I wanted to take a second to highly recommend the work of Siegfried Zielinski on media archeology - his book Deep Time of the Media investigates historical precedent to modern video formats and practices. Also of interest how it ends up bringing in ancient alchemical and early scientific “dead ends” that emerged as a result of the broad investigations around processes that eventually become photography and other visual reproductive technology. Like, we have the video camera now, but what other ways of interpreting visual input and capturing it in the past didn’t make the cut or were just not developed and forgotten? @andrei_jay brought up magic as a byproduct of intuition without sufficient information wrt feedback, I feel like that’s very accurate and tracks with Zielinski too. It’s interesting to think abt how can those lost threads shed light on our assumptions about how we experience media in general?
This perspective also could apply to things like “dead” programming languages, or other media formats.
Check it out! Super interesting stuff imo