introducing the Media Archaeology Lab

Sure thing - thanks for the suggestion, Al. And sorry in advance this email is a bit long-winded... The MAL is an open space for hands-on, experimental research and teaching actively using now-obsolete hardware and software. While the MAL does concern itself with trying to maintain access to dead media (or zombie media as nearly everything in the lab still functions) at the same as it tries to preserve early works of digital art/literature created for these dead media, it's still mostly preservation for the sake of active doing, not to create yet another museum. Or if it is a museum, it's a museum turned inside-out. In addition to landmark computers such as the Commodore 64 from 1982, the Vectrex Gaming Console also from 1982, the NeXT Cube from 1990, the lab also houses a number of working Apple IIe?s, an Apple Lisa, and Apple Macintoshes. As I know you all know, these computers are particularly important for understanding the history of personal computing and computer-mediated art and writing; while they were released throughout 1983 and 1984, the shift in interface from the one to the other, and therefore the shift in the limits and possibilities for what one could create, is remarkable. For example, a work such as First Screening by bpNichol - a series of kinetic digital poems created in 1983-1984 using an Apple IIe and the Apple BASIC programming language - uniquely depends on the MAL for, the need to preserve these works aside, we cannot understand it if we view it only via a media translation. Everything about the Apple II system, its entire hardware and software system, offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read First Screening by way of an emulation on a system that uses a Graphical User Interface. The Apple II whirs, buzzes; the keyboard clacks; even inserting the 5.25" floppy disk puts you in direct contact with the material limits and possibilities of the computer as you wait with baited breath, listening to the scratchy sound of the computer processing the data, for the triumphant 'beep' that lets you know the disk loaded. It's a kind of friction that actually helps us understand the contours of the medium at hand that we no longer have access to in the current era of seamless computing and so-called "invisible" interfaces. Basically, then, I see the MAL's collection of zombie media as a thinking device: providing access to the unique, material specificity of these computers - their interfaces, platforms, and software - makes it possible to defamiliarize or make visible for critique contemporary, invisible interfaces and platforms. Hopefully that helps explain where we're coming from! On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: campus, this audience have a -- Lori Emerson Assistant Professor | Director, Media Archaeology Lab Department of English, University of Colorado at Boulder Hellems 101, 226 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0226 loriemerson.net | mediaarchaeologylab.com