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We seek proposals for a small number of original essays to include in
Hands On History (eds. John Ellis and Nick Hall), an edited collection
focusing on practical and embodied approaches to the history of media
technology.

The collection explores the relevance of the new methodology of hands on
history to the study of media. Forging links between the diverse fields
of media studies, history of technology, and media archaeology, this
collection brings together current practices in museums and academic
research into hands on history in the fields of image-based media. These
range across:

- computer games,
- photographic history,
- television and film,
- professional and domestic practices,
- industrial production,
- leisure activities.

We seek proposals for essays of between 5,500 and 6,500 words in length.
They may be on any subject which relates to "hands on" research or
practice around the image-based media, broadly defined. The editors will
be very happy to discuss and develop proposals in advance of submission.

The collection is under contract with Routledge and will be delivered to
the publisher in 2018.

Please send enquiries or a short (approx. 200 words) proposal, along
with a CV or resumé, to
[nick.hall@rhul.ac.uk](mailto:nick.hall@rhul.ac.uk){target="_blank"} no
later than **10 July 2017**. The deadline for submission of accepted
proposals will be 13 November 2017.


We seek proposals for a small number of original essays to include in Hands On History (eds. John Ellis and Nick Hall), an edited collection focusing on practical and embodied approaches to the history of media technology. The collection explores the relevance of the new methodology of hands on history to the study of media.

Call for proposals: Hands On History (ed. collection seeking a few additional essays), Deadline: July 10, 2017

John Ellis

The theory/practice 'divide' has long bedeviled media studies. But this
divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field.
Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of
audiovisual media have been able to suppress: questions of the body, of
the haptic, of physical engagement, of technologies and their
complicated relationship with the humans who use them... or are used by
them. The subaltern senses of touch and sound can no longer be neglected
in the digital age as they tended to be in more visually-centred times.
After all, the very term 'digital' refers us to our hands...

[My ADAPT research project, charting the typical means of production
that lie behind thousands of hours of archival
TV,](http://viewjournal.eu/index.php/view/article/view/JETHC077/175) is
based on the proposition that historical media objects cannot be
understood without a knowledge of the circumstances of their production,
including (crucially) the technological arrays which brought them into
being. By reuniting those technologies with their skilled users, we are
participating in a growing movement of researchers and teachers engaged
in 'hands on history'. They are concerned not so much with how things
work, but how we work together with things. This has profound
implications for the practice of theory as well as the theory of
practice.

The ADAPT team have just organized a [three day symposium on the theme
of hands on history](https://handson2016.wordpress.com/abstracts/), with
around 60 participants. We had a timely reminder, that 'hands on' as a
term involves a bias that excludes other kinds of users. In one of the
many demonstrations during the event, Patrick LeMieux showed a game
controller for quadraplegics using a sip and puff device.

![](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=560&height=156&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_92/Patrick%20LeMieux%20-%20Sip%20Puff%20Interface%20-%20with%20game%20screenshot.jpg){.addCaption
.aligncenter loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="560" height="156"}

Keynote speakers emphasized the importance of hands on
approaches. [Annie van den
Oever](http://www.rug.nl/staff/a.m.a.van.den.oever/research) argued that
the audiovisual media become naturalized and transparent precisely to
the extent that they suppress the signs of their production. [Susan
Douglas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Douglas), one of the
doyens of [SHOT (the Society for the History of
Technology)](http://www.susanjdouglas.com/news.php) focused our
attention on the way that the technologies of distance, like radio and
the audiovisual media, can be either telescopes or microscopes,
directing attention to the world outside or to the inner world,
promoting engagement and empathy or self-absorption. For both, attention
to the means of production and their deployment within structures of
power are crucial to revealing the devices that underpin the mediated
world that we inhabit.

In that sentence, I could have used the word 'dispositive' instead of
'device'. This term, which has become commonplace in film studies, is a
transposition (rather than translation) of the French word 'dispositif'.
The word is in routine use in French to mean an apparatus, device or
appliance. You can get all kinds of [dispositifs at your local DIY
store](http://www.weldom.fr/le-vigan/dispositif-hydrosablage-nettoyeur-haute-pression.html).
But the tendency towards abstraction and exoticism in media theory
unhelpfully declared it to be a Term or Concept. It comes with the extra
problem that it sounds a bit like a term for a photographic negative
(for those who can remember what that was). Such theoretical stumblings
in media studies lead us to forget that media are unremittingly
concrete... despite the fact that we are constantly reminded of this
when our classroom internet, computing and projection equipment fail to
work.

So we need hands on approaches, which take many forms and were here
sharing ideas possibly for the first time in the UK. The approach taken
by ADAPT tries [to record and document the skilled
users](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1tyHL_QPD-Awgl71JHdYqA)within
defining structures of broadcast production that have already
disappeared. Equally, there are teachers who give their students access
to machines to explore how they felt like and how they worked. They and
others are encouraging an approach defined [by Huhtamo as
'thinkering'](http://www.erkkihuhtamo.com/). Some use their encounters
with machines to create a dialogue with those now mute pieces of
equipment to discover not what they used to do, but what they might be
capable of in different hands, hands which have been given different
affordances by the contemporary arrays of mouse and keyboard, swipe and
proximity.

All of these approaches are 'hands on', following theorists [like
Latour](http://www.bruno-latour.fr/) (the hybrid of human and machine as
a new kind of actor in the world), [Steigler (the prosthetic
human)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler), [Kittler and
Ernst](http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1343) (the archaeology of
media) and [Zielinski
(variantology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Zielinski). [Andreas
Fickers,](http://wwwen.uni.lu/recherche/flshase/identites_politiques_societes_espaces_ipse/research_instituts/institut_d_histoire/equipe/andreas_fickers) one
of the pioneers of hands on history, provided a lucid overview of these
perhaps unfamiliar theorists.

Every hands on approach need the physical objects if they are to work.
Car boot sales and junk shops can yield some of them. ADAPT depends on
private collectors who loving restore and maintain the complex
technologies that produced analogue television. Theorists like Kittler
and Ernst accumulated their own collections. You (or your students) can
set about building your own bricolage versions of machines using stuff
you may have at hand. You can resurrect lost practices, perhaps making
anthrotype photos using red cabbages or other organic materials as
Kristof Vranken demonstrated. Several participants like [Lori
Emerson](http://loriemerson.net/), [Stephanie Boluk and Patrick
Lemieux](http://dhi.ucdavis.edu/featured-stories/new-faculty-spotlight-stephanie-boluk-and-patrick-lemieux) are
creating their own collections of original machines in the new wave of
'humanities labs'. (They had a simple tip, by the way: if you want
funding nowadays, use the word 'lab'... and if you want some theory to
put behind this, wait for Emerson's book [co-authored with Jussi
Parikka](http://www.mediahistoryresearch.com/tag/the-lab-book-situated-practices-in-media-studies/)).

But by far the largest assemblages of potential objects are held in
museum collections. Hands on approaches have been pioneered by our
own [Science
Museum](http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/new_galleries/interactive_gallery),
whose research director Tim Boon presented a live video essay. Christian
Hviid Mortensen from the [Media Museum in
Odense](http://museum.odense.dk/en/museums/media-museum), Denmark
explained how their vast collection of video games is exhibited in a
hybrid space that allows visitors to use the machines, and in doing so
the museum documents what they do and how they behave. Citing Ernst's
insight that a media machine that is not performing is simply a piece of
furniture, he explained this new practice which seems, from the evidence
of this conference, to be springing up in many different media museum
contexts.

Participants were able to debate the issues surrounding this practice.
Using machines is not without its problems. Things decay, and in
particular wiring decays. Crucial components like VHS heads are no
longer made, and they decay. Famously, there are now not enough heads
left in the world to play all the VHS tapes left in the world. Things
break and cannot be replaced, like cathode ray tubes. Software also
decays. But sometimes the details inscribed into those decayed objects
is [of crucial research
importance](http://www.thegreatbear.net/audio-tape/hands-on-history/).
Skills decay, though many remarked on the delight of skilled
practitioners who rediscover old interfaces. Even the recent past is out
of reach of recreation. So a sustained approach to hands on history
needs a series of approaches.

The most pragmatic practitioners of the approach adopt the 'use it and
lose it... but document it' approach. They accept that the machinery
they have has a limited lifespan, and that their priority is not to
preserve objects in glass cases, but to use them and record how they
were used. A lot of the evidence generated will be, [like ADAPT's
simulations](http://www.adapttvhistory.org.uk/life-affirming-filming-with-octogenarians-from-bbc-ealing-studios/),
of a non-interview nature. It shows how bodies moulded themselves to
machines, that gestures became habits, the routines that developed...
and that pleasure and joy found expression in all kinds of physical
ways.

Others are interested in emulation. [Fabian
Offert](http://stage.ime.uchicago.edu/people/fabian-offert) proposed a
method of emulation of dying hardware though the use of programmable
logic devices, devices which can be programmed to behave like that
hardware. That reproduces electronic behavior, but not the old machine.
It looks utterly different. [Alex Casper
Cline](http://anglia.academia.edu/AlexCasperCline) explained how the
attempts to reproduce the famous Sinclair ZX Spectrum had no appeal for
its former users until an exact physical replica of the keyboard was
produced, enabling users to behave with the hardware as they used to do.
Then the games "made sense again". It depends, as many speakers
emphasized, on what you think is important. [Koen
Vermeir](http://cnrs.academia.edu/KoenVermeir) offered a rigorous
thought experiment which concentrated minds on this issue: how is it
possible to practice a hands on experiment with technology whose
underlying belief system you do not share. His example was the
technology and techniques of water divining.

The hands on approach offers a new way of approaching media. It provides
invaluable and energizing teaching experiences for students. It
generates fresh research perspectives. It validates experience and
practice as a means of producing grounded theorization. Above all, it
can enable us to avoid the subject/object divide which bedevils much of
western philosophy, and lies behind the irritating theory/practice
divide that is ingrained in our institutional approaches to media
studies.

 

 

 

[**JOHN ELLIS** is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University
of London](http://www.rhul.ac.uk/mediaarts/home.aspx){target="_blank"}. 
He leads [the ADAPT
project](http://www.adapttvhistory.org.uk/){target="_blank"} on the
history of technologies in TV, funded by a €1.6 million grant from the
European Research Council. He is the author of *Documentary: Witness and
Self-revelation* (Routledge 2011), TV FAQ (IB Tauris 2007), *Seeing
Things* (IB Tauris 2000) and *Visible Fictions* (1984). Between 1982 and
1999 he was an independent producer of TV documentaries through Large
Door Productions, working for Channel 4 and BBC. He is chair of
the [British Universities Film & Video
Council ](http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/){target="_blank"}and also oversees the
Royal Holloway team working
on [EUscreen](http://www.euscreen.eu/){target="_blank"}.  [His
publications can be found
HERE](http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/john-ellis%28ea0b732c-c82f-47bf-9d49-8f14fecc12ba%29/publications.html){target="_blank"}.


The theory/practice ‘divide’ has long bedeviled media studies. But this divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field. Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of audiovisual media have been able to suppress: questions of the body, of the haptic, of physical engagement, of technologies and their complicated relationship with the humans who use them… or are used by them.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Call for proposals: Hands On History (ed. collection seeking a few additional essays), Deadline: July 10, 2017

THEORY, PRACTICE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF GETTING YOUR HANDS ON