labs – loriemerson

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

Towards Feminist Labs: Provocations for Collective Knowledge-Making

“Towards Feminist Labs: Provocations for Collection Knowledge-Making” (pdf) is an essay co-written by Maya Livio and Lori Emerson and appears in Critical Makers Reader, edited by Loes Bogers and Letizia Chiappini (Institute of Network Cultures, 2019). Below are the introductory paragraphs for our piece. * In recent years, the lab as a site of knowledge […]

by Lori Emerson

Lab as Living Thing, Media Archaeological Fundus as Assemblage

The following is a draft version of an essay that appears in Achaeographies: A Festschrift for Wolfgang Ernst, Ed. Stefan Holtgen. Berlin, Germany: Schwabe Verlag Publishers (2019): 37-46. *** “Lab as Living Thing, Media Archaeological Fundus as Assemblage” 0.0 I checked. The first email I received from Wolfgang Ernst was in 2012. When it arrived in […]

by Lori Emerson

Excavating, Archiving, Making Media Inscriptions // In and Beyond the Media Archaeology Lab

“Excavating, Archiving, Making Media Inscriptions // In and Beyond the Media Archaeology Lab” appears in Inscription, published in Gothenburg, Sweden by their Regional State Archives (2018): 247-272. * This autobiographical short essay provides a snapshot of how scholarship might engage with the materiality of seemingly immaterial media and thus, by extension, with the ways in […]

by Lori Emerson

Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History

“The Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History” appears in Hands on Media History: A new methodology in the humanities and social sciences (Routledge 2019), edited by Nick Hall and John Ellis. * Introduction It is hard not to notice the rapid proliferation of labs in the arts and humanities over […]

by Lori Emerson

transcript of an interview with Nick Montfort on the Trope Tank

Early last spring I had the great fortune of spending a week at the MIT Media Lab interviewing folks and studying the lab’s organization and infrastructure; while I was on campus, I also got to see Nick Montfort’s Trope Tank, what I called in an earlier blog post a “sister lab” to the Media Archaeology […]

by Lori Emerson

sister labs // Signal Lab & Media Archaeological Fundus

For years now, I’ve been yearning to go to Berlin to visit two labs that have the closest kinship to my own Media Archaeology Lab: the Signal Lab, run by Stefan Höltgen, and the Media Archaeological Fundus, founded by Wolfgang Ernst and now also run by Stefan. I finally got my chance to tour both labs in early […]