Dead Media Project

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The Dead Media Project was initially proposed by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling in 1995 in his "Dead Media Manifesto"^[1]. As a response to the hype of the internet, CD-ROMs and VR systems of the day, Sterling stated that an archaeological media-analysis of earlier mediaforms was required to gain a wider perspective on "new" media. In the manifesto, Sterling proposes a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book about the failures, collapses and hideous mistakes of media: The Dead Media Handbook. In raising this challenge he offers a "crisp $50 dollar bill" to the first person to publish the book, which he envisions as a "rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfectbound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book".

After being manifesto'd, The Dead Media Project began as a number of persons collecting their notes and the spreading of the archive through a mailing list, moderated by Tom Jennings. This resulted in a huge collective of "field notes" about long-gone mediums, about 600 in total archived online at http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index.html. Eventually, the project lost steam in 2001 and the list died.

The archive includes a wide variety of notes from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video games and home computers of the 1980s. Dead still-image display technologies include the stereopticon, the Protean View, the Zogroscope, the Polyorama Panoptique, Frith's Cosmoscope, Knight's Cosmorama, Ponti's Megalethoscope (1862), Rousell's Graphoscope (1864), Wheatstone's stereoscope (1832), and dead Viewmaster knockoffs.