Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
Web captures document how online services presented themselves and changed over time, but they do not restore how those services worked in full. Their historical value depends on reading them alongside other records and distinguishing what they show from what can only be inferred.
Open storyIn Pong, two rotary controls and a shared cabinet made the duel easy to see—and gave people waiting for a turn a reason to watch. The game’s path from a prototype tested in a Sunnyvale bar to home versions shows how controls and setting could reshape the experience even when the basic mechanics remained familiar.
Open storyNumbered spaces give a series its structure, while duplicates and swaps carry it beyond the album’s pages. An educational collection about Mérida also shows how an album can arrange images into a sequential account of history.
Open storyIn 1960s Mar del Plata, television was not domestic from the outset. High prices, the arrival of local broadcasts and visits to watch at someone else’s home made viewing a shared practice shaped by age, economic means and ideas about household life and work.
Open storyThe arrival of the microgroove was more than a change of material: it allowed more music to fit on each side and established two distinct formats, the 33⅓ rpm LP and the 45 rpm single. From mass production to the rise of the cassette and CD, vinyl’s history shows how a technology reshaped listening habits and found new roles among DJs and collectors.
Open storyOn her 2008 debut, Lady Gaga connected 1970s glam rock and 1980s electronic pop through danceable songs, deliberate visual theatricality and a participatory idea of fame. The Fame did not reconstruct the past; it adapted it to an increasingly media-driven pop culture.
Open storyTelevision arrived in Mar del Plata in 1960, after viewers in Buenos Aires had already encountered the medium, but households still had to decide where the set belonged and who could watch. Inés Pérez’s oral-history study traces a transition marked by children visiting neighbors to see programs, televisions appearing in kitchens as well as living rooms, and different expectations across generations.
Open storyDonated by Wulf Köpke to Madrid’s National Museum of Anthropology, a collection of 355 objects offers a way to explore rooms in a bourgeois Berlin home from the early twentieth century. Its value lies in the furniture and utensils, but also in the relationships between objects, documents and museum decisions that make it possible to reconstruct a domestic space without claiming to reproduce it completely.
Open storyFrom the 1970s to 2009, the Internet shifted from interconnecting research networks to supporting everyday communication, publishing, and community. This was not a clean succession of technologies: different protocols, services, and online communities coexisted and spread at uneven rates.
Open storyLow-rise jeans and fitted clothes sum up some enduring images of the 2000s, but not a decade with a single uniform. Denim, music subcultures, celebrities and online retail show how varied styles coexisted and circulated ever more quickly.
Open storyWhen a digital service shuts down, its traces are scattered across captures, documentation, and recollections. Reading them carefully means asking what each source shows, when it was recorded, and which parts of online life it cannot recover.
Open storyFrom Buenos Aires to Montevideo, the oversized ornamental comb was more than an accessory. Its manufacture, uses and controversies reveal tensions over class, gender, politics and women’s presence in public space.
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