Hacking this assignment

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Hacking This Assignment

Through critical engagements with dead media artifacts, some of the dossiers on this site ended up questioning the definitions implicit in the assignment, which was to engage with a piece of dead media, or a dead media problematic. Perhaps some of the dossiers can qualify as hackings of the assignment insofar as they subverted its formal prohibitions, thereby changing the assignment's outcomes.

The following categories are either implicitly or explicitly deconstructed in the dead media dossiers:

Death: The problem of death, or obsolescence, was rethought in relation to the question of remediation; do media ever die, or are they simply incorporated into new media? The dossier on The Market addresses this question in its suggestion that the market is actually not dead because a kind of market function survives, although it is no longer embodied in a specific place or media technology. The question of death is discussed more explicitly on the pages, Mediatic Etymology, and Where do media go to die?.

History: The problems of death and remediation sometimes come into tension when one attempts to assemble the history of a medium. How should it be determined which facts or artifacts are part of a medium's history? When approaching a new technology from a historical perspective, how might one decide which prior forms of media belong in the same history? This question is implied in the dossier on Political Effigies, which traces the postmortem treatment of the bodies of political figures and the construction of effigies representing them. The dossier suggests that an effigy in one political regime and historical era, is the same medium as an effigy in another political and historical frame.

Media: The boundaries of a medium can be difficult to discern. Can a medium ever include its humans users or its social context? The dossier on the Nansen Passport asks whether the Nansen Passport can be considered dead simply because the context in which it was read has changed.