On Technological Taxidermy

Drawing on extensive research to be published in Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (forthcoming, The MIT Press), this paper examines professional audio recording technologies–gear–and heritagization. The paper addresses how gear is heritagized in myriad ways: from its positioning as ‘star objects’1 in exhibitions and museums, through to seminars, trade show displays, manufacturer reissues, and clones. Today’s brand new gear is heritagized from release, leading to questions: what types of gear are heritagized and why? How does some gear attract an anachronistic technological gaze? How does gear end up in museums? And who is doing the curating, visiting, and gazing? In considering the ubiquitous presence of old gear in the new, the prevalence of heritage discourse in new gear retail, marketing and promotion, and gear-as-exhibit, this paper focuses on how gear is called upon to be site of–or a repository for–cultural memory. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the Queen Studio Experience, Montreaux, and MoPop Museum, Seattle, as well as first-hand interview material from museum curators, this paper introduces a new concept, technological taxidermy, to describe the paradoxical display of–and gazing upon–dead gear. From the Greek meaning “order and arrangement” (taxis) and “skin” (derma), the peculiar practice of displaying electrical audio technologies without the required electricity has much in common with the ways dead creatures are stuffed and displayed. Symbolically aligned with ‘hunting and trophies’,2 taxidermized gear extends the gassing and gear fetishization so central to gear cultures.3 Taxidermized gear exudes excessive heritage; recapitulations of technological canonization affirm that only certain kinds of technologies are in fact gear and worthy of gutting and indeterminate display.