Through the Memory Machines performance tour conducted in a public library, the authors analyze multisensory methods including immersive performance and walking tours as probes into cultural infrastructures. Combining discussions of media theory and artistic practice, including collaboration with the 00100 Ensemble, the authors present infrastructural performance as an art method for creative infrastructural research.

ABSTRACT This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgotten media discourses, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking and other hacktivist exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology. The concept of dead media is discussed as “zombie media”—dead media revitalized, brought back to use, reworked.