April
Hi friends! We have some April news for you!
Residency Updates
We’ve got 2 residents working in the lab this month - Rob Ray and Andy DiLallo.
Rob Ray is developing a speculative historical worldbuilding project examining the topics of anarchist collectives, DIY/DIT (Do It Yourself/Do It Together), community building, radio, and space exploration. During the MAL residency, he will experiment with augmented reality as a live-streaming technology and a digital capability that positions his existing broadcasting platform as a framework for adventurous expressions of anarchist ideology, retro-engineering, and electronic music. He plans on using an iPhone 11 Pro for video capture and Unity’s AR Foundation framework to develop the augmented reality components. His first AR experiment will be placing virtual 3D objects on top of the two turntables that revolve and respond to the DJ’s interactions with the turntables and mixer. The labels on the records will be used as fiduciary markers to spawn the models and track the rotation of the vinyl records through an image-tracking system that identifies vinyl, CD, and cassette tape covers and displays a 3D model. He plans to broadcast from Boulder, Colorado using the MAL catalog as creative prompts for DJ setlists and using the electronics as important sound and video components in the DJ sets.
Andy DiLallo is working on a curated “sample pack” of sounds found in the MAL. He’ll be recording high quality audio using a range of microphones including piezo, supercardioid condenser, and electromagnetic.
He’s interested in community input on what devices in the collection should definitely be included in that sample pack, and has created a form for folks to fill out if they have thoughts on the matter. You can find that here - please submit by April 18 if you’d like to share your opinion.
MAL Folks Doing Neat Stuff
MAL Director Lori Emerson was featured on Deutschlandfunk (German public radio) for a short program on the enduring appeal of floppy disks for creating and distributing music. You can listen to Lori talking with a lovely sounding German speaker dubbed over her here.
Othernetworks Book Club
This month’s book club book is The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll, and we thought this time around we’d invite responses to both the book and to the following prompts:
What were your early (possibly pre-internet) social media experiences like?
How have those experiences framed your interaction with social media now?
What do you wish had been carried over to the contemporary internet?
We welcome your responses and discussion on the othernetworks.net book club post or on Mastodon, Bluesky and Instagram!
That’s it for this month -
ttfn, MAL