Roberts and Goodall present New Media Archaeologies as a contribution to a field that studies media technologies not through linear progress narratives, but through fragments, obsolescence, material traces, failed futures, forgotten devices, and experimental re-use. The introduction frames media archaeology as a method for questioning the ideology of the “new” by returning to older media forms—cinema, sound machines, optical toys, archives, games, code, broadcast technologies—not nostalgically, but as active laboratories for thinking about the present and imagining alternative futures. The volume stresses the relation between theory and practice: media archaeology is not only interpretation, but also handling, replaying, reconstructing, listening, re-enacting, and “thinkering” with technical objects. This experimental orientation challenges traditional historiography because machines themselves preserve forms of knowledge that cannot be reduced to cultural meaning or written narrative. The book therefore places emphasis on materiality, signal, interface, archive, and technical perception, while also recognising the field’s links to art practice, museums, pedagogy, speculative design, and critical theory. Its central argument is that obsolete or marginal media can reveal hidden assumptions within contemporary digital culture, especially its dependence on constant innovation, memory loss, and capitalist obsolescence. Media archaeology becomes a way to open technological black boxes, disturb settled histories, and transform the archive into a space of critical experimentation.
URBANISM MEETS ART