Introduction

In the last decade, there have been significant developments in the media landscape, in the field of archival and curatorial practices and policies, and in the research on apparatuses and education done in the archive. There is an evident and increasing focus in media historiographical reflections on the fact that, for so long, the essential materiality of media technologies was not brought to the fore in film and media studies. This has changed now that apparatuses are made available for study and have been collected and presented in apparatus collections around the world. Their “persistent materiality” is evident, and the need to study them is imperative, as Benoît Turquety put it in 2024, when he argued that some changes need to be made because the left-overs of media history have been “preserved” mostly “as they are”—that is, as apparatuses that are not used, but are safely kept behind glass. Increasingly, this has raised the question of whether a history of film, or media or technology can be constructed if questions concerning the operations of these apparatuses are kept outside of media research.