A belated Happy New Year from the MAL!

A bit belatedly, MAL Director Lori Emerson, MAL Manager libi striegl, and the whole team of MALPals would like to wish you all a healthy and happy 2022! We also want to thank you all for your continued support of the lab over the past year. 2021 certainly had its challenges but having the lab as a source of community and joy in our lives certainly improved the quality of so many lives. 

Surprisingly, 2021 also turned out to be a productive year for the MAL and we hope you don’t mind us sharing some of our accomplishments! The full list is below but here are some highlights:

  1. We are in the process of setting up MALnodes around campus for distributed installations/exhibits/small work stations: MAL Hub (the MAL's main space), MAL Node1 (dedicated to slow networks, radio-related material and projects), MAL Node 2 (also dedicated to slow networks, our new collection of functioning Minitels, and OLPCs)
  2. We helped create an informal antiracist lab working group of small labs/centers across campus (Atlas, CMCI, A&S, Engineering, Fiske Planetarium); the group pitched in funding for student worker LeeLee James to create with Alicia Gibb a diversity toolkit for hackerspaces; this resulted in two important documents: “How to Write a Code of Conduct” and “Evolving Aspects of a Welcoming Community”
  3. 9News did a feature on the MAL that aired Tuesday November 23, 2021
  4. We co-sponsored the Computer Mouse Conference along with the Processing Foundation and The Coding Train; through lectures, video performances, live panel discussions, writing, a live zine, and a computer mouse tear-down workshop participants explored the question: what does the mouse see?
  5. In the coming months we will launch MALwear.net--a separate website dedicated to donations in exchange for MAL schwag which our fans have been persistently asking for over the years

We hope you’ll enjoy the full update below and here’s hoping for another good year for us all!

General MAL News:

  • after a year hiatus because of Covid-19, we restarted open house hours in September 2021 and while we've had to make some adjustments as each wave of Covid-19 comes and goes, we have been so pleased to host countless in-person and virtual tours for classes and individuals around the world
  • MAL manager libi striegl has put a tremendous amount of energy into building our social media presence - work that has paid off in terms of our fundraising and visibility. Over the span of 2021, she increased our followers on Twitter by 3400, generated 4 million impressions, 137,000 visits to our profile page, and 4200 mentions 
  • we were recently given a functioning PDP-8e from an individual in Mountain View, CA and we continue to fawn over its beautiful design and also work towards getting it functional with our DEC video terminal 
  • while we've had to move in and out of several additional small spaces across campus to accommodate our growing collection, we are pleased to announce we are in the process of setting up MALnodes around campus for distributed installations/exhibits/small work stations: MAL Hub (the MAL's main space), MAL Node1 (dedicated to slow networks, radio-related material and projects), MAL Node 2 (also dedicated to slow networks, our new collection of functioning Minitels, and OLPCs)
  • we have also made a few important hires including an individual who is doing repair work for us and several part-time student interns in Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, English, and ATLAS
  • we are in the process of purchasing the archive of Tom Klinkowstein, a pioneering telecommunications artist from the 1980s, after which we will digitize his materials and make them available to the public for the first time ever
  • relatedly, we have begun working with a metadata librarian at the CU Libraries to incorporate all of the MAL catalog in the library catalog
  • we've expanded our reach with students, especially in CMCI and in the CINE department, serving as a location for a number of film shoots and audio projects and continuing to be the focus of student-led research

DEI Initiatives:

  • in the past year we created an informal antiracist lab working group of small labs/centers across campus (Atlas, CMCI, A&S, Engineering, Fiske Planetarium); each member of the group pitched in funding to pay for student worker LeeLee James to create with Alicia Gibb a diversity toolkit for hackerspaces; this resulted in two documents: “How to Write a Code of Conduct” and “Evolving Aspects of a Welcoming Community”
  • we distributed three rounds of small grants for individuals wishing to undertake research or creative practice in the lab on anything related to the intersection of race and technology;
  • we co-sponsored Inclusive Pedagogy workshops hosted by the College of Media, Communication, and Information
  • we co-sponsored a post-doctoral position for Dr. Maryam Muliaee along with a related talk series on feminism and media archaeology; speakers have included Dr. Muliaee and will include Dr. Garnet Hertz and Dr. Jussi Parikka in March and April of 2022
  • we are organizing a workshop in January by Dr. Shaz Z on decolonized lab spaces

Media:

Collaborations:

  • we collaborated throughout the year with Jas Brooks and the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago as they explore the history of smell as a modality in video gaming and other media; this has so far included a panel with members of the Weston Game Lab & Infocom author and game designer Steve Meretzky on the use of smell in the game Leather Goddesses of Phobos; and the testing of re-created scratch and sniff cards from vintage games
  • we co-sponsored the Computer Mouse Conference along with the Processing Foundation and The Coding Train; through lectures, video performances, live panel discussions, writing, a live zine, and a computer mouse tear-down workshop participants explored the question: what does the mouse see?
  • we hosted several retro game streams w/ Whaaat!? Festival
  • we assisted a pioneering net artist with the recovery of net art projects from early 1990s
  • we were used as a location for upcoming music video from filmmaker and CINE instructor Laura Conway

Fundraising:

  • in January 2021 we hosted a virtual tour of the MAL that was open to anyone in the world; the event was free or pay what you can; 170+ people registered and we raised $1000
  • we hosted two international Apple volunteer events focused on group catalog clean up and edit; we had many volunteers from Australia and China and we raised about $1000 in matching funds from Apple
  • we ran a 1-day pop-up fundraiser on Twitter and raised $1100, sending donors limited-edition stickers as 'thanks'
  • in the coming months we will launch MALwear.net--a separate website dedicated to donations in exchange for MAL merch 

Publications and Talks:

  • Lori Emerson and libi striegl gave a talk about the lab called “The Computer Lab of your Dreams” and and a virtual tour a graduate student group from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (March 2021)
  • Lori Emerson signed a contract for Future Histories of the Internet catalog (Anthology Editions) that will feature MAL objects and slow network experiments
  • Emerson also wrote numerous book chapters and articles on the MAL that will be published in 2022: 
    • “How to Read a Network.” The Digital Reading Condition. Eds. Maria Engberg, Iben Have, Birgitte Pedersen. London: Routledge 
    • “Reclaim the Future With Old Media.” Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. Ed. James O’Sullivan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
    • “Floppy Disks and a Curable Kind of Melancholia.” Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlife of a Flexible Medium. Eds. Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar. Eindhoven, NL: Onomatopee
    • “Reclaim the Future with the Past in the Media Archaeology Lab.” MinitelSE. Ed. Benjamin Gaulon 
  • finally, Emerson gave a keynote on the MAL in Mexico City titled “The Media Archaeology Lab as Anti-Museum Museum” for the conference Heritage in a Bit, hosted by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Dirección Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural of the Tecnológico de Monterrey.