Jean Katambayi Mukendi: Toward a Speculative Rather Than Technicist Media Archaeology
August 25, 2025
I have long advocated for an approach to media archaeology that departs from that of Ernst. While inspired by Jussi Parikka, I wish to argue—unlike Parikka’s self-proclaimed allegiance to the Ernstian school—that within the purview of media archaeology, neither technical analysis (à la Ernst) nor performative approaches (like Experimental Media Archaeology) are sufficient to capture the full spectrum of materiality. Even political-economic analysis falls short, for the components and circuits of a device are, in fact, the spatiotemporal products of a far vaster material world—a world that encompasses their "pre-life" in the geological domain¹ and their "afterlife" as zombie media,² as explored by Parikka and Hertz. Such a technocentric method of analysis inevitably excludes the very substances that should be considered integral parts of the spatiotemporal continuum: elements and labor.
Because of this hyperobjective quality, as described by Timothy Morton, the spatiotemporal scale of media is radically vaster than what we as humans can embody. We must therefore deploy a potentially more perilous strategy: that of Responsible Speculation.³ This approach is adopted to activate a concern for "significant otherness"⁵ amidst conditions where archives, memories, and industrial textures are systematically suppressed and rendered opaque by fortified enclaves,⁴ historical colonial violence, and the prevalence of techno-utopianism. This includes attending to the material-spatial conditions of labor migration, exploitation, and alienation in the production of devices; the design and execution of supply chains within global capitalism⁶; the geopolitical discourses and practices of extractivism surrounding planetary resources; and the inherent instability, unruliness, and uncanniness of the non-human objects that are treated as resources. These materialities perpetually resist scaled appropriation. Through my metaphor of "grounding," the social circuit is connected to the machinic circuit. This resistant energy, preserved from its geological origins all the way to the circuit board of the media device, ultimately allows low-tech hackers to attune themselves to its errant flows, thereby countering another form of instability deliberately engineered by capitalism—planned obsolescence—and awakening a critical consciousness.
The artwork Trash TV by Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi offers a schema for understanding this speculative media archaeology. In the artist’s hometown of Lubumbashi, the urban space, topography, and air quality have been shaped by the hyper-extractive gold, lithium, and cobalt mining businesses led by multinational corporations. Yet, in stark contrast to these extractive practices that ultimately serve the global electronics and digital media industries, the region endures chronic poverty. Not only are its people unable to afford cutting-edge electronic products, but they also live in a state of perpetual, large-scale power outages. According to the World Bank, as of 2016, only 14% of the population in the Congo had access to electricity: 42% in urban areas, and a mere 0.4% in rural ones.⁷
If Ernstian media archaeology aims to "open up" the casing that renders technical details invisible, Mukendi seeks to excavate a deeper set of connections. In his old, screenless television set, the circuit boards and electronic components have been reduced to a minimum. In their place is a dense assemblage of old household objects: personal film negatives, painkiller packages, children’s dolls, syringes, magnetic tapes, and paper tubes. These small items, collected locally, compose an auto-ethnographic account of a family’s life in poverty, in which the television, as a luxurious space of domestic entertainment, is embedded with undercurrents of violence and abuse. Other objects—idols, postcards, a world map—point to a spiritual life in crisis, an anxiety born from the poverty and constraints imposed by the extraction of geological resources and laboring bodies.⁸ Still other items—a tape measure, glue, scissors, wires, a spray nozzle—allude to low-wage, precarious temp work, particularly within the locally dominant extractive industry. Specifically, 15–20% of the world’s cobalt comes from artisanal and small-scale mining, upon which large-scale capitalist enterprises are heavily reliant.⁹ In the Congo, this is notoriously manifested in the form of child labor.¹⁰
In sum, with Trash TV, the artist dismantles the television’s functionality as a technical medium—a functionality that, due to global inequality, most locals are denied anyway. He replaces it with a psychogeographical topology. This method, grounded in rigorous field experience, actively connects different temporal scales—thus transcending Ernst’s singular focus on micro-temporality¹¹—with materialities situated at various points along the spatiotemporal chain. In doing so, it re-establishes a defunct medium as a space where critique becomes effective, thereby allowing us to speculate on how media are truly embedded within specific, multi-scalar scenarios.
As I have argued, this work reveals the shortcomings of traditional media archaeology. At the point of technical failure, when the components cannot tell the whole story, and where the spatiotemporal scale far exceeds the medium itself, speculation must intervene to maintain a mode of analysis that possesses the capacity for political intervention.
1. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
2. Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” Leonardo 45, no. 5 (October 2012): 424–30.
3. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
4. Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
5. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
6. Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human Condition,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2 (April 2009): 148–76.
7. World Bank Group, “Increasing Access to Electricity in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Opportunities and Challenges” (report, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018).
8. Arsene Mushagalusa Balasha, “Mining Pollution Fuels Eco-Anxiety Among Farming Communities in the Katangese Copperbelt-Short Communication,” SSRN, February 19, 2024, [https://ssrn.com/abstract=5356982](https://ssrn.com/abstract=5356982).
9. Célestin Banza Lubaba Nkulu et al., “Sustainability of Artisanal Mining of Cobalt in DR Congo,” Nature Sustainability 1, no. 9 (September 2018): 495–504, [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0139-4](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0139-4).
10. Amnesty International, “This Is What We Die For”: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global Trade in Cobalt (London: Amnesty International, 2016).
11. Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 239–55.
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