Episode 030: Lori Emerson

Show Notes

Although the role that technology plays in a work of art can sometimes be fluid and flexible, stewardship of time-based media art still requires material connoisseurship: a deep understanding and appreciation for the medium, its artistic possibilities and limitations. This week’s guest Lori Emerson, has built an academic body of work steeped in just that sort of connoisseurship, rooted in the world of electronic and experimental poetry. By establishing the Media Archaeology Lab in 2009, Lori has made it possible for countless others to learn about the creative affordances of yesterday’s technologies. Tune in to hear Lori’s story, for a virtual walking tour of the lab, and to hear what solutions yesteryear’s technologies may have for today’s problems.

Links from the conversation with Lori
> https://www.mediaarchaeologylab.com/
> Visit the lab: https://go.oncehub.com/MediaArchaeologyLab
> Follow Lori on Twitter: https://twitter.com/loriemerson
> Follow the MAL on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mediarchaeology

Join the conversation:
https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence
https://www.instagram.com/artobsolescence/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. Welcome back folks. If you've been tuning in, since I started the show back in September, or if you have, since binge listened to the back catalog, you will have heard a lot at this point about artistic intent and the sometimes fluid and always changing nature of the technologies that manifest a work of art. Unless you're new here and none of that makes any sense. In which case I definitely recommend checking out some of our past episodes. You can find the full archive at artandobsolescence.com. There's over 20 hours of content for your binge listening, delight. Anyway, what I was getting at is that no matter what role a particular technology plays in a work of art, if it is, or isn't inherently part of the artist's intent and vision, we still need to understand, and I would argue, appreciate the technology. Time-based media art requires the same kind of material connoisseurship that you see with another disciplines, say textiles or paintings or furniture design. And it is this notion of appreciation and technical connoisseurship that brings us to this week's guest. 

[00:01:14] Lori: Hi, I'm Lori Emerson and I direct the Media Archeology Lab, and I also direct a PhD program here at CU Boulder called intermedia arts writing and performance. 

[00:01:23] Ben: Now, although Lori is an academic steeped in the world of experimental poetry and writing. The work that she and her colleagues are doing at the media archeology lab grew out of this idea of enabling encounters with experimental, electronic writing and other forms of culture on the exact vintage computers they were created on. So right up the alley of this show, and I am just so thrilled to share my chat with Lori, with you all. Before we get started though. I just wanted to give a huge, huge thank you to all of the listeners that donated to support the show over the past couple of months during our fundraiser. Thanks to all of you we maxed out our matching offer between all of your donations and the incredible generosity of the Bates Gossett family fund - thank you so much, Michael - we've raised around $7,000 and that will be going directly to support artists that we have on the show. And finally, before we get started, unfortunately, we had a bit of a technical snafu for the interview this week. So the sound quality on Lori's end will not have the high fidelity that you are used to on the show. I am so sorry. I hope you all forgive me. And perhaps you'll not even notice as you hear our brilliant guest, Lori Emerson. Tell her story. 

[00:02:33] Lori: My undergrad degree started off with me being an economics major cause I had no idea what I wanted to do. And then I took an economics course and realized that I didn't understand it, I hated at it, and I was terrible at it. Gradually my interests, turned toward experimental poetry. I went to school at the university of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and there was a poetry professor there by the name of Douglas Barber, one of those rare, never to be replaced people. And he was in experimental sound poetry groups in Canada since I think the 1960s. And he was friends with all of the major visual and concrete poets in Canada, but also internationally as well. And he blew my mind as a young person. I mean, when I was in undergrad, I thought poetry was the romantics. I thought it was Byron and, Yates and very sort of serious white men and then I met Doug barber and he introduced me first to Frank O'Hara and these completely sort of ridiculous playful poems that had words like ploop in them. I just remember being absolutely blown away . That this was poetry because the playfulness really appealed to me. And he would pull me into his office every week and just hand me giant stacks of, you know, at that time, I suppose, weird books by Richard Kostelanetz I remember there were a couple anthologies that Richard Kostelanetz had put together on notation and sound poetry and concrete poetry By the time I graduated from my undergrad degree I had naive, sweet, innocent ideas about me going on to be a experimental poet of some kind. At that time I was really interested in sound poetry and concrete poetry and experimental systems of musical notation. All of that kind of seemed like the perfect bundle of things that expressed who I was. I wrote a master's thesis on the poet, bpNichol in HyperCard believe it or not. I also took a class on Cyber Cultures as it was called then by someone named Christopher Keep. That class blew my mind too, because I mean, it's hard to describe what life was like in Victoria, Vancouver island in the mid to late nineties, but it was, I think, quite isolated, had really strong hippie undercurrent to it. I remember being in that class and people almost being ready to like overthrow the professor because they were so actually disgusted with the things that he was teaching us, like we did a unit on virtual shopping malls and people were just like, absolutely repulsed with the idea that we would go online to virtual shopping malls and do our shopping. That was the first time I'd really been exposed to any kind of thinking and work on digital media. I think there was an interesting confluence for me there with starting to think through digital media and software at that time and bpNichol, because here's the important part, bpNichol created one of the first kinetic digital poems in 1982, 1983 on an Apple IIe computer and he wrote it all by hand in Apple Basic and , I wrote a substantial part of that thesis on First Screening, which is the name the piece. 

Things really came together when I went to Buffalo to do my PhD in the poetics program there, because at the time it was the place in the English speaking world to study experimental poetry with people like Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein and Robert Creeley was there at the time. And It was a really, really exciting place to be. After a few years of me taking coursework and really being heavily influenced by these people, I realized that what I loved and what actually almost made me salivate was materiality, and I loved and still do the materiality of language. Just exploring the sounds or the feeling that the sounds of words make in your mouth and the vibration that you experience in your body. And also playing around with language as a sculptural medium. So I wrote a PhD dissertation on digital poetry and there was very little written or discussed at the time about the materiality of digital media and the materiality, especially digital poetry. A lot of it was just about describing what the poems were about. Maybe you mentioned that they were made in Flash or, hand coded in some way, but generally people did not think about or talk about what hardware and software were used to make these pieces. But my training with Stephen Scobie and Doug Barber in Canada, and then the Buffalo poetics program really gave me a whole set of theories and thinkers and poets and writers to help me think harder about the materiality of these digital poems.

 It didn't quite all come together for me in Buffalo, but then I got this job here at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I became friends with a guy named John Bennett on campus who ran the Atlas Institute and he was trying to support me because I was one of the first people hired at the university that was working in digital media and humanities. I think at that time, the university was trying really hard to make sure that I felt supported and he gave me a $20,000 grant to start a lab. So this is 2008, 2009 and I was thinking to myself what kind of computer lab could I possibly build at this time that's useful to English majors, that's not just a room full of contemporary computers. Over dinner with my spouse, we had the idea like wouldn't it be interesting if you tried to get, say a couple Apple IIe computers and you tried to get the code for bpNichol's, First Screening on five and a quarter inch floppys and you know, call that the lab, and why don't you call it the Archeological Media Lab? 

So then I spent the next year or two just picking away at trying to build up enough Apple IIe computers and enough copies of first screening on five and quarter inch floppies. So that undergraduate students could come and have hands on access to this poem and really start to think about what difference it made that bpNichol made it on this particular machine and what difference does it make when you use this keyboard and the tactility of the keys and the sound of the drive whirring when you put the floppy disc in there. One of the great things about being Canadian is that Canada's a pretty small country. And so it was not hard to get in touch with bpNichol's, widow, Ellie Nichol, and she's really facilitated us having these uh, manuscript versions of first screening on floppy discs that I don't think are available anywhere else. What happened then was that I got on Twitter and I started, talking out loud to people about what I was doing and a lot of library folks and archivists, I think helped me understand why and how this was a really cool, interesting thing that I was doing, because I didn't completely understand it myself and I just started to go deeper and deeper into the world of computer hardware and software and honestly, I became less interested in traditional close readings of literature and poetry, and just much more interested in the material underpinnings of how writing and literature and art are created. Before long, I started to make friends with people on eBay and they started to send me their stuff for free like one of our longest time donors, his name is Keith Moore, I met on eBay and he has given us so much cool stuff over the years. It's really incredible. And then I also started to contact people on Craigslist to ask them if they might be interested in giving their sons or daughters old game consoles that have been gathering dust in the basement to this very esteemed establishment of the university of Colorado Boulder. And I'd say nine times outta 10 it worked. 

The first thing to know about the lab is that it is located in a house that's probably from the 1920s on the edge of campus and it is in the basement of this house. So it's very unobtrusive, very modest and the upside to this location is that it gives us a ton of freedom to just do whatever we want. So you walk up to the house and you go down some very steep stairs that are not ADA compliant, which really bothers me, and then you walk through a old 1920s door, and then you're in what probably used to be at some point a living room and now is a long narrow room filled with most of our desktop computers. There's like, two or three different timelines going on around the room. The total square footage of the lab might be 1100 square feet, but it's very weird labyrinthine space. So we've really had to be creative with how we use the space. The way we've decided to exhibit our machines is a little quirky. Uh, As soon as you walk in the door, you're met with our machines from the 1970s, that work by switches. So we've got an Altair 8800 B from 1976, a PDP 8E from, maybe the early seventies, and then it will gradually wind its way over to a line of Apple Computers that goes all the way from a Apple II computer, to an iMac and then the chronology starts again on the opposite side of the room with a TRS 80 and then moves its way back up again to the most recent one, which is a, SGI Indy and mixed in there are some interesting clones from Eastern Europe, a computer from East Germany a clone from Sweden and also mixed in there are on some shelves are our collection of laptops, luggables and portables. And when you walk in the door above the Apple IIE computers is a wall, a solid wall of software for all of the machines that are in the lab. Cramed into a corner of the same room are some lie detectors from, I think one looks quite old, could be from the 1960s. The other is from the 1970s. And then we also have some believe it or not Scientology E meters mixed in there, along with all of the manuals for how they work. 

 That's room one and then you walk down a weird narrow hallway between two bathrooms, cause again, this was, somebody's living area in the early 20th century and. Down one hallway is our equally crammed storage space workspace. filled with spare parts, computers that are in the process of being repaired or taken apart various projects. Uh, we go back down the main hallway there's a large printed matter collection that has all kinds of interesting, weird tidbits. There's a book that's called the first artificial intelligence coloring book, which I think is from the 1970s. It is a weird artifact. Along with copies of every issue of Byte magazine all kind of interesting books written by people that did what was called Humanities Computing back in the day. So 1960s era, 1970s era experiments with trying to use computers to write concordances and dry stuff like that. Then we enter the kitchen, which has been turned into a secondary lab that's run by my colleague Thora Brylowe and it's, dedicated to letter, press and printing it's very, very cool little space. And finally we get into the back long narrow room that has a little listening station with a couch and a couple chairs and we have an eight track player, record player, cassette player, and also an Edison Diamond Disc phonograph player from 1912, that works by hand crank, no electricity. To the left of this little listening area, we have a nook full of typewriters. And then when you walk further back into the room, we have a wall of analog media that includes magic lanterns and projectors of all kinds, cameras. Then we have another wall of cell phones and various PDAs. And then in the very back corner, it's all gaming. It's an entire wall of, game consoles and old CRTs and television sets. I really love our Vetrex Game Console. It's a vector based video game console and it comes with a light pen and really cool cartridges and there's one in particular called Animaction that allows you to create these gorgeous vector based animations using the light pen. You can create animations within a minute or two, you know, they're not super sophisticated, but it's just such an interesting example of what an alternative world in game consoles could have looked like? So that's basically my tour of the lab. We get random people on vacation who read about the MAL on Atlas Obscura, and they think, oh, what the hell? It sounds cool. Stop by and go see the Media Archaeology Lab. We get families, we get high school students, we get undergrads, honestly, I wouldn't say that there's a, single demographic of person that comes to the lab, but I can say that the demographic that is most enthusiastic are just, people who are tinkerers generally get really, really excited about the lab.

[00:17:30] Ben: It sounds like maybe the mission of the Media Archeology lab has shifted over the years. How would, you define it today?

[00:17:36] Lori: It has gone from an entity that I used, I think, to justify my own research and teaching to an entity that is partly a vehicle for something like an artistic practice. Maybe that sounds goofy, but I do think of it as my own quirky creative practice. It's a vehicle for me to explore any old whim as well as, a vehicle for other people associated with the lab to explore. A lot of what goes on in the lab is unstructured and free flowing and fluid and playful. It gives me great joy and I think the other really important part of the lab today is the fact that it's a hub for community. It really is, again, no longer about me and my work. It's much more about using the lab as a means to gather people together. Either you know, students on campus who just need a place to belong to, or we've got some volunteers who work in the tech industry and they feel like they need a place to belong to like a, a meaningful place to belong to. That's not just a company or a, corporation. And it's also a place for artists and, people who just love tinkering with electronics and just can't get enough of it. The project that continues to give me the most delight is one by Jamie Allen and it was called how to tell a lie. And in this project, he was reflecting on what he calls apocryphal tech. And basically he was thinking about how lie detectors and machines like the Scientology E meters construct an idea of truths and verifiability through the performance of objective measurement. Every time I pull out the Scientology Emeters, they blow my mind and I also have this irrational fear that the Scientology people are gonna show up at the lab, and demand their truth machines back. We've had artists come to the lab and work in there creating electronic music with, Commodor 64 and stuff like that and then put on a performance at the end of it and I've really taken a lot of pleasure in that. 

[00:19:50] Ben: One of the things that I love about the work that you do is that, it kind of immerses you in this history of interfaces and computer technologies. Having such immersion in that, are there any lessons that you think the past has for writers or artists, or I guess really anyone that uses technology to today?

[00:20:12] Lori: I actually recently wrote a piece called six difficult and inconvenient values to reclaim the future with old media. And that was my, first go at really trying to articulate for myself the values that I think we can take from old media and the six main ones that I ended up with are slow, small, open, cooperative, care, and failure. I really enjoy just working through the value of, for example, slowness thinking about or using old media as an opportunity to think about what else might be possible outside of this relentless push toward productivity and consumption and waste this cycle that we're all stuck in, that I think is so exemplified by smartphones in the way we are encouraged and inevitably forced to throw away our cell phones after, or maybe five years at most. You look Altair 8800B in the lab from 1976 that still works perfectly, but of course it is incredibly slow and it's incredibly inefficient by today's standards. But I like to think of it as an opportunity to decelerate or an opportunity to get away from this frenetic movement of electronics from our homes and offices to e-waste sites on the other side of the globe. I think slowness is really an important value. Smallness also, I've been thinking a lot about small networks in particular. My current research is heading toward the history of networks that came before the internet or that existed outside of the internet and I've been, trying to use the MAL as a vehicle to think more about the affordances of bulletin board systems, for example, and thinking about the value of having a small network that's mostly of local users that you could use the bulletin board system as an opportunity to get to know people in your community. You could also set up your own bulletin board system and customize it. Not the easiest thing in the world, but not impossible. And so you're not relying on these impersonal corporations that are really mostly only interested in making a profit and instead you can build your own network and make it oriented toward community, for example. Yeah. So I think, the value of openness that I mentioned as well fits well with the bulletin board system, the fact that you can have a network and understand how it works and in fact, build it yourself and customize it exactly as you'd like to have. It it's really powerful. Also, the value of care, caring for material machines and trying to make sure that they last as long as possible, rather than just churning through your computers or your smartphones as quickly as possible. There's a lot to be learned from failure and, you know, our, current consumer culture, that's so focused on efficiency and productivity and getting anything done as quickly as possible is really adamantly opposed to failure. But when things break, it is an incredible opportunity to figure out how they work and to slow down and try to take them apart and try to understand how they work from the inside out. 

[00:23:46] Ben: What has been the biggest challenge in running the media archeology lab so many years?

[00:23:51] Lori: I worry about longevity, the longevity of the lab and whether it can you to exist 10 years from now, 20 years from now but I also know that if the lab has to die, that's not the end of the world. If we have to scale way, way back that will be fine as well. The other major challenge is really just space and infrastructure. We are overflowing, we're busting at the seams. Uh, We just don't have enough room to maneuver in our current space. It is not accessible for people with mobility issues, and every time it rains it floods a little bit believe it or not. We've got sandbags in certain corners of the lab, but the fact that we're. Known around the world for being the lab that we are and that we have to have sandbags for inevitable flooding is a little bit ridiculous. And every time the wind blows the windows blow open. It's not glamorous. I mean, let's be honest. When people have asked me in the past, whether I have advice for them starting up their own Media Archaeology Lab, given all the things that I told you about the stuff that people are willing to give away for free, especially for the sake of research or teaching or artistic practice. I think really the hardest thing to come by is space. My other piece of advice too, is that relationships with people are more important than machines and I know that sounds uh, kind of, corny or preachy, but I mean it so sincerely because I have learned over the years that you can have a whole bunch of really cool machines in a room, but it really doesn't matter unless you have a, community of people that exist around the machines, because who cares about vintage computers sitting in a room? It's about what you can do with them, through them and around them. I think that really matters. My last piece of advice is to do what you wanna do at the margins rather than aim to make a big splash and, become really well known for your thing, do it at the margins where there's freedom to maneuver and experiment. We are in a really fortunate position where we've become well known for what we do after us doing things at the margins. And so it has meant that we're encouraged to keep doing what we're doing even though it's a little bit suspect at times. The big plan is to see how long we can keep doing the goofy stuff that we're doing. That's the dream. Last month I did come up with a, semi zany idea. The new challenge is to see whether I can get funding to pay for a MAL mobile I love this idea. Get an old van fix it up and fill it with retro tech and take it on the road. There is a book coming out in a couple weeks called the Lab Book. And It's a book that I co-wrote with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka and it is about media labs, the past present and future of media labs. And there's a case study in there of the meteor archeology lab, along with a case study of some labs that we're critical of and some labs that we really have huge respect for. 

[00:27:04] Ben: if listeners want to come pay a visit to the Media Archeology Lab, how can they do that?

[00:27:10] Lori: They can visit our website or they can message us on Twitter probably the easiest way is to drop me a note on Twitter I'm @loriemerson, L O R I E M E R S O N. 

[00:27:22] Ben: And there you have it folks. If you find yourself in the Boulder Colorado area, definitely check out the Media Archeology Lab I cannot recommend it enough. And I will put Lori's information in the show notes. Thank you so much, Lori, for taking the time to chat and as always, thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's show. If you liked what you heard this week, I hope you'll help me continue building the little community of the 600 or so people that tune in here each week, by sharing the episode with a friend, you can find the show notes and full transcript artandobsolescence.com and as always, you can find clips and highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.