Our conception of the pas depends on the kind of question we ask.
Any source, be it a detail of a picture or a part of a machine, can be useful, if we approach it from a relevant perspective.
There is no such trace of the past, which does not have its story to tell.

Histrorians have began to acknowledge that they cannot be free from the web of ideological discourses constantly surrounding and effecting them. In this sense history belongs to the present as much as it belongs to the past.
It cannot claim an objective status; it can only become conscious of its ambiguous role as a mediatior and "meaning processor" operating between the present and the past( and, arguably, the future).

recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again.
THe sense of deja vu that Tom Gunning has registered when looking back from the present reactions into the ways in which people have experienced technology in earier periods.


Erkki Huhtamo

From kaleidoscomaniac to cybernerd:Towards an Archeology of the Media

This version published in Leonardo, Vol.30. No 3(1997), pp. 221-224