The Dead Media Notebook (3 page)

I can't do much about it, personally, because I'm booked up to the eyeballs until the end of the millennium. So is my good friend Richard Kadrey, author of the COVERT CULTURE SOURCEBOOK. Both Kadrey and myself, however, recently came to a joint understanding that what we'd really like to see at this cultural conjunction is an entirely new kind of book on media. A media book of the dead.

Plenty of wild wired promises are already being made for all the infant media. What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today's mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media. THE HANDBOOK OF DEAD MEDIA. A naturalist's field guide for the communications paleontologist.

Neither Richard Kadrey nor myself are currently in any position to write this proposed handbook. However, we both feel that our culture truly requires this book: this rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfectbound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book, which is to be brought out, theoretically, eventually, by some really with-it, cutting-edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in seventeen different sections of your local chainstore: Political Affairs, Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies, the coffeetable artbook section, the remainder table -- you know, whatever.

It's a rather rare phenomenon for an established medium to die. If media make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand wildly in their early days and then shrink back to some protective niche as they are challenged by later and more highly evolved competitors. Radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio or movies, video and cable didn't kill broadcast network TV; they just all jostled around seeking a more perfect app.

But some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?

Never heard of any of these? Well, that's the problem. Both Kadrey and I happen to be vague aficionados of this field of study, and yet we both suspect that there must be hundreds of dead media, known to few if any. It would take the combined and formidable scholarly talents of, say, Carolyn "When Old Technologies Were New" Marvin and Ricky "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women" Jay to do this ambitious project genuine justice. Though we haven't asked, we kinda suspect that these two distinguished scholars are even busier than me and Kadrey, who, after all, are just science fiction writers who spend most of our time watching Chinese videos, reading fanzines and making up weird crap.

However. We do have one, possibly crucial, advantage. We have Internet access. If we can somehow convince the current digital media community-at-large that DEAD MEDIA is a worthwhile project, we believe that we may be able to compile a useful public-access net archive on this subject. We plan to begin with the DEAD MEDIA World Wide Web Page, on a site to-be-announced. Move on, perhaps, to alt.dead.media. Compile the Dead Media FAQ. We hope to exploit the considerable strengths of today's cutting-edge media to create a general public- domain homage to the media pioneers of the past.

Here's the deal. Kadrey and I are going to start pooling our notes. We're gonna make those notes freely available to anybody on the Net. If we can get enough net.parties to express interest and pitch in reports, stories, and documentation about dead media, we're willing to take on the hideous burdens of editing and system administration -- no small deal when it comes to this supposedly "free" information.

We both know that authors are supposed to jealously guard really swell ideas like this, but we strongly feel that that just ain't the way to do a project of this sort. A project of this sort is a spiritual quest and an act in the general community interest. Our net heritage belongs to all netkind. If you yourself want to exploit these notes to write the DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK -- sure, it's our "idea," our "intellectual property," but hey, we're cyberpunks, we write for magazines like BOING BOING, we can't be bothered with that crap in this situation. Write the book. Use our notes and everybody's else's. We won't sue you, we promise. Do it. Knock yourself out.

I'll go farther, ladies and gentlemen. To prove the profound commercial potential of this tilt at the windmill, I'll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK. You can even have the title if you want it. Just keep in mind that me and Kadrey (or any combination thereof) reserve the right to do a book of our own on the same topic if you fail to sufficiently scratch our itch. The prospect of "competition" frightens us not at all. It never has, frankly. If there's room for 19,785 "Guide to the Internet" books, there has got to be room for a few useful tomes on dead media.

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won't they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn't this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn't, why doesn't it? It ought to.

Speaking of dead media and mono no aware -- what about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot- messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night's erotic tryst? That was a medium. That medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically advanced cultures on earth. And isn't it dead? What are we doing today that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu, the world's first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how will we learn from our own?

Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she was one of the 20th century's great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we're gonna put brother Man Ray's knock-you-down-and-stomp-you- gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.

Jacqueline testifies: "After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy.... We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap... As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse."

"The telephone was the death of Montparnasse." Mull that Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites. Jacqueline may not grok TCP/IP, but she has been there and done that. I haven't stopped thinking about that remark since I first read it. For whom does the telephone bell toll? It tolls for me and thee -- sooner or later.

Can you help us? We wish you would, and think you ought to.

THE DEAD MEDIA NOTEBOOK

Compiled by Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Tom Jennings

This edition edited by Tom Whitwell

1995-2015

From Bruce Sterling

“A quipu is a collection of cords with knots tied in them. The cords were usually made of cotton, and they were often dyed one or more colors. When held in the hands, a quipu is unimpressive; surely, in our culture, it might be mistaken for a tangled old mop.

“Quipus probably predate the coming to power of the Incas. But under the Incas, they became part of statecraft.

“There are several extremely important properties of quipus. First of all, quipus can be assigned horizontal direction. Quipumakers knew which end was which; we will assume that they start at the looped aends and proceed to the knotted ends. Quipus can also be assigned vertical direction. Pendant cords and top cords are vertically opposite to each other with pendant cords considered to go downward and top cords upward.

“Quipus have levels. Cords attached to the main cord are on one level; theur subsidiaries form a second level. Subsidiaries to these subsidiaries form a third level, and so on. Quipus are made of cords and spaces between cords. Larger or smaller spaces between cords are an intentional part of the overall construction.

“As well as having a particular placement, each cord has a color. Color is fundamental to the symbolic system of the quipu. Basically, the quipumaker designed each quipu using color coding to relate some cords together and to distinguish them from other cords.

“Additional cord colors were created by spinning the colored yarns together. Two solid colors twisted together gives a candy cane effect, two of these twisted together using the opposite twist direction gives a mottled effect, and the two solid colors can be joined so that part of the cord is one color and the rest of it is another color.

“For the most part, cords had knots tied along them and the knots represented numbers. But we are certain that before knots were tied in the cords, the entire blank quipu was prepared. The overall planning and construction of the quipu was done first, including the types of cord connections, the relative placement of cords, the selection of cord colors, and even individual decorative finishings.

“The quipumaker’s recording was nonlinear. A group of strings occupy a space that has no definite orientation; as the quipumaker conmnected strongs to each other, the space became defined by the points where the strings were attached. Essentially then, the quipumaker had to have the ability to conceive and execute a recording in three dimensions with color.”

Source: Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society David Crowley and Paul Heyer, eds. Longman, New York and London, 1991 ISBN 0-8013-0598-5

From Bruce Sterling

“Many of the minstrels were conjurers. These entertainers probably reached their greatest popularity in the fourteenth century, when they were known as tregetours. Some of their tricks were generally attributed to an understanding between the performer and the devil, this view being held by James I.

“Accordingly, the tregetours were frequently classed with magicians, sorcerers and witches. They often travelled about in companies, and it is to be assumed that they carried with them the various contrivances necessary for the performance of tricks which did not depend on the most precious accomplishment of the conjurer, then as today—sleight of hand.

“In ‘The Frankeleyns Tale’ Chaucer descries some of the tricks. Among them were the appearance, in a hall, of water and a barge, a lion, flowers, a vine, a castle of lime and stone—all of which vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared: He also tells how there appeared wild deer, some being slain by arrows and some killed by the hounds.

“Falconers were seen on the bank of a river, where the birds pursued herons and slew them. Knights jousted on a plain. The amazed spectator saw himself dancing with his lady.

“These were undoubtedly magic lantern effects, yet the lantern itself is usually thought to have been invented by Athanasius Kircher in the middle of the seventeenth century. The explanation, however, is that in the fourteenth century there were glass lenses which gave good telescopic and microscopic effects.”

Source: Popular Entertainments Through the Ages by Samuel McKechnie London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd GV 75 M35 MAIN UT library (1937?)

From Patrick Lichty

What is Vectrex?

Vectrex is one of the most inspired video game machines ever produced (but similar things were said about the Edsel and Titanic). Its point of distinction is the fact that it uses vector ‘line’ graphics (as opposed to raster ‘pixel’ graphics). This is the same type of screen used in such arcade classics as Space Wars, Asteroids, Battlezone and Tempest.

“The machine has a 9 x 11 inch black and white screen and comes with a built-in Asteroids clone called Minestorm. The games come with plastic overlays that slide over the screen to cut down on flicker and give some illusion of color. It uses one of the most advanced 8 bit processors, the 68A09 (6809 with 1.5MHz clock speed), and a popular and excellent sound chip, General Instruments AY-3-8192, which can produce a wide range of noises. Also included is a 1.5 inch, self-centering, joystick with 4 buttons on the right. It uses an analog/potentiometer system allowing differing degrees of directional input.

“The machine’s footprint takes up a little less than a square foot on a desk (in fact, it quite resembles a jet black Macintosh SE sans mouse and keyboard), and can be operated easily in that area. The joystick is connected via a springy telephone-like cord and can be folded into the base of the machine for portability. The machine is moderately transportable and very well constructed but, alas, very much extinct.

“It made its debut late in 1982 and was quite scarce by the end of 1984 due to the Great Video Game Depression of ‘82 which forced Milton Bradley (who bought the rights to the Vectrex from General Consumer Electronics (GCE)) to discontinue production due to to poor sales. After this, the rights to the Vectrex and all related materials were returned to the original developers, Smith Engineering. Smith Engineering has graciously condoned the not-for- profit circulation of any duplicatable materials including games and manuals and is happy to see it is still ‘alive’ in certain circles.