This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media – one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles.

Contributors and their essays:
1. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka – Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology

Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary
2. Erkki Huhtamo – Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study
3. Eric Kluitenberg – On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media
4. Jeffrey Sconce – On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine
5. Thomas Elsaesser – Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock

Part II: (Inter)facing Media
6. Machiko Kusahara – The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern
7. Wanda Strauven – The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch
8. Claus Pias – The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports
9. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun – The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory

Part III: Between Analogue and Digital
10. Paul DeMarinis – Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation
11. Wolfgang Ernst – Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media
12. Jussi Parikka – Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance
13. Casey Alt – Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium
14. Noah Wardrip-Fruin – Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes
15. Vivian Sobchack – Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past

Paperback, 368 pages, published in 2011.