Introduction

For this issue of the velvet light trap—the first specifically dedicated to technology in twenty years—we solicited articles that put media technologies squarely at the center of inquiry. The study of technology has been a long-standing and often fruitful concern of film and media studies, but its importance has been especially acute in recent years. Digital technologies have changed how we write scholarship by introducing new methods and tools, but they have also changed what we study by transforming the ways participants produce, share, and consume media. Yet despite the exciting prospects for scholarship on the technological changes of our contemporary moment, there remains much historical work to be done on the ways in which technology has shaped media institutions and practices. There can be no doubt that media technology has contextualized industrial and stylistic change; revealed—and sometimes obscured—sites of cultural negotiation and meaning; and enabled new modes of media production, circulation, and reception. To paraphrase Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery’s Film History: Theory and Practice, media depends on machines.

Too often, however, technology serves our scholarship purely as a “background” for different questions. We tend to approach technological invention, innovation, and diffusion as the cause of—or context for—broader changes rather than situating technology and its contexts as mutually determined. This is useful and often necessary, but it can have unintended consequences. One is the tendency to assume that technological changes will automatically engender concomitant changes in our “real” (and often extratechnological) object of study, when representations and practices that endure despite technological change can offer equally important insight. Similarly, the focus on studying broader trends steers us away from inquiry into failed efforts at technological change, where entrenched structures of cultural or industrial design are tested and made visible. A focus on technology as some pure “agent” of change can ignore how technological advancement is often the direct result of cultural or industrial demands. To invert our paraphrase of Gomery and Allen, machines sometimes depend on media.

Each of the three feature articles presented in this issue offers a fascinating case study of how technological change has historically engendered broader changes in media industries, professional discourses, and production cultures—and vice versa. Using evidence from archival collections, industry trade publications, and practitioner memoranda, the authors convincingly articulate understandings of technology as, above all, a site of negotiation, whether that negotiation is one of commercial dominance, visions of the future, professional identity, or labor.

In “Better Pictures through Chemistry: DuPont and the Fight for the Hollywood Film Stock Market,” Luci Marzola highlights the untold story of the DuPont chemical company’s challenge to Eastman Kodak’s dominance of the market for raw film stock in the 1920s. Marshaling an array of archival documents, Marzola argues that DuPont’s competition with Kodak helped to spur the latter’s investment in panchromatic stock in 1926, encouraging the standardized and widespread adoption of what had been an expensive specialty format. Marzola’s argument is situated within a carefully rearticulated understanding of the relationship between the technology and production sectors of the film industry, one that sees studios as “both consumers of technology and sellers of entertainment.” Her work encourages us to think beyond a conception of “Hollywood” as an isolated, monolithic industry and suggests the potential for scholarly work on other “feeder” industries that supplied the studios’ production inputs, such as camera, lighting, and sound equipment manufacturers.

Steven Malčić advances an intricate and intertwined history of mathematical logic, the discipline of computer science, and intellectual struggles over the ontology of digital networks in “Interentity Communication: The Ontological Imaginary of Early Network Design.” Citing communications among the designers of ARPANET in the 1970s and 1980s, Malčić shows how early network designers conceived of the Internet as an “identity management system.” Malčić argues that this system was, from its beginning, designed to be composed of a largely transitory set of hierarchically and mathematically defined “entities,” including users, machines, addresses, processes, and files. In their conception of a network that would grow well beyond its initial size, the designers productively employed what Malčić calls an “ontological inversion...