digital – loriemerson

The Importance of Getting the Weather on Your Atari 800, or, Slow Networks Experiment 7

Happily, libi striegl and I are slowly getting back to our Slow Networks experiments in the Media Archaeology Lab we began in 2020 as a way to, well, stay sane during the pandemic and have a little fun. To inaugurate our return, today’s experiment involves learning how to use our Fujinet network adapter. We first […]

by Lori Emerson

Why is this all so delightful? Or, Slow Networks Experiment 6

Now that the Media Archaeology Lab is, incredibly for a humanities/media lab, turning 12 years old, and now that I’ve written on the lab in many different ways (how it embodies certain principles from media archaeology, intervenes in the divide between theory/practice, empowers students to reimagine the future, gives us all meaningful access to how […]

by Lori Emerson

Slow Networks Experiment 5: very short range over-air transmission

Continuing on from “Slow Networks Experiment 1: Over-Air Tranmission,” “Slow Networks Experiments 2 & 3: VHF Radio Transmission,” and “Slow Networks Experiment 4: Videotelephony,” this time we played with a strange and relatively recent entrant to the home security market: the X-10 Wireless video sender which we believe came out in about 1998. This is a puzzling […]

by Lori Emerson

Future Histories of the Internet Syllabus

Below is a syllabus for a sophomore-level class I hope to teach in Fall 2021. This class is a reflection of my ongoing work on a cluster projects I call “Other Networks“–attempts to uncover and document the technical specs and functionalities of pre-internet networks (particularly from the 1970s and early 1980s) as well as artistic […]

by Lori Emerson

Towards a Variantology of Hands On Practice

Thanks to the hard work of co-editors Patrick Ellison and Collin Williamson, a special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture is now out – “Object Lessons, Old and New: Experimental Media Archaeology in the Classroom.” Below is the final draft of the Afterword I wrote, in which I outline six opportunities provided by hands-on practice, […]

by Lori Emerson

Interfaced

Thanks to the hard work of Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, Further Reading: Oxford Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford UP) has just been published with an incredible line-up of people. I revisited and expanded on some ideas I wrote about in Reading Writing Interfaces via my piece “Interfaced” – a draft version of which […]

by Lori Emerson

now out: “Anarchive as technique in the Media Archaeology Lab | building a one Laptop Per Child mesh network”

I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to co-author a paper, titled “Anarchive as technique in the Media Archaeology Lab | building a one Laptop Per Child mesh network,” with a remarkable PhD student I work with, libi striegl. It is now out as open access in the inaugural issue of The International Journal […]

by Lori Emerson

What and Where is the Interface in Virtual Reality? An Interview with Illya Szilak on Queerskins

It’s been four years since the publication of Reading Writing Interfaces (University of Minnesota Press 2014) and admittedly, to my ears and eyes, the first chapter on gestural and multitouch interfaces already seems outdated – at least outdated in terms of specific tech if not in terms of the general principles. If I were going […]

by Lori Emerson

selling the future at the MIT Media Lab

The following is the text of a talk I gave at Transmediale on February 5, 2016 as part of a panel with Jussi Parikka, Ryan Bishop, and John Beck on “The Persistence of the Lab.” The text of the talk will eventually find its way into THE LAB BOOK. * What follows are some of my […]

by Lori Emerson

the Canon Cat // processing advanced work

Below is an essay Finn Brunton and I wrote for the latest/last issue of VLAK: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts. Many thanks to Louis Armand for publishing this piece.