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The Aristotelian division into theoria, praxis and poiesis is de- rivative and secondary. History is essentially poiesis, not imita- tive poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals’ doing and representing/saying. This doing and this representing/saying are also instituted historically, at a given moment, as thoughtful doing or as thought in the making. (Cornelis Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 1987, preface)

This concluding section is an attempt at synthesizing my exposé of the relationship between praxis and theoria and media research into a methodological framework for the present dissertation. In the previous sections I discussed theory and practice through their relation to different forms of research, describing the positions of action-, practice-based and finally artistic research. This was fol- lowed by a discussion of knowledge production within media and communication science, where I tried to establish a historically grounded argument for a direct engagement in media practices as part of an expansion of the methodological frameworks in this dis- cipline. At the same time, I’ve been alluding to an integrated ap-

proach which acknowledges poeisis, the aesthetic act of knowledge and cultural production involved in all forms of doing, practical as well as theoretical. The concrete practice-based methodologies as well as the theoretical methodologies which I engage in the case- studies are situated in this poetical, integrated approach rather than being linear cases of “theory first, practice later” or the other way around. The specific methodologies will be dealt with in each case study but I also see fit that I provide the reader with a general outline here which also reflects back on the different perspectives discussed so far in this chapter.

A Practice of Cultural Production

The cases in this dissertation involve practice-based research in the sense that I’ve actively taken part in them as a cultural producer, including curating and artistic work. This is of course not the only way that media research may be considered as practice-based. A more traditional understanding would be that simply engaging in the reception and use of media by different forms of audiences and users is grounded in practice (cf. Couldry, 2008). More in line with my use of the term is the emerging work by researchers such as Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska who include their own artistic practice in their research on new media (2012) or Ann Balsamo who uses her design practice as basis for her research into “design- ing culture” (2011). The difference to the traditional approaches to practice here is in in other words one of agency, as my research is one where the agency of the producer(s) forms the experiential em- pirical data, including my own involvement as a curator and occa- sional artist. Consequently, the form of practice which is predomi- nant throughout this dissertation can be broadly categorised as “cultural production”. I employ this term in three ways, first in a highly pragmatic way, mainly as the practice of conceptualisation and organisation of projects or platforms for cultural expressions. Secondly, cultural production also takes the concrete form of cul- tural expressions such as exhibitions, works of art, films, texts etc. Finally, cultural production can also be seen from a perspective of political economy, as a form of production contingent with con- temporary situations such as the network culture context. In this

broad manner, I regard “cultural production” to be a suitable form of practice to experiment with in the context of media and com- munication research. Media archaeology is the most significant subset of cultural production that will be deployed within this approach.

The cultural production approach of this dissertation is influ- enced by the performative dimension in Thrift’s notion of the cul- tural circuit (2005), for example when thinking about cultural production also as a set of relations between theories and practices. The practices of cultural production that I describe in this disserta- tion, I regard similarly as contingent with concurrent relations of production rather than comprising of any autonomous critical character.⁄ This gives the projects described in the case study chap- ters a necessary historical dimension, which is made explicit in my attempts at contextualising the projects. The practical dimension of these cases, through curating and artistic interventions, are ways of expanding upon that historical reflection in the present, as at- tempts at critically performing the problematic of technological de-

⁄ _{Transversality as a critical research paradigm}

“(…) the praxis of speculative thought, by which I mean the praxis of devicing techniques for thought concerned with building unrealistic or otherwise called hyperstitional – or also fabulation– conditions, able to insert cuts, gaps, break downs in the smooth operational flow of info-knowledge of cybernetic capitalism.”

(Parisi, Luciana, “AtHQ: transversality”, 2008, n.pag.)

For researcher Luciana Parisi, in an essay on transversality and the critique of cultural studies institu- tions, transversality can be a key to construct critical academic disciplines when deployed as a “praxis of speculative thought” (2008). Parisi’s starting point is similar to Nigel Thrift’s notion of the cultural circuit of contemporary capitalism. She discusses how in the present knowledge economy “cultural and creative capital” have become pre-emptive forces that disable critique by incorporating everything. The kind of practice needed to escape this process of capture, for Parisi, is a “minotarian praxis” that does not try to create its own independent, protected and particularised spaces within institutions, but which enacts critique by camouflage and viral logics in existing disciplines. These are transversal practices that do not seek unity but exists only in specific contexts: “one could call them revolutions meaning changing the evolutions of things (…) and the break down or irreversible dis-function of a causal chain of effects.” (2008). The idea of working within chains of development and evolution, changing them by lateral critique that relativises linear causal chains and inserts “un- realistic conditions of thought” can be likened to how media-archaeology is employed as a transver- sal approach in media studies, cultural production and technological development in this disserta- tion. What we can learn from Parisi’s essay is to remember to ask the question that she also poses, that of how to evaluate transversal practices and to sense their finitude, their built-in expiry date that logically stems from their specificity and intervention-based character.

References and further reading: Luciana Parisi, “AtHQ: transversality”, 2008; Thrift, Knowing Capi- talism, 2005.

velopment. In this process, the form of the research, as cultural production, seems close to the practice-based methodologies of ac- tion-research (cf. Winter, 2002) in that it takes place mostly through collective, organisational processes. The goals of my re- search however comes closer to artistic research as there is no in- strumental aim of “improving practice” but rather an engaging in a common poetic making that transversally folds back onto the ini- tial research premises. For Gislén (2004, p.49), discussing design research, practice-based research should not only strive to be re- flective practice with the intention of improving upon one’s own practice, but also seek to influence the practice of others and, per- haps most importantly, contribute to a critical discussion on the discourse as such. In my own research, I see both my own practice and the practice of others as valid “objects” of the research, doing media archaeology by drawing on the practice-based methodolo- gies of artistic research as well as inter-disciplinary close-readings of cultural objects; together forming what I propose as practice- based research through cultural production. In this research ap- proach, two methodological concepts stand out: case studies and cultural analysis. In the way that I am deploying them, both these methods should be seen as integrating theory and practice.

Case Studies and Cultural Analysis

Media, it should be clear, are very particular sites for very par- ticular, importantly social as well as historically and culturally specific experiences of meaning. For this reason, the primary mode of this book is the case study. (Lisa Gitelman, Always Al- ready New, 2005, p. 8.)

Just as in Gitelman’s book, the main part of this dissertation is made up of case studies. If we view cultural production as a term denoting the process of production, the “texts” and the cultural circuit, there is the possibility (and necessity) of applying a host of different methods. For me, cultural analysis in the form of close readings of “texts” or rather objects such as art installations and TV-programs has constituted one way of developing the cases fur-

ther. Cultural analysis in the manner proposed by Mieke Bal (2002, 2003) is suitable to my exploration of the concept of trans- versality in relation to the cases at hand and to my aim of integrat- ing theory and practice. In the cultural analysis of Bal, theory itself is acknowledged as a kind of practice which is thoroughly en- meshed with the doings of culture.

In describing cultural analysis as "a sensitivity to the provisional nature of concepts", Bal strives to direct culture studies away from the idea that culture studies proceeds through stages of ever more elaborate theories of cultural objects, emphasising instead the more pragmatic interdisciplinary testing of concepts that on the one hand are programmatic and delimit a field of study but on the other hand are attentive to how the objects “speak back”, thus re- defining our initial concepts. For Bal, the discussion of concepts is even “an alternative methodological base for ‘cultural studies’ or ‘analysis’” (Bal, 2002, p. 28). This may be comparable to how Gilles Deleuze conceived of having an idea in philosophy, not as a reflection on the pregiven, but as a doing, a making of concepts, serving as active agents in the shaping of the world. (Deleuze in Kaufman 1998, cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). In her under- standing of cultural analysis, Bal reminds us that knowledge itself has a crucial performative dimension as it does not exist only as something “‘out there’, waiting to be appropriated” but as a “learning from the practice of interdisciplinary cultural analysis” (2003, p.39).

As a methodological framework for this kind of knowledge building, Bal proposes the “case study” as a process-based cultural analysis which does not offer systematic explanations but instead unfolds as an exploration of “the possible relations between con- cept and object” (2002, p.10). This is a highly situated approach in that it demonstrates the usefulness of a concept in situ rather than through a final result with claims to objectivity. Two such case studies are explored in this dissertation, in the manner of how cul- tural analysis works with relational “objects” speaking back to the researcher (Bal, 2003), employing transversality as a lead concept, followed by a number of new concepts that I develop along the way such as “reverse-remediation”.

It must be noted, that I modify Bal’s notion of cultural analysis here, as I bring in the fields of practice-based and artistic research, actively influencing the “objects” under analysis and intervening in the research field, letting practices as well as texts work as active and reflective agents, applying and refining transversal concepts of cultural production in and through old and new media. Thus in the case studies, as dealing with different forms of cultural production, I apply an integrated approach to theory and practice. These pro- jects are constructing specific worlds and action spaces within the overall topic of the dissertation and as such they constitute trans- versal media practices that unfold through research and cultural production.

1 _{John Downing’s classic book Radical Media (1984) in its first editions would be a case in point.}

(He later revised his positions to a more nuanced reading with the 2001 edition) Chris Atton’s Alter- native Media (2002) acknowledges the problem but his empirical material in the form of Fanzines is a history of anarchist and left-wing movement media. Even though Atton also discusses the complex- ity of the politics behind his examples, claiming they do not succumb to any clear-cut party political lines.

2 _{One could of course argue that such projects also have a highly political function in representative}

democracies, I’m just going along with the view here that not all community or local media initia- tives should be defined as staking out specific political projects.

3 _{The reference here is to the conference description and transcript edited by Valeska Bührer and}

Andreas Broeckmann (2006).

4 _{This is the approach taken by David Gauntlett and Will Merrin in their calls for a Media Studies}

2.0 (2007; 2008). Following an article on media practice by Nick Couldry (2004) there has also in- deed been a turn towards practice in media studies, albeit not in the sense of practice-based research. For Couldry, practice serves as the key term to reorient media studies towards the social sciences, studying what people do with media. This is a distancing of media studies from literary criticism which is continued in the anthology edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill, Theorising Media and Practice (2010), beginning with an extended version of Couldry’s article and followed by contri- butions from a rich number of media researchers. The only researcher among these to discuss prac- tice-based research, in which the researcher is also involved in the practice, is Cathy Greenhalgh with the contribution “Cinematography and Camera Crew: Practice, Process and Procedure”. This is the very last entry, placed in the chapter on “New Media Production Practices” and seems to represent a very different, insider’s take on the relationship between theory and practice than the rest of the book which is concerned with theorising practice from the outside. Greenhalgh instead adopts a transversal and interventionist view of media practice: “Media practices insert themselves within other practices, entering without permission, incorporating new information, technology and forms at speed.” (p. 309).

5 _{Here I should add that I’m not referring to media research already formulated within the context of}

the computational sciences, architecture and design, where the MIT Media Lab would be a well- known example.

6 _{Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice (1998) is a later work that takes this kind of conversa-}

tional epistemology of practice further and relates it to materiality and performativity. For Pickering, practices, scientific ones included, always involve a performative dimension, likening practice as a performative process to a “dance between human and material agency” (p.51).

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“In a very literal sense, video’s medium is community.” - David Joselit, Feedback, 2007, p. 105.

Picture 4.1. “Bye bye Analogue Television!” Still from Reclaim Sort Skaerm/TV-Hacknight video, tv-tv, 2009. The image is a retransmitted picture of the Danish National Television switch- ing off their analogue transmission. The hostess is waving goodbye to the viewers as a technician gets ready to press the