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Abstract: Lori Emerson will discuss how her research focuses on uncovering crisis points in past media, or, points at which there was the possibility, never fully realized, for technologies that are definitively “other” than what we have now. Beginning with a brief overview of the Media Archaeology Lab and some of the oddities in its collection, she will move on to discuss the cluster of projects she's currently working on called "Other Networks" - an excavation of the rarely discussed, underlying workings of networks that preceded and/or that currently exist outside of the internet.
Bio: Lori Emerson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is also Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. Emerson writes about media poetics as well as the history of computing, media archaeology, media theory, and digital humanities. She is currently working on a cluster of research projects she calls “Other Networks” or histories of telecommunications networks that existed before or outside of the Internet. She is co-author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies” (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, 2022) with Jussi Parikka and Darren Wershler and author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press, June 2014). She is also co-editor of three collections: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, with Marie-Laure Ryan and Benjamin Robertson (2014); Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell, with Derek Beaulieu (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013); and The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, with Darren Wershler (Coach House Books 2007).