media archaeology 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 MAL (previously called the AML, or Archeological Media Lab)—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 MAL, 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. You can get a sense of the lab’s holdings by look at these pictures of the lab.

Advisory Board Members:

• Johanna Drucker (Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography, UCLA)
• Wolfgang Ernst (Professor, Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Christopher Funkhouser (Associate Professor, New Jersey Institute for Technology)
• Paul Gerhardt (Software Engineer)
• Lisa Gitelman (Professor, New York University)
• Garnet Hertz (Research Scientist and Artist-in-Residence, Department of Informatics, University of California Irvine)
• Erkki Huhtamo (Professor, UCLA Design Media Arts)
• Matthew Kirschenbaum (Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Associate Director of MITH)
• Mark Matienzo (Digital Archivist, Yale University)
• Jussi Parikka (Reader in Media & Design, Winchester School of Art)
• J.R. Raith (Network Administrator)
• Jason Scott (Filmmaker, Archivist, Historian of computing)
• Darren Wershler (Assistant Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature)

Curators:

• James Ascher (Curator, Professor & Rare Book Cataloger, University of Colorado at Boulder)
• Leonardo Arellano (Junior Curator, Emporia State University)
• Mél Hogan (Digital Curation Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Assistant Curators:

• Kyle Bickoff (student, University of Colorado at Boulder)
• Kevin Kane (student, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Donors:

• Robert Craig, Julie Gemmel, Lionel Kearns, Aaron Kuhn, Deena Larsen, Fiske Planetarium, Lynette Leiker, Judy Malloy, Keith Moore, Bo Olson, Wade Peterson, Michael Preston, Mike Procopio, Randy Prunty, Tasha Reynolds, Timothy P. Sweeney, Charles Tribble, Paul Zelevansky

Affiliations:

• Member of the Library of Congress National Digital Stewardship Alliance
• Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (HaCCS)
• The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
• LA Game Space
• ZKM | Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems

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.