Columbia Records actually considered marketing the devices. While it may not be possible to buy a Dream Machine today (though Brunton has spied a few homemade models still working in aging Northern Californian hippie communes), the idea of enjoying abstract visual patterns lives on in today's screensavers.

Brunton questioned whether any media is "truly dead," except in rare cases, such as the Rongorongo tablets found at Easter Island, which no one now knows how to read or even decipher the reason they were created. 

"Total non-recoverable death is really rare," he said. "We use the term 'dead media,' but most media is in a strained other state."

Even successful media is rarely used for its intended purpose. The TV remote control, for instance, was originally developed to mute out the sound of commercials. 

"People often build things for very culturally specific reasons that might then go away. But the hardware is still there, to get taken up anew," he said.