“Zombie media addresses the living deads of media culture. As such, it is clearly related to the earlier calls to investigate “dead media” by Bruce Sterling and others: to map the forgotten, out-of-use, obsolete and declared dysfunctional technologies in order to understand better the nature of media cultural development. And yet, we want to point to a further issue when it comes to abandoned media: the amount of discarded electronic media is not only the excavation ground for quirky media archaeological interests, but one of the biggest threats for ecology in terms of the various toxins they are leaking back to nature. A discarded piece of media technology is never just discarded but part of a wider pattern of circulation that ties the obsolete to recycling centers, dismantling centres in Asia, markets in Nigeria, and so forth – a whole global political ecology of different sorts where one of the biggest questions is the material toxicity of our electronic media. Media kills nature as they remain as living deads.”
Hertz, Garnet & Parikka, Jussi. (2011). Five Principles of Zombie Media. Conference: Defunct/Refunct.
Why blogging this? This is probably the core notion of this project, to the point that our interest resides in documenting what one could call “zombie media practices”. Perhaps the “media” angle is less prominent in our project though.