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The Dead Media Project was initially proposed by Bruce Sterling in 1995 in his "Dead Media Manifesto" (http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html). As a response to the hype of the internet, CD-ROMs and VR systems of the day, Sterling saw that an archaeological media-analysis was required of earlier mediaforms to gain a wider perspective on "new" media. In the manifesto, Sterling proposes a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book about the failures, collapses and hideous mistakes of media: The Dead Media Handbook. He raises the challenge, and a crisp $50 dollar bill, to the first person to publish the book, which he envisions as a "rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfectbound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book".

After being manifesto'd, The Dead Media Project began by a number of folks collecting their notes and the spreading of the archive through a mailing list, moderated by Tom Jennings. This resulted in a huge collective of "field notes" about long-gone mediums, about 600 in total archived online at http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index.html. Eventually, the project lost steam in 2001 and the list died.

The archive currently includes a wide variety of notes from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video games and home computers of the 1980s. Dead still-image display technologies include the stereopticon, the Protean View, the Zogroscope, the Polyorama Panoptique, Frith's Cosmoscope, Knight's Cosmorama, Ponti's Megalethoscope (1862), Rousell's Graphoscope (1864), Wheatstone's stereoscope (1832), and dead Viewmaster knockoffs.

• The Dead Media Project, "official" homepage
• The Dead Media Project - A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal, Dead Media Manifesto by Bruce Sterling
• New Genre: Dead Media, Nettime post containing list by Bruce Sterling
• Vancouver Film School Dead Media Page
• "The Life and Death of Media" Speech by Bruce Sterling, at the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art, Montreal Sept 19 1995
• Neural Magazine - Bruce Sterling: the Dead Media interview by Alessandro Ludovico, September 1998
• CTheory Dead Media Project - An Interview with Bruce Sterling by Arpad Bak, March 1999
• The Dead Media Handbook, literally by Garnet Hertz

• New Media
• Media Studies
• Bruce Sterling