Xavier’s lecture consists of a reading of Carlos Adriano’s Santoscópio=Dumontagem, a video-art project based on a study of found footage films made by American avant-garde artists from the 1960s and 1970s, in particular Ken Jacobs. Drawing on an intermedial approach, Xavier’s purpose here is to discuss the ways in which Adriano’s work establishes a dialogue between a nineteenth-century ‘philosophical toy’ and contemporary digital technology. Using Thomas Elsaesser’s suggestive expression, one could say that this is an example of ‘Media Archaeology in practice’. As part of the AHRC/FAPESP-funded IntermIdia Project (www.reading.ac.uk/intermidia), led by investigators from the University of Reading (UoR), UK, and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil, this international conference seeks to invite discussion of intermediality as a historiographic method.