civilisation


Media are special cases within the history of civilisation. They have contributed there share to the gigantic rubbish heaps that cover the face of our planet or to the mobile junk that zips through outer space.

dead media project


Together with like-minded people, in 1995, Bruce Sterling started a mailinglist (at that time still an attractive option) to collect obsolete software. This list was soon expanded to collect dead ideas, or dead artifacts, and systems from the history of technical media: inventions that appeared suddenly and disappeared just as quickly, which dead-ended and were never developed further; models that never left the drawing board; or actual products that were bought and used and subsequently vanished into thin air.

machines can die


Sterling's project confronted burgeoning phantasies about the immortality of machines with the simple facticity of a continuously growing list of things that have become defunct.

technology and death


Once again, romantic notions of technology and of death were closely intertwined in the Dead Media Project.