Literature, Media Histories, and Information Cultures

“Hello there!” Those were the first words that the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf uttered into the microphone when he recorded his voice for the first time on a wire recorder in 1950. But whom did Ekelöf address? Himself? An unknown listener in the future? A ghost in the machine?
By chance “Hello” was also the first thing that Thomas Alva Edison said to the phonograph after inventing it in 1877, and this anthropomorphic gesture reveals something of the ambivalence, fascination, and uncanniness that new technical media evoke in culture and everyday life. They are almost human, but at the same time something else. They are machines that operate both within and beyond the limits of human perception, consciousness, and culture.

This circumstance has fueled my own research in comparative literature, which has traversed a field between literature and the other arts as well as the space between technical media and aesthetics. Most notably I have taken an interest in the avant-garde tradition during the last hundred years and how a technological, but also social and political, modernity has been processed and problematized in this context.
For example: In what way did the possibility of recording voices affect notions of voice, subjectivity, and representation in poetry and novels? How can apparatuses such as photography or phonography offer alternative historiographical or “media archaeological” accounts of the past? To what extent did the early computer and the possibility of storing information as binary code and electric signals affect the textual space of literature during the second half of the 20th century? Or, vice versa, how might the multi-medial interfaces of contemporary computers be studied through earlier aesthetic forms and methods such as collage and visual poetry?
My current research project, Rewinding Things Past, deals, more specifically, with the tape recorder as an “aesthetic technology” – as a material device used by writers and artists to transform the methods and forms of literary expression and as a conceptual tool to re-think and reconfigure such phenomena as voice, memory, identity, and representation.
The historical frame of the project coincides with the heydays of magnetic audiotape (1950s to 1970s), and the material analyzed and discussed consists primarily of literary works (from sound poetry to spy novels), but also art and music that in various ways use voice, writing, and language. Among the issues addressed are the editorial poetics of the tape recorder, technical storage and distribution of voices, the tape recorder as a social medium and as an instrument for surveillance and control.

Image from the BBC archive.

The research group Literature, Media Histories, and Information Cultures aims at exploring similar intersections between literature, art, and the media ecology taking shape during the last century through film, phonography, radio, television, and digital media. The potential field of investigation covers, for example, questions of archives and databases, distribution and transmission, noise and meaning, inter- and trans-medial art, media technologies and cultural memory, media technologies and the history of the senses, bio-media, appropriation and remediation, trans- and post-literacy.
A crucial question to be confronted in this context is how technical media might affect and change the theoretical and methodological thinking about literature and art. To what extent do they invite alternative modes of analyzing and describing aesthetic practices and the past? Do they force out or require other forms of reflection and narration that correspond to their ambiguous position between the human and what is beyond the reach of an anthropocentric culture?
The activity of the group Literature, Media Histories, and Information Cultures will consist of doctoral and senior research projects as well as seminars, workshops, and conferences on the field, to which scholars, writers, and artists are invited. Moreover, a digital archive and working space are planned to be constructed, which will document the activities of the group and the affiliated research network, but also function – hopefully – as a platform for the exploration of methodological and theoretical questions within the humanities. For more information about these activities, see the menu bar.