MAL Post: Welcome to 2020!
SPRING SEMESTER HOURS
Monday: 1 PM - 4 PM
Tuesday: 10 AM - 1 PM
Wednesday: 10 AM - 4 PM
Thursday: 10 AM - 3 PM
Friday: 12 PM - 3 PM
Saturday: 1 PM - 4 PM
2019: Year in review!
In 2019, the twelve volunteers and three staff members affiliated with the Media Archaeology Lab were incredibly productive. Everything increased in the MAL in the last year, including average number of weekly visitors (which went up to roughly 50 visitors a week, peaking at 200 visits during one week in fall semester) and number of class visits throughout the year (which went up to roughly 35 different class tours). The increase in the latter is due almost entirely to MAL Manager libi striegl, which we expand on below. That said, what follows is just a portion of what happened in the MAL throughout 2019 from one week to the next. In 2020, some projects we plan to work on include continuing our artist residency series, continuing to install “mini MAL” exhibits at businesses and properties across Boulder, launching a new website, launching several new amateur radio projects, documenting all our workflow processes, and continuing to fundraise for a full time staff member.
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Many of MAL volunteer Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s creative projects in 2019 were inspired from wandering and tinkering in the Media Archaeology Lab. SEICA Intermediary Interface Research Lab (IIRL): nowisthenextstep.rtf (video loop, 2019) resulted from investigating the NeXT Cube at the MAL. This piece was presented as part of a presentation at the New Media Caucus (College Arts Association, New York, NY) and at the Colorado State University's Electronic Art Speaker Series (Colorado Springs, CO). Practice-based research project Trash Queen Pulverator was published in the journal Continent on "Apocryphal Technologies" (Edited by former MAL residents Jamie Allen and Anthony Enns, Issue 8.1-2, 2019) with an introduction by Professor Lori Emerson. In 2020, Analog Sentiment (video, 2019) will be exhibited at the Arlington Arts Center, Virginia, which is a series of dances that was created from attempting to understand various media objects through their operating gestures and movements. The piece was based on her experience learning how to use a typewriter at the MAL.
With libi striegl’s help, MAL volunteer Amanda Hurtado learned to use the Mimeograph at the lab in order to create a 948 page book called ECHO. A gift for her daughter Alice’s first birthday, Amanda hand-stenciled a sound wave of one of Alice's earliest vocalizations (something that sounded a little like "echo"), and printed the sound wave until the stencil broke down. The first and last pages of the book will be published in ToCall Journal for their forthcoming music issue.
In addition to co-organizing the “What is a Feminist Lab?” symposium and co-authoring “Towards Feminist Labs: Provocations for Collective Knowledge-Making” (Critical Makers Reader. Eds. Loes Bogers and Letizia Chiappini. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Institute of Network Cultures. 2019), throughout the year Maya Livio was busy curating the MAL’s artist residency series which has been running since 2013. In 2019, the MAL hosted 12 residents from across the United States who were carefully selected from a competitive open call for proposals. These researchers- and artists-in-residence included faculty, graduate students, and independent creative practitioners who brought a broad set of interdisciplinary interests and expertise through the MAL’s doors. Resident research covered topics ranging from the interface design of computer desktops to experiments with the lab’s East German Kleincomputer, and from the queer history of computing to law enforcement technologies. Resident project outputs were equally diverse, including a virtual reality (VR) experience based on historical screensavers, a research paper on Scientology e-meters, and a video art project on the phenomenon of YouTube unboxing videos.
In 2019 volunteer Chris Torrence continued to work with David Hyde, who donated a Commodore Amiga 1000 to the MAL, on his digital recreation of the Bayeaux Tapestry. He’s creating this in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga and is hoping to complete the project in 2020. Chris also worked with libi striegl and Harry Edwards to repair a Friden calculator Edwards donated to the lab. This involved 3D modelling and printing of a broken gear, and then disassembling and reassembling the calculator. The Friden was used extensively in the Fall for an undergrad class. He also setup the hardware and software (ADTPro) to transfer floppy disk images to/from the Apple IIe in the MAL. This will allow us to both preserve original floppy disks by imaging them and uploading to the Internet Archive, and also to make new floppy disks from disk images. Visitors can hook up their modern Mac or PC using either a wireless connection or a USB serial cable. As a side note, on Chris’s YouTube channel he has a “Media Archaeology Lab” playlist where he’s collected all of his MAL-related videos.
Meanwhile, throughout the year libi striegl developed curriculum with and facilitated visits to the MAL from almost 30 different classes, ranging from small 10-12 person seminars to 200 person lectures that were able to visit in stages. Assignments included scavenger hunts, love letters to various media, in-depth research projects into the pop cultural significance of individual objects, and explorations of the history and evolution of various devices including mice, keyboards, and screens. She also continued to develop projects around the One Laptop Per Child collection, worked to expand the usability of the lab, and engaged in a variety of outreach efforts around campus and elsewhere. In the spring she facilitated a Retro Game Night event in conjunction with the BTU Lab, in September she curated a pop-up exhibit at the Museum of Boulder, and in October she curated an exhibit at the Whaaat?! Experimental Games Festival. She hosted a Women in Computer History Breakout Session at the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon in Denver in March, a “Crafty History of Computing” workshop at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art Fem Fest in May, and a “Take-It-Apart(y)” workshop at the Denver Art Museum in July, all of which were co-sponsored by the MAL. She also traveled to the Our Networks conference in Toronto in September and the Radical Networks conference in New York City in October to present “differNetworks”, a workshop developed through her research in the lab.
Volunteer Eric Magnuson worked on three main projects in the MAL throughout 2019. First, the MAL’s iPod has been loaded with games and other software. Using the Apple II's audio input, originally intended to be used with a cassette player, the software can be loaded on demand from the iPod into the Apple II. This allows visitors access to a large library of software that takes up a small footprint. Second, historically, the MAL has accessed all new donations into documents stored on Google Drive and on WordPress. Unfortunately, a formatting was never standardized, so the existing catalog is difficult to access, add to, and parse. During this project, all documents containing MAL catalog info were aggregated. Text processing was then done to strip files of needless formatting, and the resulting files were then converted into CSVs for processing. Concurrently, an online database was built to parse the CSVs and display them in a programmatic matter via an API. This not only allows the data to be stored in a more organized fashion, but the API enables easy access to our catalog from our upcoming relaunch of our website. As a result of the new API, website users will be able to search and traverse the entire MAL inventory. Future additions to the MAL catalog will also be facilitated by the new API. Third, Eric started creating a process to shoot representational photos of items in MAL’s catalog. The project involves setup of lighting for studio shots, processing of photos, and uploading of photos to the lab’s website.
At the beginning of 2019, Andy Brandt started to look at how he could apply his volunteer gig at the MAL to his day job. Part of what Andy does is to run a malware research lab out of his home, where he runs malware on real machines and observes its behavior. He began by looking at whether it was possible to use the machines in the MAL to run some of the oldest malware in existence, and whether there was anything he could learn about that malware that was applicable to modern information security. He was able to obtain viable samples of three very ancient malware families -- the BHP Virus (for Commodore 64), the ELK Cloner virus (for Apple II), and the Morris Worm (which affected certain mainframe servers running BSD 4.2). Using some custom hardware (the ZoomFloppy adapter for the Commodore 64, ADT Pro for the Apple II) he was able (with help from MAL volunteer Chris Torrence) to create floppies that he subsequently could use to infect and run the malware in its aboriginal physical medium. To run the Morris Worm, he obtained and built a hobbyist kit called a PiDP-11, which is a scale model that closely resembles the PDP-11, and enlisted the help of an expert to help him create a vulnerable environment identical to those that were used in 1988 when the Morris Worm was released on the early internet. At some point, when he has completed that build, he plans to donate the PiDP to the MAL. The research led to a presentation proposal getting accepted at two industry conferences - VirusBulletin, and Saintcon. The MAL was given prominent reference and thanks in the talk, which was very well received. What was most surprising was that all three malware families are clear antecedents to modern malware techniques and operations, and laid the groundwork for the emergence of, for example, memory-resident malware (ELK and BHP) and wormable exploits (Morris) that are common techniques now used widely by cybercriminals.
In addition to this project Andy helped build out the MAL's internal (wired) network and networked together most of the Macs along the south wall of the front room. With the help of libi striegl, they obtained and were able to build out and license the ESX server which MAL will be able to use to house digital archives, host internal web pages and other services, build out virtual machines for systems that no longer exist, and set up test environments that MAL can use to, for example, build an internal telephone network to test out modems, telephones, fax machines, or other telephony equipment. Andy brought in and installed a large selection of After Dark screensavers from his own collection, which a visiting scholar was able to use for her project about screensavers.
Finally, MAL Director Lori Emerson spent much of 2019 fundraising with the aim of growing the MAL’s collection, launching a new website, and - most importantly - giving the MAL a full time staff person. While we are still working on funding for a staff person, thanks to a very generous donation by Brad Feld we have grown our collection about tenfold and we look forward to sharing pieces of the new acquisitions in a room upstairs from the MAL as well as in small MAL exhibits around town. And thanks to grants from CU’s English Department and the Center for Humanities and the Arts, we will also be launching a beautiful new website whose front end is designed by Seth Kranzler and Will Denton of Channel Studio in NYC in the coming months and backend largely designed by volunteer Eric Magnuson. Throughout 2019, Emerson gave a keynote presentation on the MAL at the National Library of Norway and the University of Luxembourg. Emerson also continued to work on THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press) which will contain several case studies featuring the MAL in terms of its spatial configuration, its management, and its apparatuses. She also published a series of articles and book chapters on the MAL - two of which were co-written with MAL workers and PhD students: with libi striegl, “Anarchive as Technique | The Media Archaeology Lab's OLPC Mesh Network Project” (International Journal of Digital Humanities 1:1 [April 2019]: 1-12); and with Maya Livio. “Towards Feminist Labs: Provocations for Collective Knowledge-Making” (Critical Makers Reader. Eds. Loes Bogers and Letizia Chiappini. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Institute of Network Cultures. 2019). Other pieces authored by Emerson on the MAL include “The Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History” (Hands on Media History: A New Methodology in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Eds. John Ellis and Nick Hall. Routledge: 2019. 175-186) and “Lab as Living Thing, Media Archaeological Fundus as Assemblage” (Achaeographies: A Festschrift for Wolfgang Ernst, Ed. Stefan Holtgen. Berlin, Germany: Schwabe Verlag Publishers [2019]: 37-46). Finally, in April 2019, along with Maya Livio and Thea Lindquist, Emerson co-organized the “What is a Feminist Lab?” symposium which was also co-sponsored by the MAL. The event featured eight keynote speakers and numerous tours of labs across campus, including one of the MAL.
