Rojal Förlag, ISBN 978-9198492736, English, 150 pages, 2024, Sweden

The seminal concept of dead media, popularised by Bruce Sterling in the 1990s with a project that compiled a remarkable collection of descriptions and histories of obsolete media and apparatuses, has gained increasing attention, driven both by the problematic programmed obsolescence of machines and by the mixture of fascination and nostalgia for the earlier mechanisms of computation and communication. This book is an excellent contemporary compendium on the subject, involving curators, historians and artists (including Annika Gunnarsson, who writes the introduction, Joanna Zylinska, Sarah Cook, Kristoffer Gansing, Jacek Smolicki, and several others) with commissions that challenge a wide range of media through their respective research. Each of the authors engages with a project or medium, including spectrograms, overhead projectors, early net art, early photography, videotape, etc. In doing so, they document their historical role and their oblivion today. This is followed by a section focusing specifically on art, showing mostly artists’ books that incorporate and illustrate different artistic strategies using a diverse range of media. The book also experiments with its own double physical format, in which a version with a metal cover bears an adhesive on chemical paper whose contents are doomed to disappear due to the UV light.