United States of Eureka
(2025)
author(s): Tolga Theo Yalur
published in: Research Catalogue
There has been an overwhelming mediatization of corruption, pandemics, wars and conflicts for decades going on through the 2000s. When the “Israel-Hamas War” had just begun in the fall of 2023, for instance, the mainstream media was covering it with wordy psycho-politics. Instead, what I suggest in this article is a detour to a centennial relevance for the psychopolitics of Israeli, Turkey, the USA and current global realities. A relevance that was missing in the psychopolitical realities of countries founded in the interwar and post-war world. Comparing two countries of these stages, Israel to Turkey, I think they are similar in regards to the constitution of national identity politics. It is Sigmund Freud’s relevance shrouded in the shadows for a century, which is not merely a relevance of his own. His work is as powerful a founder of psychoanalysis as the foundations of countries like Turkey and Israel.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.