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.

How romantic we are, may be felt most intensely when our favorite machine breaks down, or threathens to be destroyed. This occurred to me recently, tripping over an electricity wire, connected to a thinkpad notebook. A small domestic drama occurred, and not even the promise of an improved (tablet) version of the same notebook could drive away the atmosphere of sadness and loss. Fortunately, after some fiddling with a screw driver, the damage seemed to have been reduced to an occasional blue screen. Yet, the incident illustrates how deeply involved we are with our machines, even if by profession we should know better.

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[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

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(C) Æliens 04/09/2009

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