loriemerson

After being in the English Department at CU Boulder for 14 years, I am now an Associate Professor in the Media Studies Department. I am also Director of the Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance Program and Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. I co-authored (with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka) The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, authored Reading Writing Interfaces, and co-edited three collections. My research focuses on uncovering crisis points in past media, or, points at which there was the possibility, never fully realized, for technologies that are “other” than what we have now. I also try to undo established narratives of how contemporary technologies came to be by looking at artists and writers’ experiments with, for example, network technologies. As part of my Other Networks project I describe below, I recently became an amateur radio operator; my callsign is KF0LCB. A PDF of my complete curriculum vitae, updated in February 2024, is available here.

Right now I am working on a cluster of projects called “Other Networks,” also documented on a standalone website. I post about it frequently on Bluesky Social and on Mastodon using the #othernetworks hashtag. These projects uncover, document, and archive networks that existed before and outside of the internet; they also look at how these networks shaped and determined artist and writer experiments on these same networks. “Other Networks” includes a book, titled The Wire, on the Canadian timesharing network IPSAnet and how the three undersea cables the network ran on shaped the artist networks it hosted; another book, titled Slow Networks, which documents both the technical specs of pre-internet telecommunications networks and artists’ experiments on these networks; an extensive catalog of these “Other Networks,” from 2000 BCE through the present moment; an essay titled “The Net Has Never Been Neutral;” and an interview with internet pioneer John Day titled “What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It.”