June is here!

Hello friends! We're settling in to our summer and things are a little more relaxed around the lab, but we do still have open house hours on Tuesday afternoons (1:30-4:30) and most of the day Friday (10:00 - 4:00). We are also usually able to schedule a couple of tours outside of those times each week - just reach out and we'll see what we can do!
Our big news for the summer...
is that we will be shifting our pop-up space from the Other Networks exhibit we curated for spring semester to a new exhibit titled Media Before Media for fall semester! This exhibit will explore a wide range of early devices including mechanical calculators, robot toys and automata, pre-cinema visual toys, early computational art making devices, past examples of attempts at artificial intelligence, and more.

To help facilitate the purchase of some new devices for the exhibit, we're running a small fundraiser. Some of the pieces we're hoping to purchase include: a wind-up automaton, a magnetic wire recorder, wire recordings and blank wire, a stereoscope viewer, and a miniature phenakistiscope. If you'd like to contribute to the fund we're using to purchase, you can do so through our paypal pool. We'll be putting together a little thank-you pack including stickers and limited-edition postcards of images from the MAL collection for donations over $15, so please make sure to include a good contact email address so we can reach out to you for shipping info.
In other news around the lab:
- MAL director Lori Emerson was interviewed by the college magazine about her book, Other Networks.
- We are well on our way to determining the Practitioner-In-Residence cohort for 2025/26! We should have our finalists selected by the time our next newsletter arrives.
- Visiting artist Jazmyn Crosby will be at the lab in late June to do some site-specific work and will be performing live on our favorite radio station, Radio 1190 (exact date TBD).
- MAL Pal Andrew Brandt will be presenting at Black Hat this July.
- MAL managing director libi rose striegl will be taking part in the 4th Digital Naturalisms Conference in July.
That's all for now!
-MAL