The Shards of Zadar: A (meta-)archaeology of cinema

By 'unearthing' artefacts from folded layers of time, media archaeology undermines linear historical discourse: in this regard, this chapter addresses an exemplary art-based project on the origins of cinema that takes the epistemological metaphor of 'excavation' at its word. In 2011, the Canadian artist Henry Jesionka discovers several ancient bronze and glass objects on a Croatian beach, dates the pieces to the first century ce, and identifies them as components of an intricate Graeco-Roman mechanism for the projection of moving images. This rewriting of media history not only illustrates how traits of materiality and contingency interfere with teleological history; it also reflects on industrial capitalism's paradox claims of 'reason' and the ideological presuppositions of progress: Cornelius Castoriadis's notion of a merely simulated Rationality of Capitalism (1997) suggests that traditional narratives of technological invention are invariably organized around a clandestine and insufficiently repressed nucleus of the unforeseen, unpredictable, and irrational. By admitting to a similar element of chance or lost control, Jesionka's Ancient Cinema project and new founding myth of cinema comment on the logic of media archaeology as an expression of late capitalism's waning belief in its own rationale.