archeological media lab
The motto of this lab is that “the past must be lived so that the present can be seen.” Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available; however, the AML—which is, as far as we know, the first of its kind in North America—is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using the tools, the software and platforms, from the past.
The Archeological Media Lab (or AML), then, is propelled equally by the need to maintain access to early works of electronic literature (and note too that, given how quickly technology changes, sometimes an “early work of electronic literature” may have been created as recent as 2001 and is similarly no longer viewable on current platforms) and by the need to archive and maintain the computers these works were created on. We envision, however, that this lab will house not only the computers on which early works of electronic literature were written, but it will also house stand-alone works of electronic literature (such as those works written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems) as well as early text-adventure games such as Adventure and Zork. It will also “archive” gaming systems such as Pong, Intellivision, Atari 2600, and ColecoVision.
Director Lori Emerson has expanded on the philosophy of the lab in this post, “The Archeological Media Lab as a Locavore Thinking Device“.
You can find out about the AML’s new acquisitions here. And you can find out about recent press on the AML here.
We are very grateful to ATLAS (the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society) and the current director, John Bennett, for the generous donation which has made this lab possible. Thank you too to the CU Department of English for its assistance and to CU Libraries’ ScriptaLab for its unceasing support.
Director: Lori Emerson (Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder)
Curators:
– James Ascher (Professor & Rare Book Cataloger, University of Colorado at Boulder)
– Megan Gomes (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Advisory Board Members:
– Jason Scott (Filmmaker, Archivist and Historian of computing)
– J.R. Raith (Network Administrator)
– Paul Gerhardt (Software Engineer)
Donors:
– Keith Moore
– Charles Tribble
– Wade Peterson
– Paul Zelevansky
Affiliated Labs:
– Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (HaCCS)
– The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
[...] Harriet piece also linked to the Archeological Media Lab which not only is super cool for preserving ‘old’ media works of literary art, but [...]
[...] easily be expanded–and I hope it would!–to include retro-computing labs, such as the Archeological Media Lab at U of Colorado directed by Lori Emerson, or its counterpart at MITH, with the aim of identifying [...]