For this year’s inaugural session, the Media Studies Midday Colloquium welcomed Thomas Elsaesser, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Professor Elsaesser presented his essay “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” which draws on the case of cinema to analyze the diverse methodological approaches commonly grouped together under ‘media archaeology’. In the paper, he described the benefits of this approach to doing media history, theory, and practice—its attentiveness to multiple genealogies and marginalized histories, its suspicion of simple causal schemes, and its attempt to unsettle unilinear historical accounts with more complex, recursive models. In the discussion, Professor Elsaesser also emphasized potential challenges for media archaeology—most importantly, the temptation to manage and domesticate the future by casting it as a mere variation of familiar media history, which threatens to foreclose its open-endedness and potential for utopia.
The event drew over thirty participants from a wide spectrum of Cornell departments and units, including Architecture, Art History, Asian Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, German Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Performing and Media Arts, Science and Technology Studies, and Visual Studies. Professor Elsaesser’s visit, which also featured a screening of his documentary essay film The Sun Island at Cornell Cinema in dialogue with film philosopher David LaRocca, was sponsored by Media Studies, Cornell Cinema, Cornell University Library, German Studies, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Society for the Humanities, Institute for German Cultural Studies, and the Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity
The next Media Studies colloquium will take place on October 11, 2019 at 12:00pm in the Uris Library Media Classroom. To receive a copy of the paper and be notified of future events, subscribe to the media studies listhost (media-studies-l-request@cornell.edu).
