The current controversy surrounding the definition of AI hallucinations in the field of artificial intelligence research reveals the inherent limitations of an engineering-centered perspective. Based on the German theory of Kulturtechnik and through a retrospective analysis of media history, this paper argues that AI hallucinations are not merely technical flaws, but cultural practices that continue the developmental logic of earlier media such as writing and printing. Whether it was the telescope challenging the interpretive authority of theology, or the printing press shaping cognitive power, technological innovations have consistently structured cultural power by defining the boundaries of reality, with human anxieties over the erosion of cognitive privilege deeply embedded throughout. As a product of cognitive augmentation in digital media, AI hallucinations, by rewriting the limits of reality, constitute a dynamic frontier in the evolution of knowledge forms within humanmachine symbiotic civilization. This paper advocates abandoning the binary corrective approach that treats hallucinations solely as technical errors, embracing instead a new reality under probabilistic distributions, and reflecting on the emergent ethical relationships of humanmachine co-symbiosis and co-evolution.

Food labels are common elements of everyday life. However, from the point of view of communication researchers (especially visual communication), they are incredibly interesting cultural artifacts, located at the intersection of communication, design, technology, and regulation. This article analyzes the evolution of the labels of Muszynianka, a leading mineral water brand in Poland, from the perspective of media archaeology. It treats labels as dual artifacts—media (information carriers, regulatory objects) and artistic (elements of applied art, design). This article emphasizes the importance of materiality, the non-linearity of history and the analysis of the technological–regulatory “archive.” It develops concepts of labels as complex, multimodal messages, especially in a historical context. The authors conducted a visual analysis of the evolution of Muszynianka’s labels, placing them within broader design trends. To explore recurring visual and narrative motifs, a topoi analysis method was used to identify three basic topoi: Topos of Nature/Mountain Origin, Topos of Health/Vitality/Purity, and Topos of Modernity/Technology.

Jonathan Crary is well known for his analysis of the ‘discipline of vision’. According to him, our field of perception is structured by the history of the capitalist mode of production and by the scientific knowledge and technical instruments it deploys to put the eye to work. This is why Crary's work can be analyzed as a study not only of the ‘eye of power’ but, more precisely, of the ‘eye of capital’. The aim of this article is to present how Crary’s work allows us to articulate the socialisation of perception and the political organisation of modes of production – while being attentive to the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies it conveys. We begin by presenting the history of attention training developed by Crary. Secondly, we analyze the influence of these theses in three different fields (the economics of attention, media archaeology and the history of sensibilities). Thirdly, we discuss the methodological and political implications of such a proposal.

This paper introduces and discusses a theoretical approach for media scholars: the media maintenance approach (MEMA). Maintenance is not a new subject of study in social sciences and humanities, but it has been rarely addressed by media studies so far. After reviewing literature about maintenance in history of technology, philosophy of technology, and STS, and defining the concept of “maintenance”, the paper turns to media studies and examines how current (sub)fields, such as media archaeology, ecomedia, media sustainability, media history, media evolution, audience and users’ studies, labor studies, and PEC have already addressed issues related to maintenance and to maintaining forms or practices of communication. MEMA can gather, connect and enrich these existing perspectives and can advance a unified and integrated approach able to combine continuity and change, but also conservation and innovation in media studies. In the conclusion, the paper addresses three “benefits” that MEMA can bring to media studies, all dealing with different degrees of temporalities.

I explore how imaginary networks provide us with meaningful models for alternative future networks outside of or beyond the internet. This essay mostly looks first at how media archaeology’s interest in uncovering media from the past to reimagine media in the future could lay the initial groundwork for seeing imaginary networks as alternatives to the contemporary internet. However, I find that media archaeology has a limited ability to understand imaginary networks; instead, complimenting it with Black radical thinkers such as Franz Fanon and Marxist thinkers such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi gives us tools to imagine networks beyond the reach of global financial capitalism.

This article examines the Derrigimlagh bog in Ireland as a site of infrastructural ruination and media archaeology, focusing on the remnants of the Marconi transatlantic wireless station and the broader implications of technological obsolescence. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining environmental humanities, media archaeology, and speculative documentary practices, the study considers how the bog serves as both a repository of past electromagnetic infrastructures and a terrain for imagining future cycles of extraction and decay. The presence of sheep grazing among the ruins is analysed as a material and symbolic intervention, reframing nonhuman agency within the entanglement of media, landscape, and industrial afterlives.

This essay examines the avant-garde televisual experiments of the ‘G Group’ in relation to the sociotechnical imagination of experimental television in German modernism. Inspired by the physiology of synaesthesia and the possibilities of the ‘electric eye’, or photocell, avant-garde artists working in multiple media experimented with frequencies outside the perceptible spectrum in their attempts to convert light into sound and vice versa. By shifting attention from ‘visual music’ to ‘optical media,’ this essay contributes to avant-garde studies, modernism studies, and media archaeology, especially recent scholarship connecting the pre- and post-history of national television broadcasting. The ‘para-tele-visual’ here complements senses of television as distant vision with that of haptic broadcasting and the creation of visible sounds and auditory images.

This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with thirteen retroconversion artists. Navigating emerging and outdated technologies, retroconversion artists resituate contemporary media onto obsolete formats. Retroconversion artists often navigate murky legalistic territories with a keen awareness of the limitations of contemporary license-based digital media management. Focusing on the curatorial impetus for such work, the paper highlights how retroconversion artists engage in a series of curatorial acts that help reconsider questions of media consumption and ownership in an era of streaming-first media distribution. The paper explores how retroconversion artists curate media to foster brand building, ensure content preservation, and help respond to personal and communal nostalgic desires. The paper also contextualizes the work of these artists against an era in which the use of video and other analog medias contradicts is cultural notion of easy and immediate access and contends that the work of these artists intentionally demands slowing down with and utilizing media within the constraints of former media paradigms. The paper highlights the theoretical implications of taking retroconversion art seriously as an act of archival preservation and argues for embracing the curatorial practices of retroconversion artists in institutional media archeology settings.

ABSTRACT This article introduces silicon listening as a materially grounded and threshold-oriented mode of machine listening that emerges at the blurry edges of the audible. Drawing on media archaeology, writings in sound studies, and patent analysis, this contribution explores how near-ultrasonic communication and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based audio technologies organise listening in terms of what machines hear and how listening itself is enacted, operationalised and valued. The first part traces the emergence of near-ultrasound as a medium of acoustic data exchange, showing how applications like “SmartTones” and “Things that talk” encode specific assumptions about attention, perception, and the sonic. These systems use the upper range of human hearing to enable machine listening, often in covert or extractive ways. The second part turns to the micro-scale materiality of MEMS microphones – devices that render silicon into a resonating, listening surface. By focussing on their auditory thresholds, the article shows how such components reshape the relation between sound, data, and power, foregrounding sonic connectivity over computation. Ultimately, silicon listening offers a conceptual lens for thinking machine listening beyond AI, centring material, sonic thresholds, and the inaudible as active sites where listening is shaped.

This interview explores embodied agency and the evolving dynamics of knowledge creation through practical and experimental engagement with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Drawing on media archaeology, media theory, and science and technology studies, it examines how the emergence of language interfaces destabilize distinctions between user and system, collapsing the boundaries between human and artificial modes of expression and understanding. Framed within an artistic research methodology, the project critically engages with the ongoing shift toward machine- and voice-based forms of inquiry, analysing how these technologies reshape the epistemic, linguistic, and ontological conditions of knowledge and research. Departing from keyboard-based interaction, the process emphasizes the decoupling of the body from the machine interface and the increasing fluidity of human-computer correspondence through voice technology. While acknowledging the growing uncertainty of origin and autonomy resulting from this technological shift, it foregrounds indeterminate authorship as both methodological challenge and theoretical pivot, underlining the implications for academic accountability and data ethics. The employment of practice-based experimentation is used as a tool to trace the infrastructural, affective, and rhetorical vectors through which intelligent automated speech influences knowledge production. By examining this process, the study contributes to ongoing debates on verification, trust, and the social negotiation of information induced by advanced conversational AI agents. Overall, the paper argues that voice technologies do not merely transmit content but actively configure the conditions under which knowledge is produced, authenticated, and circulated.

Keroncong music, a hybrid genre rooted in Portuguese colonial influence and indigenous traditions, has undergone significant transformation over centuries, culminating in its institutionalization as a national symbol in Indonesia. This article investigates the evolution of Keroncong across five distinct phases beginning with the Tugu community’s early preservation efforts, through colonial and postcolonial media dissemination, to contemporary reinterpretations by diaspora and youth movements. The study applies a multidisciplinary methodology combining historical periodization, media archaeology, musicological analysis, and cultural theory. Through archival research and comparative analysis, the article identifies the critical roles of NIROM and RRI in canon formation, emphasizing how broadcasting and state cultural policy promoted Langgam Jawa and iconic compositions like “Bengawan Solo” as representative of national identity. It further explores how canonization processes, while preserving cultural memory, can also marginalize regional and minority expressions. Comparative cases from other postcolonial contexts underscore the shared challenges and dynamics of musical canonization. The findings reveal that Keroncong’s continued relevance lies in its adaptability. Diasporic reinterpretations, educational incorporation, and revivalist movements demonstrate that Keroncong remains a living tradition. Rather than a fixed heritage, it embodies an evolving site of identity negotiation, cultural memory, and aesthetic innovation. This study contributes to scholarly discourse on music, media, and postcolonial identity formation, offering a model for examining how musical traditions are constructed, institutionalized, and reimagined within complex socio political landscapes.

What if video was just a commodity, a piece of scenery like any other, that could be forgotten, reused, or re-recorded over and over? This is the question raised by this text, which traces the thread of a multi-site ethnography, observing both the situations in which vernacular videos are shot in Romania and the human and material circulation of video technologies. At the intersection of visual anthropology and media archaeology, this research offers both an initial chronology and mapping of the video medium in Romania and a perspective on the methods and objects of film history, which is closely linked to film archives and their preservation.

We performed a presentation of the critical theory of the media (North American, emerged from the 2000s) present in the authors Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alexander R. Galloway and McKenzie Wark. We distinguish three key themes, software, networks and classes, which engender a compilation of texts (articles and book chapters). From this, we outline the themes, questions, contexts and central theses raised by the authors, as well as make explicit, in final considerations, the scopes of their media archaeologies, which foment their critical theories.

This study examines the game If We Were Allowed To Visit, which represents a radical experiment in the remediation of graphic poetry. The game evokes shock and resists full perception, encountering a certain limitation or remediation block. The aim of the study is to explain this phenomenon, refine existing ideas about the specifics of perception in digital art, and identify the social issues that the game’s interface may potentially reflect upon. The analysis revealed that computers manipulate symbols and data far faster than the human brain and that imagination slows down when mediated by language. As a result, the perception of such digital interface where reading is embedded in the process of graphic generation exceeds our cognitive capacities. The case of If We Were Allowed To Visit is examined as a Procrustean interface — one of several types of shock interfaces (alongside unconventional, broken, and incoherent interfaces). An analysis of the Procrustean interface from the perspective of media archaeology and remediation mechanisms also suggests that it may serve as a means of pointing to the trauma we experience in the process of adapting to new media.

This article offers a summary report on discussions, approaches, findings and themes arising from the ‘Original Cast Recordings: Musical theatre and/as sonic heritage’ research network – an eighteen-month project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (United Kingdom). After outlining the centrality of the musical theatre albums to the history of the form and popular culture at large, the article brings together two objectives of the network through three thematic discussions. First, it considers the complexity of definition – what do we mean by ‘original cast recording’ (OCR)? What are the ramifications of different taxonomic parameters? Second, it presents a synthesis of various approaches to the analysis of musical theatre on record, elucidating the complexities and potential in albums as fragments, a synecdoche for the live event, a pedagogic tool and an artefact in both media archaeology and the musicological analysis of historically informed practice. Further, it briefly outlines the state of play with respect to archival access to musical theatre archival recordings at several institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining barriers and potentials for access to enable further and future study of their sonic heritage. It concludes by offering reflections on three future areas of research activity: a project designed to increase access to multiple musical theatre sonic archives and reduce duplication of materials; the need to study musical theatre fan communities and cast album collecting practices in more depth; and the rich potential for an oral history of artists, performers, music producers and engineers that are involved in creating the ‘sound souvenirs’ of OCRs.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the participation of communities, groups, and individuals concerned (CGIs) in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is framed and reconfigured in 44 nomination videos submitted by China to UNESCO for inscription between 2008 and 2024. Employing media archaeology and multimodal analysis, it explores these videos as “archaeological” traces of heritage-making and layered dynamic “social text” shaped by institutional, political, and technological forces. While the analysis reveals a shift from state-centered narratives to increased CGIs visibility, it also demonstrates that this shift remains mediated through state-controlled framing, limiting grassroots agency. The study highlights how nomination videos function as heritage documentation and narrative construction tools, reinforcing risks of homogenization in global safeguarding practices. It concludes by advocating for CGIs-initiated narratives that prioritize empowerment and capacity building, proposing a more inclusive and sustainable approach to ICH representation.

Video synthesis is a method of producing images using a video synthesizer that can generate images without any external input, such as a camera. It was developed mainly in the sixties in the United States by artists such as Steve Rutt, Bill Etra, Daniel Sandin, Robert Moog, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Nam June Paik and many others. What is important about this technology is its immediate performative nature, subversive use, and synesthetic dimension. Images and sounds have the same source, electromagnetic waves, and are created because of live interaction with the machine (video synthesizer). The article, which was supposed to be a kind of curatorial notes, is an attempt to show some cartographies of methods of media archaeology practices, using the example of the Tribute to Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski project presented during Vidoesyntezy exhibition.

Amidst the centenary reflections on Franz Kafka’s legacy, this article explores his work’s ongoing resonance with the digital age, particularly through the lens of generative AI and cloud computation. Anchored in a close reading of Kafka’s “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer”, this study interrogates how the spatial and temporal codes embedded in the narrative parallel the architectures of contemporary diffusion systems at the heart of AI models. Engaging with critical theory, media archaeology, and AI discourse, this article argues that the rise of large language models not only commodifies language but also recasts Kafka’s allegorical critiques of bureaucratic opacity and imperial command structures within a digital framework. The analysis leverages concepts like Kittler’s code, Benjamin’s figural cloud, and Hamacher’s linguistic dissemblance to position Kafka’s parables as proto-critical tools for examining AI’s black-box nature. Ultimately, the piece contends that Kafka’s text is less a metaphor for our technological present than a mirror reflecting the epistemological crises engendered by the collapse of semantic transparency in the era of algorithmic communication. This reframing invites a rethinking of how narrative, code, and digital architectures intersect, complicating our assumptions about clarity, control, and the digital regimes shaping contemporary culture.

This article focuses on the spread of Internet memes centred on the use of subtitling and closed captioning techniques. Through an interdisciplinary methodological approach, based on digital discourse analysis and media archaeology, we observe the evolution of techno-graphic compositions that mobilise the sampling or modification of subtitled images to produce viral translation word-plays. The general purpose of this article is to propose a typological categorisation of such memes, showing how they draw their comic and memetic potential from the specific features of cinematic or automatic subtitling.

By reconstructing a basic temperature sensor and its chains of translation, the text presents a new approach to experimental media archeology, critical making and speculative design. Based on this experiment, the text proposes to investigate how sensoric mediation transforms data into operational signals, challenging the myth of ‘raw data’ as unfiltered representations of the environment and the clear distinction between analog and digital. In a micro-analysis, the text reconstructs the translations between the analog and the digital as processes of virtualization, through which what is processed by the computer shares an efficiency with what it refers to, without being of its nature or substance. In order to better understand how autonomous machines adapt to their environment by means of such translation chains, without assuming an isomorphic representation of the world or direct access to the environment, the text follows the first steps of such chains of translation in detail. Experiments with a simple temperature sensor and an Arduino microcontroller show how often unreflected and black-boxed pre-decisions flow into the necessary sensory mediations. This in turn sheds light on new forms of co-existence between humans and autonomous, sensor-based machines such as autonomous vehicles or robots.