June is here!

staticky television color test bars

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.

illustration of a person using a phenakistiscope

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