MAY
Hi friends! A little bit of news for you…
Residency Updates
Rob Ray wrapped up his residency at the end of April with a fantastic workshop titled: Build Your Own Creative Person’s Survival Kit! (and Other Strategies for People Insistent on Waking Up Tomorrow and Trying to Do Something Interesting). A bit of the video is still up here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2129527635 if you’d like to see some of what he had to say.
Rob also took a series of UV portraits of objects in the lab, more of which are up on our Mastodon account and our Instagram.
Resident Andy DiLallo has started making recordings of the objects in the lab, and hopefully we’ll have some of those to share with you all soon. Thanks to those who completed the survey we sent out last month!
And, May resident Paul O’Neill has started his time in the lab by diving in to our book collection, looking at all things networking. More updates as he gets further in to his time with us!
Other Networks Updates
On May 2nd MAL Founding Director Lori Emerson gave a talk on some of the imaginary networks she writes about in her forthcoming book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. The talk was titled "The Material Lives of Phantasmic Networks" and was hosted by the Université de Paris 1.
Also, the Other Networks reading group continues - this month we’re reading Lurking by Joanne McNeil. We’ll be trying out some live reading time this month, so keep a look out on our social media accounts. Posts are up at othernetworks.net / Mastodon / Bluesky / Instagram - follow along wherever makes sense for you!
Operations Stuff
We’re headed into summer, so expect our hours to shift a bit. We don’t know yet what the summer schedule will be, but we’ll keep it updated on our Mastodon hours post.
On that note, if you are interested in volunteering with us, please reach out! We’re looking for folks who can help in a variety of ways, from hosting open house hours to doing virtual volunteer work cleaning up our catalog to taking things home for repairs. If you’re interested, please fill out our volunteer form.
Finally, and we promise not to do this very often:
As you may know, MAL is part of the University of Colorado but generally a lot of our funding has come from external donors, and that has contributed to our ability to operate with a little more freedom, do weirder things, be more open and accessible to the general public than most university stuff. But, as these things go, a lot of those donors are shifting their priorities or scaling back.
We want to be able to continue being a resource in the way we have become accustomed to - maintaining our collection in working order as much as possible, offering these tools to artists and scholars and students and the general public, and doing our level best to be as weird as possible about it.
So, while we're looking at grants and other funding modes that we can shift to, we are also asking you all: does your workplace have a philanthropic fund? Do you or someone you know have the means to make recurring donations? Please consider asking them to contribute to our support fund, or doing so yourself: https://giving.cu.edu/fund/media-archaeology-lab-support-fund
THANKS FOR READING - please know we appreciate you all!
🌈 MAL 🌈