Engaging with remains and remainders of media cultures

As new, as current, as now—this is primarily our understanding of technologies and their mediating of our social constructions. But past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements. To trace this haunting, two performance theorists and a media theorist engage in this volume with remains and remainders of media cultures through the lenses of theatre and performance studies and of media archaeology. They address the temporalities and materialities of remain(s), the production of obsolescence in relation to the live body, and considerations of cultural memory as well as of infrastructure and the natural history of media culture.

Rebecca Schneider is professor of theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University. She is the author of Theatre and History, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, and The Explicit Body in Performance.

Jussi Parikka is professor of technological culture and aesthetics at University of Southampton. He is the author of A Slow Contemporary Violence, A Geology of Media (Minnesota, 2015), The Anthrobscene (Minnesota, 2014), What Is Media Archaeology?, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minnesota, 2010), and Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses.

Ioana B. Jucan is an artist and researcher in theatre and performance studies at Brown University. She is the author of Cosmology of Worlds Apart.