November

image from a letraset catalog, 3 sets of radiating lines coming out from a central circle

Hi y'all - just a few updates as fall really settles in for us.

First -

We will be at WHAAAT!? Festival on Saturday November 7! MAL will host our usual That Kid In Your Neighborhood's Basement retro games arcade, there will be a live game show (with MAL managing director libi as a contestant!), the usual cereal bar for breakfast but also a glizzy bar for lunch, and this year's keynote speaker is Jamin Warren from Kill Screen. The theme this year is... well, read their website for yourself. This one's got layers of absurdity and experimental play... and let's just say that MAL has joined the revolution. Ticket purchases & info about what's included at each level are here.

EXCITING UPDATE!

Whaaat!? Keynote speaker Jamin Warren will do a short talk & play session with us in the MiniMAL space in CASE W25o on Monday, Nov. 9 at noon! Bring a lunch, bring a friend, come by and hang!

Second -

In addition to our usual curated selection of retro games, our arcade at MAL will feature the creation our October Practitioner-in-Residence Cory McKague assembled while at the lab last month! The Spectral Scanner is a physical manifestation of Cory's ongoing work with the VR game Watsonville.

Monitor connected to oscilloscope displaying a frequency map for a Spectral Scanner

Third -

Our second Practitioner-in-Residence this cohort, Chris Combs, has been inhabiting the lab for the past 10 days engaging with all sorts of different parts of the collection - HyperCard and the ImageWriterII printer, for a start. Check out his work on his instagram and watch our socials for final documentation as he wraps up his time with us this week.

Fourth -

Our founder & director Lori Emerson gave a keynote presentation, “Liberation Radio, From Technology to Techniques,” for the Mediehistoriskt arkiv Symposium at Stockholm University (Sweden) on October 15th. Read the abstract here.

Finally -

Last month Lori and libi published a typewritten, hand-sewn zine through the Media Archaeology Lab titled "How to Spend Ten Years Repairing a Computer and Why You Should Too." You can find copies at the MiniMAL in CASE W250 and a print-ready version is also available here: https://archive.org/details/lisazine/cover_full/.

That's it for today, folks - if you're in the US & able to do so, go vote tomorrow (if you haven't already!)

More soon -
🌈MAL