This course examines media as technical objects with specific histories and a contemporary presence. In the contemporary context where media technologies are programmed to become obsolete, residual forms and practices provide materials traces for analysis. The class will focus on the evolution of media forms, looking particularly at early, antiquated, and obsolete practices and technologies of communication in order to recover their material traces, and to situate them in their historical, social, cultural, and political contexts. Through texts, archival materials, and case studies, old media will be brought back to life to question notions of authenticity, authority, preservation, archiving, temporality, agency, power, evolution, decay, and death.