Writing When the Internet was 'Internet'
Lori Emerson Media Archeology Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder

Seminar with Lori Emerson, Media Archeology Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder - http://mediaarchaeologylab.com. In this talk I will discuss the underlying philosophy of the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) as a place where students, teachers, artists, writers, and researchers "do" media archaeology by using obsolete but still functioning hardware and software.%0A%0AI will discuss how, in my own research, best exemplified by Reading Writing Interfaces, I have used the MAL to describe a non-linear and non-teleological series of media phenomena - or ruptures - as a way to avoid reinstating a model of media history that tends toward narratives of progress and generally ignores neglected, failed, or dead media. I have also come to understand the MAL as a sort of "variontological" space in its own right, a place where, depending on your approach, you will find opportunities for research and teaching in myriad configurations as well as a host of other, less clearly defined activities made possible by a collection that is both object and tool. The MAL is an archive for original works of digital art/literature along with their original platforms. It is an archive for media objects. It a site for artistic interventions, experiments, and projects via MALpractices, MALware, MALfunctions. It is a flexible, fluid space for practice-based research from a range of disciplines including literature, art, media studies, history of technology, computer science, library science, and archives. It is an apparatus through which we come to understand a complex history and the consequences of that history. It offers past solutions for present problems.%0A%0AIn short, the MAL turns the archive and the museum inside out in the interests of disrupting two tendencies that seem to support and feed each other: a) the tendency to create neat teleologies of technological progress that span from past to present and b) the tendency to represent such teleologies through exhibits that display only the outsides and surfaces of these artifacts rather than their unique, material, operational sides.