2011).

Jussi Parikka at the "Network Archeology" conference.

The Interstate Commerce Act developed for regulating the railroads has continued to influence the development of the legal framework for all the subsequent network technologies — petroleum pipelines, trucking, civil aviation, and telecommunications, among other technologies. Here metaphors were effective vehicles for the transfer of conceptual frameworks from one technology to another because they were all point-to-point networks for the movement of materials and information from one point to another. We focus on a case where this process of transferring metaphors from one technology to another broke down — the case of radio. The development of broadcasting created what we call a “metaphor vacuum,” as there were no readily available metaphors to think about the new technology. We are interested in understanding how the legal system dealt with the central problematic of the “metaphor vacuum.”  Here, on the one hand, there was a radically new technology for which no clear precedent was available.  On the other hand, the case law could not proceed without a precedent.  One way this tension could be resolved was by taking an established metaphor and stretching it and that was what was done in the case of radio, as the concept of Public Interest Convenience and Necessity (PICON) from the world of railroads was stretched to generate for a framework for regulation of radio.  We examine how this stretching process works.

Harmeet Sawhney is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests focus on how telecommunications networks are envisioned and created.  His research articles appear in Telecommunications Policy; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; Media, Culture, & Society; Info; Prometheus; Entrepreneurship & Regional Development; Communication Monographs; Annual Review of Information Science & Technology; Science Technology & Society; European Journal of Legal Studies, The Information Society and book chapters in edited volumes. He has been visiting faculty at University of Michigan, London School of Economics, and Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, London.  He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Information Society.

Venkata Ratnadeep Suri is a doctoral student in the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. His academic background includes: MA in Mass Communications and Development, University of Hyderabad, India; M.A., Communication, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. His research interests include new communication technologies (ICTs), and the role and use of ICTs in development.

Hyangsun Lee is Research Fellow at Office of Planning and Management, Korea Communications Standards Commission, Seoul, Korea.  She completed her doctoral studies in 2008 at the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. Her prior academic background includes: BA in English Literature & Linguistics, Korea University; MA in Telecommunications, Indiana University. Her research interests focus on technology and law.

Harmeet Sahweny presents at "Network Archaeology."

Even for those writers who may be in overt denial of any digital mediation of their practice, networked services are likely to provide crucial points of reference during the composition of their texts. If this is the case, then terms have literally been agreed. The writer has conceded that he or she is happy both to supply something—typically a large number of search phrases—to various services and then to receive, read, and transact with results produced by algorithms. We may claim that we have a generalized understanding of these algorithms’ behaviors, however the detailed workings of such processes are jealously guarded as proprietary and are considered highly valuable for reasons that may be entirely divorced from or at odds with the intent of the writer’s queries. The underlying transaction is very different from looking up a word in a dictionary.

This paper will address these circumstances and attempt to think through selected consequences for digitally mediated, aesthetically engaged practices of writing.

John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and poetics. Recent and ongoing projects include The Readers Project with Daniel C. Howe, imposition with Giles Perring, riverIsland, and what we will … Information on these and other works may be consulted at http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, where he teaches writing in and for digital media, including electronic writing, and writing for immersive artificial audiovisual environments. Presently Cayley is obsessed, agonistically, by Writing to be Found with=against Google and other similar ‘services.’

John Cayley presents at "Network Archaeology."

What makes a material network a navigable social space? In my contribution, I will try to demonstrate that the relation of built structures and their media of representation forms a fundamental aspect of network histories. As opposed to pre-modelled, planned networks, the history of the London Underground train system is emergent and evolutionary. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, representations of the subterrean lines are mostly cartographic. There hardly is an aesthetic of topological nodes and links to be found, until the unknown draughtsmen Henry C. Beck delivers a revolutionary redesign of the conventional map of London trains. Although there a precursors to the icon of modernity the London Tube Map was about to become, it turns the sheer materiality of the railroads into something new–a concise diagrammatic network with regular meshes, a calm interface to the dynamism of the metropolis.

But what are the historic relations that inscribed themselves in the London Tube Map? I propose a different understanding of the famous diagram which re-explains the contexts of its introduction. Three aspects will be especially important. (1) Beck’s invention owes a lot to the specific perception of the Underground passenger who is an expert of everyday ‘nodality’ (Castells). As Beck himself has put it: “connections are the thing”. (2) The design follows a general approach of London Transport’s publicity director Frank Pick to make the public train system navigable by a unified semiotic and material style. (3) Beck’s London Tube Map must also be understood as a way of synchronizing a mostly asynchronous network. Its spatiality owes a lot to the mostly unknown train timing and recording practices of London Transport: Before the diagram of the map, there exists a multitude of clocks and their diagrams. (4) Without the contemporary political background a complete graphic network would hardly have been imaginable. The year 1933 happens to be the year of an governmental unification of the competing railroad lines of London. What the London Transport Passenger Board (LPTB) is to the citizens, the Tube Map is to the passenger.

Built networks as social spaces unfold in time. Although this is generally true for 18th and 19th century representations of reticular material structures, it becomes *the* prominent feature of 20th century networks in general. An archaeological approach to the materiality of networks has to account for that kind of “becoming network”: Temporality is the key to relationality.

Sebastian Gießmann, Internet Policy Advisor to the Greens in the German Bundestag. Formerly research fellow at the Excellence cluster TOPOI and research assistant at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Monographs: Netze und Netzwerke. Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik 1740 – 1840, Bielefeld 2006. Forthcoming: Die Verbundenheit der Dinge. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Netze und Netzwerke, 2012. Editing: “Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften”, “ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft”.

Sebastian Gießmann presents at "Network Archaeology."

In the introduction to their new media archaeology anthology, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka propose that “[m]edia archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline. When media archaeologists claim that they are ‘excavating’ media-cultural phenomena, the word should be understood in a specific way” (3). In this talk I propose that much can be gained in a study of mediated sites by considering how archaeologists understand excavation, and by productively “confusing” media archaeology and archaeology proper. As I’ve studied relationships among historical media networks and the material spaces of cities, I’ve looked for material evidence of the “older” media systems that laid the foundation for our cities’ contemporary media. Such work has required that I dig both metaphorically and literally into urban terrain. Many archaeologists and urban and architectural historians have wielded shovels before me, and I’ve come to appreciate how much media history has to learn from these fields.

I then present a case study that relies on such a “triangulation” of interdisciplinary methods. Examining New York’s sonic history – particularly its role as a site for radio broadcast and as a space for public address – requires that we understand how radio and sound waves have interacted with, and even shaped, the material city. To excavate the material spaces that made possible these various forms of broadcast, I draw on recent work in sound studies, a field that has informed media and design studies and practice, as well as the humanities and social sciences at large.

Shannon Mattern is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School. Her research and teaching focus on relationships among media, architectural, and urban space. Her book, The New Downtown Library, was supported by the Graham and Mellon foundations and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. She has been awarded a Visiting Scholarship at the Canadian Centre of Architecture and an Innovations in Education Grant from The New School to support her current work on “urban media archaeology.”

Shannon Mattern presents on urban media archaeology at "Network Archaeology."

The Rays, a 1970 videotape by the Raindance Corporation, shows something curious: As the three collaborators record each other, rhythmic waves flow across the screen. In each wave there are bits of recognizable images – cartoon rabbits, glossy spokes models, and news footage. The video camera inadvertently picks up television images broadcast from the tall antennas in the background. Television is all around the artists, not just in their homes, but also on their skin and in the air that they breathe.  The images Ryan plucks from the air and traps on the tape are “his rays” – they belong to him. This is partially true: the airwaves are, technically, public property, but this electric commons was publically owned but practically inaccessible for independent videomakers. Guerrilla Video’s sensational infiltration of cable and broadcast television in the 1970s is largely a myth. The moments that Guerrilla Video appeared on corporate and public television were aberrant moments. The half-inch video that spooled through artists’ cameras in the 1970s was officially unbroadcastable by FCC standards. Contrary to scholarly accounts, it was tape, not television, I argue, which was the important medium for the movement. It was the very materiality of the tape that afforded its radical potential, both aesthetically and politically. Half-inch videotape posed a challenge to the mechanisms of network and cable television in that it allowed for the creation of alternative networks for distribution that were completely outside of corporate and FCC control: guerrilla videomakers drove the tapes around the country, sent them out in the mail, and used illegal pirate stations to transmit them over the air.  Only by actively disrupting, displacing, and replacing the officially sanctioned channels of television distribution could Guerrilla Video become an explicitly political movement as well as an aesthetic one. This guerrilla action depended on the containerized cassette tape and improvised, lo-fi means of getting it to individuals, not to the masses.

Kris Paulsen is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Film, Video, and New Media in the Department of the History of Art and Program in Film Studies at The Ohio State University. Her current research addresses artistic engagements with television and experiments with telepresence. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, “Real Time over Real Space: Telepresence and Contemporary Art,” and has recently begun a new project, “Mass Medium: Artists’ Television 1965 to the Present.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, renowned neurophysiologist, John C. Lilly, received funding from several U.S. government agencies including NASA and the U.S. Navy to conduct experimental research on the feasibility of human communication with dolphins. This paper explores the short-lived human-dolphin communication network that emerged from Lilly’s unorthodox experimental devices and techniques for breaking what he called the “interspecies communication barrier.” The modes of interspecies communication at Lilly’s Communication Research Institute suggest that both “communication” and “network” during this period had an array of competing meanings, some of which drew upon established models of telecommunication and broadcasting while others, like Lilly’s, emerged from fields influenced by cybernetics, such as neural nets, brain modeling, artificial intelligence, psychiatry and biocomputing. The paper analyzes the material and discursive construction of the human-dolphin communication network using Lilly’s designs, published papers, photographs and media coverage. Drawing from Andrew Pickering, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour and John Durham Peters, I argue that Lilly’s techniques and technologies enacted a distinctly cybernetic approach to network-building in which the aim was not to increase transparency in communication or maximize control but rather to produce zones of uncertainty in which new organizations of agency could evolve. Revisiting the human-dolphin network thus troubles the role that is commonly attributed to cybernetics in conventional histories of network media and highlights the often neglected diversity of materials – chemical, acoustic, biological, electronic – in the experimental communication networks of the postwar period.

John Shiga is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Sterne. His current research focuses on sound and subjectivity in interspecies communication research.

John Shiga presents on dolphins, drugs, and circuitry at "Network Archaeology."