All posts by Darren Wershler

Darren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media & Contemporary Literature, and, with Charles Acland, the co-founder of the Media History Research Centre at the Milieux Institute.

Main Research Questions

– What are the discourse networks that authorize console-modding practices? Who can participate in them and who is excluded? What counts as valuable knowledge and what is dismissed? – What operations and techniques circulate in these networks? To what extent are these techniques borrowed from other discourse networks? How are borrowed techniques adapted? Are any of the relevant techniques sui generis? Which techniques persist and which fade away? Have any circulated outward to other networks? – What kinds of official and unofficial documents do these networks produce? Where do they reside? How public are they? – What sorts of institutions recognize and enable these techniques and practices, and what sorts fail to comprehend their existence? – What sorts of subjects,...

/ June 30, 2020

Media Archaeology 2020

ENGL 603: Media Archaeology January-April 2020 1:15-4:30 Tuesdays 3 credits Darren Wershler (Concordia University) Concordia Department of English course page Course Description What is media archaeology? As Jussi Parikka describes, it is a subfield of media history that scrutinizes contemporary media culture through investigations of past media technologies and creative media practices. Media archaeology takes a special interest in recondite and forgotten apparatuses, practices and inventions. Media Archaeology also encourages opening up and tinkering with the “black boxes” of media technologies, in order to develop a relationship to them that is not based on being a “consumer” or “end user.” At an historical moment when our own media technologies become obsolete with increasing rapidity, the study of residual forms and...

/ July 24, 2019

Forensics: Genesis 2 with original Mega Amp

A brief but interesting teardown of a Sega Genesis model 2 containing one of Ace and Villahed's original Mega Amp boards

/ April 3, 2019

Weeknotes: 22 March 2019

This was a very busy week at the Depot. We have four projects on the go: a database; the Wii-modding project; a new project dealing with Sega Genesis audio mods; and a Super Smash Brothers Melee project.

/ March 23, 2019

Forensics: Genesis 1 component-mod

What makes this Sega Genesis “High Definition Graphics” model 1 unusual is that it has a full set of gold-plated AV jacks added to the rear, for component video (YpBPr) and stereo sound. In this post, we open it up to see what's inside.

/ February 7, 2019

Emulation at the Residual Media Depot

An emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system to behave like another. At the Depot, we're interested in emulation for a variety of reasons.

/ September 2, 2018

The Platformization of Nostalgia

This is how business is done in the age of the Stack. On a global scale, Nintendo is concentrating decades of public interactions with its games and game systems into the narrowest possible channel, in order to shut down cultural practices that they don't like, and to extract maximum profit.

/ August 31, 2018

Forensics: Super Famicom component-mod

A forensic examination of the Depot's Nintendo Super Famicom, which has been modified with the addition of ports for composite video, S-video and component video, while leaving the functionality of Nintendo’s “multi out” connector intact.

/ February 14, 2018

The Video Game Archaeologist

Darren Wershler dusts off old consoles that say a lot about our culture

/ June 8, 2017

Syllabus: Media Archaeology 2017

Materiality, Cultural Technique, Space, Infrastructure

/ May 21, 2017