The Sussex Digital Humanities lab presents ‘dead tech lib’, a week-long exhibition of exciting media archaeology collection of past technologies used for research by SHL Digital centred mostly around computers from the 1960s to the present day.  This exhibition will show a curated selection of artifacts.

What is ‘dead tech lib’?

In a technoculture characterised by Facebook/Meta’s ‘move fast, break things' motto, the speed of innovation relies on obsolescence, waste, loss of heritage, and cultural hyperamnesia.  

What has been broken in the race for new, more powerful devices?  

The dead tech lib upturns this question through the practice of collection, repair, and the repurposing of forgotten technology as a mean of maintaining and building future cultural heritage. It holds technology accountable to its early promises of democratisation, challenging 'the always already new', and re-animating lost utopias and modes of expression, through: 

• fostering maintain-repair-care culture through collecting, repairing, repurposing and preserving obsolete or obscure hardware and software 
• promoting open knowledge through open access technology, new skill development and collaboration
• reducing the environmental impact of technology through reuse 
• facilitating space for critical computing (e.g. exploring historic bias in computation, interrogating technology as liberation, de-blackboxing knowledge, expanding on STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics—as an interdisciplinary field) 
• bridging alternative cultural imaginaries of technology
• the use of ‘dead tech’ as a provocation to foster critical and open discussions

Opening hours:

Monday 16 June - 12 noon-4pm

Tuesday 17, Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 June - 10am-4pm

Friday 20 June - 10am-12 noon

Where: Digital Humanities Research Lab, Silverstone, Level 2 (opposite SB211).

The dead tech lib is funded by the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, and is a collaboration between Cécile Chevalier, Andrew Duff, Irene Fubara-Manuel, Alex Peverett (alphabetical order), and the University of Sussex Library.

Make sure you visit if you are on campus. The exhibition is on from Monday 16 until Friday 20 June. 

All welcome!

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