The Computer Lab of Your Dreams
Founded in 2009 by Dr. Lori Emerson, the Media Archaeology Lab is a place for cross-disciplinary, experimental research, teaching, and creative practice using one of the largest collections in the world of still functioning media. Researchers, students, teachers, artists and members of the public are encouraged to turn on, open up, play and create with items from the collection that include phonograph players; magic lanterns; historic personal computers, handheld devices and game consoles including the Altair 8800b, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Vectrex, and Imagination Machine I and II created by African-American video game pioneer Ed Smith.
The MAL is utterly unique not only because it is an open, accessible space for anyone to come and perform hands-on experiments with its extensive collection but also because it demonstrates alternative paths in the history of technology and empowers visitors to imagine an alternative present and future.
The MAL has also evolved into a real life and virtual community enterprise; it has an international advisory board of scholars, archivists, and entrepreneurs; faculty fellows from departments across the CU Boulder campus; and a regularly rotating cohort of students and community volunteers who help with hardware repair, class tours and guest visits to the lab. The lab hosts reading groups, artist residencies, events, retro game nights, and workshops on how to fix your old or new devices and even on how to build your own mesh network.
In short, the MAL is a community-driven hub for preserving and exploring the history of technology. Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch!
Events
5:00 - 6:20 PM The Bruce Curtis Building Museum Collections, Room W100 1440 Central Campus Mall University of Colorado-Boulder
Description: Useful radio is radio with a job to do, as distinct from broadcast radio whose function is to entertain, inform and exhort. Useful radio regulates the labor and mobility of humans, animals and vehicles on land, sea and in the air; supports state functions, including policing and surveillance; enables infrastructures of production, distribution and consumption. As a multidirectional system of transmitting and diffusing commands, instructions and situational information, useful radio has from its origins simultaneously mapped and reproduced geographies of power and control. At the same time, manifestations like citizens band (CB) and low-power handheld radios have enabled uncountable acts of resistance and rebellion. Useful radio has played a key role in workers’ organizations, civil rights and antiwar movements and youth rebellion, and it might be considered the pulse of the January 6 Capitol riot. This talk presents sounds and images together with elements of a collective research agenda in the hope of encouraging fieldwork, research, fabulation and critique within this dominant but typically unheard and barely theorized sector of the wireless spectrum.
Bio: Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator, currently writing a book on the history, culture and politics of “useful radio." He began collecting "ephemeral films" (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called "useful cinema") in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 30,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 8,700 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library, an experimental research library in downtown San Francisco, in 2004, still open to the public. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Rick will guide us in modes of listening to useful radio. Materials provided, space is limited. If you wish to attend, please RSVP using this form: https://forms.gle/GoxYBEpjXKpTYoGr9.
Bio: Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator, currently writing a book on the history, culture and politics of “useful radio." He began collecting "ephemeral films" (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called "useful cinema") in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 30,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 8,700 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library, an experimental research library in downtown San Francisco, in 2004, still open to the public. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
12:30-1:45 PM Roser Atlas Center (ATLS) Room 102 1125 18th Street University of Colorado-Boulder
Bio: Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator, currently writing a book on the history, culture and politics of “useful radio." He began collecting "ephemeral films" (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called "useful cinema") in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 30,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 8,700 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library, an experimental research library in downtown San Francisco, in 2004, still open to the public. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Experimental Zinemaking with Sid Drmay (hybrid, drop in)
Monday, November 27, 2023
Time: Drop in between 4-6 PM
Where: Media Archaeology Lab, 1320 Grandview Ave, Boulder
Over the course of this workshop participants will be able to consider all the ways that zines can exist, and engage in a group Zinemaking activity. We will use prompt questions and visuals to imagine Utopias and what the world could look like before creating zines that explore these concepts.
Materials needed: scissors, glue, mark making tools, collage materials
Sid Drmay – @cyborggarbage
Sid is a queer non-binary trans interdisciplinary artist who loves textiles, cyberpunk and snails. They work as the Community Coordinator for OSHWA, as well as Summit Fellowship Chair during OHS planning season. They are also co-chair of Dinacon and a freelance journalist with bylines in CBC, This Magazine and Broken Pencil Magazine. They are a passionate arts educator and zinester. They are probably in the middle of too many projects right now.
You can see more of their work on instagram or sidneydrmay.com
