Low light of the past

"We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"

These are the words of Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day (2006), one of the favorite fiction writers for media theorists and media archaeologists.

Could we say the same thing about the past , as journeys to the past that are like defective forms of time-travel? To past times when old technologies were once new, and puzzled and awed, with their low lighting, crackling, noise, and pixelated style? 

See for instance some of Torsten Lauschmann's works...also on now at John Hansard Gallery, in Southampton.