Speculative Fictioning Colloquium

Schedule

Intro: 20min
Reading: 25min
Fictioning: ~60min
Talking & Sharing: 10min

Intro

A workshop focused on fictioning through media archeology. Using different material and techniques, we will try to implement elements of the critical fabulation method through making that goes beyond merely writing text. Lead by Victor and Senka.

What is media archeology?

As Wikipedia states:

"Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called dead media, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_archaeology

References and previous work

• Broadcast of Personal Accounts of Irreplaceable Lace: A 200 year long history of Lost and Found [1]

Interface of the soundboard for the caretakers of week 7

A fictional narrative radio broadcast about archiving as a profession and an attitude, and how materials can preserve and store the past. It was a reflection on how digital archival storage often is not as reliable or stable as we want to think that it is.
The archivist of the past was using the experimental medium of lace, which was more durable but less popular than tape. There was also the presence of a dataclysm, an event which whipped presumably all digital records. So the archivists of the future ended up using pen and paper records as the most reliable ones, and a new "shimmer" technology which stores information on crystals.

Exquisite corpse writing exercise

Reading

Excerpts from Saidiya Hartman's 'Venus in Two Acts' we will read during the session to familiarize ourselves with the method of critical fabulation and the context it was created in.

Excerpt from https://earth-history.com/Sumer/index.htm Gives a brief overview of the development of Sumer writing, and also contextualizes the archive we will work with today, giving insights to "the media" of (Sumerian) clay tablets.

Ancient Sumer

The Sumerians inhabited southern Mesopotamia from 3000-2000 B.C. The origins of the Sumerians is unclear -- what is clear is that Sumerian civilization dominated Mesopotamian law, religion, art, literature and science for nearly seven centuries.

The greatest achievement of Sumerian civilization was their CUNEIFORM ("wedge-shaped") system of writing. Using a reed stylus, they made wedge-shaped impressions on wet clay tablets which were then baked in the sun. Once dried, these tablets were virtually indestructible and the several hundred thousand tablets which have been found tell us a great deal about the Sumerians. Originally, Sumerian writing was pictographic, that is, scribes drew pictures of representations of objects. Each sign represented a word identical in meaning to the object pictured, although pictures could often represent more than the actual object.

The pictographic system proved cumbersome and the characters were gradually simplified and their pictographic nature gave way to conventional signs that represented ideas. For instance, the sign for a star could also be used to mean heaven, sky or god. The next major step in simplification was the development of phonetization in which characters or signs were used to represent sounds. So, the character for water was also used to mean "in," since the Sumerian words for "water" and "in" sounded similar. With a phonetic system, scribes could now represent words for which there were no images (signs), thus making possible the written expression of abstract ideas.

The Sumerians used writing primarily as a form of record keeping. The most common cuneiform tablets record transactions of daily life: tallies of cattle kept by herdsmen for their owners, production figures, lists of taxes, accounts, contracts and other facets of organizational life in the community. Another large category of cuneiform writing included a large number of basic texts which were used for the purpose of teaching future generations of scribes. By 2500 B.C. there were schools built just for his purpose.

I think it is interesting how Hartman's notions of "the violence that produced numbers" seems present in this archive, as "The Sumerians used writing primarily as a form of record keeping".

Excerpt from David Graeber's DEBT: The first 5000 This snippet further elaborates on the Sumerian society through an account of how its economy operated. It is worth to note that this chapter concerned with the origin of money, thus its focus on it, but it resonates well with how the previous excerpt points out the most common purpose of Cuneiform was accounting:

The Sumerian economy was dominated by vast temple and palace complexes. These were often staffed by thousands: priests and officials, craftspeople who worked in their industrial workshops, farmers and shepherds who worked their considerable estates. Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent citystates, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy-one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it's to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen or the 24-hour day.32 The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel's weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 6o minas, corresponding to one portion of barley-on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It's easy to see that " money" in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments.

full book avaiable here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf

Fictioning

• Look at the Sumerian archive
  • This good starting point, where you can read a bit about the clay tablets that the archive refers to, and even has pictures of some of them! >>> https://earth-history.com/Sumer/Clay-tablets.htm
  • At the bottom of the page is a table with links to different texts from the tablets that have been translated.
• If you want read something about it to familiarize yourself
• Pick a medium from what is available to you: clay, pen, paper... Feel free to pick a different one if you prefer it, anything is encouraged.
• Think about the vastness of life what was not captured in this archive, and try to bring it to the foreground with your fictioning