“Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various
moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It
became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated
from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure
stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the
constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he
establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot
through with chips of Messianic time.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
Constellated media is a novel historical and theoretical approach to the study and preservation of ephemeral popular media. Challenging the primacy of the film object, the theory investigates the intermedial interconnections between promotional materials, pressbooks, advertising, autobiographical writings, tie-in literature, comic strips, popular music, consumer products, and more.
Constellated media describes how these forms interrelate and become serialized. Through constellation, such entities come to constitute entire media universes outside (and within) the spaces of media engagement. The programming and presentation of constellated media undergirds support for their official preservation in archives.
Historiographically, the practice of constellated media is invested in unexpected applications of the contingency and media permeability found in the study of early cinema.
