Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9462982161, English, 238 pages, 2019, The Netherlands

While media archeology discourse is now moving in different directions, its practical implications are more present now than ever. This collection builds on the conference “Archaeologies of Media and Film” and comprises nine essays which are divided into three sections: Media Archaeological Theory; Experimental Media Archaeology; and Media Archaeology at the Interface. In the first section there are various examples of theory, eventually moving towards a creative practice, after manoeuvring museum and archives’ holdings, such as Van den Oever and Fickers’ ‘re-enactment’. The close relationship of media archeology to the ephemerality of the digital, also leads to the relationship between theory and practice being explored in the second section of the text. Here, among others, Elsaesser’s ‘moving forward and backwards in time’ reformulates theory about the changing function of the moving image, while in the final section, there’s an explanation of Cube Collective’s practical cinema archeological experiments. To end, Jussi Parikka, and his theory of ‘alternative histories’, details a ‘political imaginary’ which is articulated through theories and plenty of artworks, inspiring possible practice-based use at different levels, and consolidating the direction of perceiving, using and speculating about media archeology as live matter.