Kalervo A. Sinervo is a PhD candidate in the Humanities program at Concordia University, where he explores questions relating to materiality and differential media. In addition to media theory, he is interested in comics, detective fiction, social, puzzle, and adventure games, and the general debris of pop culture. His approach combines slapdash Actor-Network Theory with haphazard poststructuralism and a smattering of theories from other schools, always looking for the connections that keep objects alive and active.
Authors | Kalervo Sinervo
Articles on Amodern by Kalervo Sinervo
A NETWORK ARCHAEOLOGY OF UNAUTHORIZED COMIC BOOK SCANS
High-quality scanners, cheap storage media, open file formats, peer-to-peer networking and high-bandwidth home connections have all contributed to the unauthorized online availability of magazines and comic books. But what is a scholar to do when confronted with such objects? Is a set of digital comic book scans an “archive” in the traditional sense? How do we study the circulatory practices of comic book scanners when traces of their activities barely exist? And what are the ethics of studying objects that would not exist without copyright infringement, yet are unavailable in most libraries? This paper presents the initial findings of an ongoing research project into the production, circulation and consumption of unauthorized digital comic book scans.