Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
Archives and museums do not preserve photographs merely as images: they safeguard their supports, descriptions, provenance, and links to the activity that produced them. Drawing on cases from Spain and Mexico City, this article examines why preservation, digitisation, and access are parts of the same cultural responsibility.
Open storySpanish television changed in medium, image, and conditions of access between the 1970s and the 2000s. The available evidence does not amount to a total history, but it does allow an examination of how a broadcast medium also became accessible archival heritage.
Open storyA cautious comparison of three Japanese references cited as landmarks of 1970s motorcycling, set alongside the period’s growing attention to safety and braking solutions.
Open storyDecorative arts are not preserved merely by protecting objects. Documentation, photographs, ongoing review and storage are part of the information that makes an object interpretable. The National Museum of Decorative Arts shows how a museum turns decoration into contextualized heritage.
Open storyApple, Commodore and Tandy are grouped in the expression “1977 Trinity,” a term used by Byte according to the UPV Museum of Informatics. This analysis places that formula within personal computing’s change of scale: from specialised machines and communities to a recognisable home market.
Open storyA cautious reading of selected milestones in sound recording and playback: the museum preservation of phonographs and gramophones, Sony’s Walkman in 1979, and the later turn towards digital devices and platforms.
Open storyA critical guide to placing The Confession (1970) among the Costa-Gavras works cited by educational and film-history sources, without mistaking a film for a transparent record of the past.
Open storyModena’s Museo della Figurina offers a starting point for considering the sticker not only as an item for swapping, but as a printed object requiring provenance, description and context. This reading connects its collection with public principles of inventory, conservation and access.
Open storyThe Museo Cerralbo project offers a way to examine restoration as the recovery of a historic interior rather than work on isolated objects alone. Documentation, coordination among trades, and the sequence of work from 2002 to 2009 show why conservation also means deciding which material and museographic evidence should remain legible.
Open storyA critical guide to turning gestures, household objects, domestic work and familiar spaces into historical questions, without mistaking an isolated image for an era’s complete experience.
Open storyOfficially created in 2006, Mexico City’s Museum Archive of Photography offers a way to consider photography not only as an image, but also as an institutional document, urban memory, and heritage requiring context, classification, and preservation.
Open storyA critical reading of the comics magazine as a periodical format: its bond with the newsstand, serialized publication, changing market scale, and today’s coexistence of print, albums, and the internet.
Open story
