Why media archaeology? What is it? Eric Kluitenberg describes “media archaeology” as more than just another branch of media theory and history. Researchers in this new area “choose to document the lineages of the media machines themselves.” [1] Erkki Huhtamo seeks to describe the multi-layered strata of media machineries to detect their occurrence, disappearance, and recurrence. In his view, media archaeology is “a way of studying such recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history and somehow seem to transcend specific historical contexts.” [2] Siegfried Zielinski says, “I shall now launch a few probes into the strata of stories that we can conceive of as the history of the media in order to pick up signals from the butterfly effect, in a few localities at least, regarding both the hardware and the software of the audio-visual. I name this approach media archaeology, which in a pragmatic perspective means to dig out secret paths in history, which might help us to find our way into the future...” To Zielinski, digging up the past is closely tied to the effort to retain a utopian potential for contemporary and future media cultures. [3] Thomas Elsaesser, one of the “New Film History” theorists/historians who had revitalized the study of the cinema’s origin, argues for a new historiographic model, which he calls “media archaeology, to address the turn-of-the-century multimedia conjuncture.” In his view, the field of audio-visual experience needs to be re-mapped so that our understanding of the issue may overcome the “old-new” binary pair. The following terms require clarification: Embodiment / Interface / Narrative / Diegesis / Non-entertainment uses of the audio-visual dispositive [4] [1][2][3] Kluitenberg, Eric, ed. Book of Imaginary Media: excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium. Rotterdam: NAi Pubishers, 2006. 12-14. [4] Elsaesser, Thomas. "The New Film History as Media Archaeology," in CiNeMAS, vol. 14, n. 2-3: 75-117.