Overview

In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a self-registering apparatus for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ( black boxes ), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how forensic media work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.

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9781322221076

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Reviews

Forensic Media is an innovative work that contributes substantially to the growing body of research in surveillance studies, risk studies, and design studies as they converge in the history of technology and media studies disciplines. Greg Siegel is an elegant and engaging writer, and this book will satisfy technology historians and film and media studies scholars alike. --Lisa Cartwright, author of Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child

Author Information

Greg Siegel is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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