A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

a response to the Dead Media Proposal from Pete Skerys (with additions by and sourced from Andy Lonsdale)

In early 1995¹ cyberpunk writers Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey posted an open invitation to the Internet community for someone to write a Dead Media Handbook.

The invitation sparked the interests of a number of subscribers to the Q-WEB web/internet developers list, which is loosely centred in Brisbane, Australia. Through this post I discovered that Andy Lonsdale, like myself, had an abiding interest in the role differing media has played in determining our historical development and forming our cultural environment. Andy also had some real neat old books and journals that in part lauded the (then) latest developments in communications technology.

We believe a retrospective investigation of past media fads and failures, winners and losers, can only help form a more complete framework from which to investigate the possible directions current (and near future) media may take. This site is our contribution to the Dead Media project.

There's an old Buddhist saying: The living are few, but the dead are many. So it is with the evolutionary life-line of media. From cave paintings to the travelling minstral and the various species of magic lantern, media is continually evolving. Evolutionary experiments are left behind in the race for the latest gizmo. The old is supplanted by the vigour of its young. Some technologies manage to mature and reach a ripe old age, for others, despite a healthy start to life, death comes early and with little warning. Media is forever alive and evolving but the dead are many and today we stand on the bones of the past to peek into the future.

We're not about to attempt to track all dead media, the enormity of the task is just too daunting. Rather, we'll focus on media of the industrial age, particularly electro-mechanical media. We find this genre of media of particular interest. It is the immediate precursor to current technologies and yet is so heavily dependant on the techniques and philosophies of the industrial age. The developers of this time had some wild ideas and we've found a lot of real cool images. We hope you enjoy this as much as we plan to.

Pete Skerys

Reeves and I jazzed it up a bit.