Jentery Sayers, "Prototyping Absence, Remaking Old Media"

The Society for the Humanities, Central New York Humanities Corridor, and Cornell University Library present a public lecture by Jentery Sayers, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at University of Victoria.

Prototyping Absence, Remaking Old Media
When conducting archival research, historians of media and technology frequently encounter devices that no longer work or existed only as illustrations, fictions, or one-offs. Rather than studying such uncertainty at a remove, this talk outlines ways to prototype absences in the historical record. It draws from examples of remaking old media to demonstrate how prototyping the past affords unique approaches to examining the contingent relations between matter and meaning, without fetishizing exact reproductions of historical artifacts.