Dead media is alive and well in my house.

My husband, Brian, and I have an affinity for various types of discontinued and outdated media from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s everything from 8-tracks and LaserDiscs to VHS tapes and retro video game consoles.

There’s something fun about revisiting old media from your childhood or experimenting with now-obsolete technology that was popular before you were born.

I want to highlight some of my old media as a way to celebrate Dead Media Day, which is October 12 at Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown location.

The inaugural event pays homage to retro media, entertainment, and ephemera, and features vendors selling vintage and rare items.

It will also have exhibits, hands-on demonstrations, and crafts for fans who want to step back in time and honor all things old and once forgotten.

Here’s a look at five types of dead media that continue to thrive in the Stratton household.

It’s October, so many of us are in the mood for a good ghost story, and you needn’t look any further than Penny Seats Theatre Company’s The Woman in Black.

Never heard of it? Neither had I. But it’s based on a 1983 novel by British author Susan Hill, and Stephen Mallatratt adapted it for the stage a few years later.

With a cast of three, who play a multitude of characters, The Woman in Black went on to become the second-longest running non-musical play in London’s West End—second only to Agatha Christie’s stalwart The Mousetrap—and a 2012 feature film adaptation starred Daniel Radcliffe.

“Several Michigan companies have mounted the show, all with vastly different takes on it,” said Penny Seats’ executive director Lauren London. “One of the most fun things about this show is the number of ways it can be interpreted.”

As London describes it, the two main characters are an actor and a man who wishes to convey to his family and friends, with the actor’s help, a traumatic experience he suffered.

A round-up of recent books from authors with Washtenaw County connections, past and present. We've also highlighted Ann Arbor-area readings and signings when available.

The Kerrytown Concert House’s annual Edgefest has long prided itself on scouring the globe to bring some of the foremost artists making avant-garde music to Ann Arbor.

But the 29th edition of the four-day festival will have a decidedly more localized bent, with several artists hailing from Detroit and Chicago gracing the lineup.

This year’s festival, entitled Edgefest 29: Speaking OUT, takes place October 8-11 at Ann Arbor's Kerrytown Concert House, featuring several artists from the two Midwest cities, including Kenny Green and his Cosmic Music Collective, which is composed of members from both Detroit and Chicago.

The informal talk series Nerd Nite Ann Arbor hit its 100th-event milestone in July, but nobody threw a party for it.

“We talked about whether we wanted to celebrate it or not, and we decided every Nerd Nite is a neat Nerd Nite,” said Ann Arbor District Library's Emily Murphy, who co-hosts the event with AADL colleague Jacob Gorski.

“And yes, we hit 100, but we’re gonna keep going. We acknowledged it when we were there and said, ‘Here we are—wow, 100 times,’ but I feel confident that we’re gonna just keep going, and people [will] keep coming to it.”

Murphy and Gorski are hosting the 103rd edition of Nerd Nite Ann Arbor on October 9. The two-hour event, held on the second Thursday of every month at LIVE, features three speakers giving informative talks in a bar setting for 15-20 minutes on topics of their choice.

Topics often cover science, technology, health, history, and pop culture. The October 9 event features speakers Kim Williams-Guillén on the bats of Wayne County, Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong on the impacts of loneliness and social isolation on people’s health, and Jim Ottaviani on identifying and tracking asteroids in our solar system.

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance is taking over The Encore Theatre stage this weekend and next for a play that director Sydney Morton calls tailor-made for U-M students.

She Loves Me, with book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, is a musical adaptation of a play by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo. The play has been the source for the 1940s movies Shop Around the Corner and The Good Old Summertime, and was the inspiration for You’ve Got Mail.

She Loves Me is the story of two star-crossed lovers who have never met but exchange heartfelt love letters. But the musical is also about the people at Mr. Maraczek’s very successful parfumerie in Budapest. Everyone has a story, a song, a dance. The play is about a work family in which each character has a story.

Director Morton writes that the play has many connections to U-M, including lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s friendship with the Musical Theatre Emeritus Chair, Brent Wagner. But, until now, the musical has never been produced by the university.

The Radar tracks new music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week: Loamsy, DASHpf, BigPlanet, Mei Semones, Chris DuPont, DJ Myint, Hemmingway Lane, Hey Look Listen, Latimer Rogland, Modus Operandi, and G.B. Marian.

If you've ever been in the Chip Davis Technology Studio at the University of Michigan, you know it's not a large space. It's an amazing room, filled with music-making and music-reproducing tech that will melt your brain, but it's not the kind of space that could host a music festival featuring more than 25 artists over two days.

Except when it does.

Again.

The second Spaceout International Ambisonics Festival runs October 16-17 at the Chip Davis Technology Studio, featuring an international and local cast of creatives who make music in a 3D audio format.

The studio's 32-speaker immersive audio system allows performers and presenters to envelop your ears, turning sounds into hallucinatory spectres that attack your cochleas from all angles.

Over the course of three concerts across two days, artists from Japan, Turkey, Italy, Chile, Brazil, Norway, Canada, Germany, India, the USA, and more will perform ambisonic compositions that incorporate multimedia, cybernetics, collaboration, system theory, and cutting-edge technology.

A new “live media festival” in Ypsilanti aims to expand the conversation on what media is, with live experimental works in audio, video, projection, and expanded cinema that goes beyond traditional film.

Those attending the first Media Live Ypsi live performance festival on October 10 and 11 can expect everything from Bring Your Own Beamer projection art displays to a half dozen “durational artists” each delivering their own three-hour sets of storytelling and other nonlinear performances that could incorporate audience participation.

It’s all intended to shake up how people perceive the “live” performance, Media Live Ypsi co-organizer Abhishek Narula said, while emphasizing the need to be present to truly experience the media being displayed.

"I think a lot of art today is experienced online—on Instagram, on YouTube, and all that,” said Narula. “It's hard to sort of document; it's hard to capture these things. We really want to have that experience for the people that are in Ann Arbor and Ypsi and to bring people together. I think post-pandemic, people have been interacting online, and we still sort of live most of our worlds online. So, we're trying to break that a little bit by providing the live experiences where you sort of have to be there.”

Stacey L. Kirby was the Stamp School's 2025 Roman J. Witt Artist-in-Residence, spending 12 weeks on the University of Michigan campus between January and March to meet with students, staff, and faculty to gather information that informs her new interactive, immersive installation, The Bureau of Personal Belonging.

The site-specific work is activated by viewer participation, with the intention of fostering conversations about engagement and empowerment, collective and personal identities, and the power of art to build respect and solidarity among participants.

Kirby’s exhibition "transforms bureaucracy's everyday rituals into unexpected moments of civic connection. Through forms, gestures, and scripted interactions, visitors can sit down, engage, and reflect on identity, community, and belonging," states a Stamps Gallery post on Instagram.

Another Stamps post explains: