Vinyl records outsell CDs now. VHS tapes are being hunted in thrift stores by people who were not alive when they were the standard. Cassette sales have grown every year for the last decade and the artists releasing music on tape in 2026 are not doing it ironically. Film cameras that were declared dead twice over are back in production. Zines are being printed and distributed at shows by people who have never not had the internet. None of this is nostalgia in the sentimental sense. Something more deliberate is happening, and it says something pointed about what the digital world is and is not able to give us.

The word obsolete implies that something stopped working. What actually happened to most of these formats is different. They stopped being the most convenient option. Vinyl cannot fit in your pocket. Film cannot be corrected in post. A cassette cannot be shuffled. A zine cannot be shared with a million people overnight. The limitations are real and they are exactly why people keep coming back. Constraints force decisions. When you cannot undo a shot, you commit to it differently. When you cannot skip to the best track, you listen to the album as a sequence the artist intended. The format shapes the experience and the experience shapes the relationship with the work. Digital removed the friction. The friction, it turns out, was doing something.

The editor-in-chief of Purple Magazine said it plainly about film photography: digital is sharper and cleaner, it captures a lot of information, but it is cold. Film gives you less information but it is emotional information. You can cry looking at a contact sheet. That distinction between technical information and emotional information is the centre of everything Dinosaurigami is about. The formats we declared dead were not producing inferior results. They were producing different results, results with grain, warmth, impermanence, and the specific quality of having been made under real conditions with real constraints. Digital optimised away the imperfections and in doing so optimised away a particular kind of feeling that people are now actively seeking out.

The generations driving this revival are not the ones who grew up with these formats as defaults. Millennials and Gen Z are leading the analog comeback, and for them these are not nostalgic objects. They are novel ones. A 22-year-old shooting on a Canon AE-1 never had a darkroom. A teenager buying a cassette has never owned a Walkman. The appeal is not memory. It is the texture of an experience that their entirely digital upbringing never provided. The physical object that cannot be copied infinitely. The process that cannot be undone. The format that carries visible evidence of its own making. In a world where most creative output is infinitely reproducible and instantly forgettable, these qualities have acquired a scarcity value that makes them feel genuinely special.

The creative applications are expanding beyond the obvious. Artists are not just using old formats to distribute old types of work. They are folding the aesthetic of dead media into entirely new creative contexts. VHS texture overlaid on contemporary footage. Halftone print patterns applied to digital illustrations. Cassette-style packaging for digital releases that will never physically exist. The look of the obsolete format borrowed and applied to work that could only have been made now. Dinosaurigami in its most interesting form is not preservation. It is reconstruction, taking the bones of something that was declared finished and building something new from them that could not have existed before.

The parallel with physical media's relationship to streaming is worth sitting with. Subscription fatigue, the frustration of content disappearing from platforms without warning, the inability to truly own anything you pay for digitally, have all pushed people back toward physical objects that cannot be taken away. A vinyl record you own is yours regardless of what a licensing deal does or does not renew. A DVD on your shelf plays whether or not the studio decides to pull the film from its streaming catalogue. The physical format offers permanence that the digital one has consistently failed to guarantee, and the generation that grew up watching streaming libraries shift around is starting to value that permanence in a way their predecessors who experienced the format wars might have predicted.

The formats were never really dead. They were waiting for the digital world to show enough of its limitations that people had a reason to come back. That moment arrived and the coming back has been anything but reluctant.