Oh November!

Hello there! October happened! It’s election day tomorrow! Everything is fine!

Some news:

On Oct. 7 we took some things down to Pine Creek High School in Colorado Springs! It was a whole bunch of fun and the librarian who invited us wrote up our visit in a really nice little article: pinecreek.asd20.org/stories/a-visit-from-the-media-archaeology-lab-2024-10-08.
Back in July, MAL Director Lori Emerson gave a talk titled “Future Histories of Other Networks” at the our networks conference. The conference organizers have now shared videos of this year’s talks! Read the session description or watch Lori’s talk.
Last week, MAL Director Lori Emerson gave a talk on imaginary networks at a symposium called “After Memory” that took place at the Center for Art & Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. She also got the chance to visit the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, so please enjoy these Jean Luc Cornec sheep:

sculptures of sheep made out of telephone parts, with telephone cord bodies and telephone faces and handset feet

And also these chic and modern portable radio carrying ladies:

black and white photo of women in hats and overcoats carrying portable radios. captioned: chic und modern: das Kofferradio, 1950 (Chic and modern: the portable radio, 1950)

And this indoor telephone system demo:

two telephone poles with functional box, lines running between them, ceramic insulators. inside a museum setting with a drop ceiling

MAL Pal Spike hosted a group of German election observers and disinformation experts at the lab this past week as part of his ongoing other volunteer work supporting U.S. election integrity, especially with regards to technology and cybersecurity. We’re closed on election day because he’ll be working the polls on campus.
Finally, Spike (in addition to everything else he does) has a job where he is part of a team at SOPHOS that has been working for a LONG time on a cybersecurity counter-offense and defense project called Pacific Rim, and they’ve recently published a really comprehensive set of documents that you can check out here: sophos.com/en-us/content/pacific-rim. Read his mastodon post about all this here: infosec.exchange/@threatresearch/113403101183232696

That… is it for news? This month we’re reading Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm. As always, feel free to read along as much as you’re able and share your thoughts in the comments on the othernetworks.net blog post or in response to the posts we’ll be making on our various social media accounts using the hashtag #MALbookclub.

Keep an eye out at the end of the month for a pre-order for the new MAL t-shirt design that was actually commissioned this time last year but we’re really slow…

bye for now -

MAL