I recently posted the table of contents and a chronological list of network entries that will appear in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. As I try to make clear in the introduction, most entries also include examples of experiments with or on these networks because we often don’t know just how compelling a given network can be until we see artists exploring its limits and possibilities. Not surprisingly, however, just as we rarely understand how networks actually work, from the moment we send to the moment we receive, we also rarely attend to the underlying workings of media art ..read more

And here, friends, is the same list of networks I provided earlier in the table of contents for my forthcoming Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook but listed chronologically. Of course the list is impossibly incomplete but it still reveals some interesting lulls and surges of network activity. * unknown: Drums [1] unknown: Whistling [2] 3000 B.C.E.: Necromancy [53] 2600 B.C.E.: Library [42] 2100-2000 B.C.E.: Book [43] 1570 B.C.E.: Postal System [44] 400 B.C.E.: Hydraulic Semaphore [6] 300 B.C.E.: Fire or Smoke Signals [3] 50-40 B.C.E.: Pigeon Post [44.1] 1337: Flag Signaling [7] 14 ..read more

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a catalog of 150-200 networks that preceded or that exist outside of the internet. One of the many challenges of the project has been the abundance of fantastic material that can’t all go into the book; occasionally I have written entries and then had to take them out of the manuscript because they are, for example, one-off artist-created networks that are so ephemeral and so hybrid that they don’t fit neatly in any category. Below, is an example of just such a network: “A 3 Country Happening” from 1966 and created by Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, an ..read more

Below is the text of a talk I’m giving on September 8, 2022 for the Doing Experimental Media Archaeology research group at the University of Luxembourg. The text is written to be a talk, which means I haven’t been as thorough about citing outside sources as I would if it were to be published. *** 1. Introduction Today I would like to try to think through why and how to develop flexible, emergent, medium-specific, multiple methodologies for hands-on experimentation in media archaeology. The subject of my talk emerged from some very interesting meetings I had the opportunity to participate in la ..read more

Below is the text for the talk I’m giving as part of the Reconsidering John C. Lilly symposium that takes place online on April 2, 2022. I’m hoping to expand on the distinction between a behaviorialist and an ethological approach to thinking through (human)dolphinNets when I turn the talk into a book chapter in the coming months. *** Over the last month as I have been preparing to talk with you today about John C. Lilly, I kept asking myself: how did I get here? How did I end up trying to work through dolphin communication (of all the things) and how it involves the ad hoc creation of a water ..read more

Happily, libi striegl and I are slowly getting back to our Slow Networks experiments in the Media Archaeology Lab we began in 2020 as a way to, well, stay sane during the pandemic and have a little fun. To inaugurate our return, today’s experiment involves learning how to use our Fujinet network adapter. We first learned about this gadget from a piece our pal Benj Edwards penned in August 2021, “A Vintage Atari Is an Amazing Weather Terminal in 2020“. In that piece Edwards explains that Fujinet is basically a peripheral that works with any Atari 8-bit computer (taking advantage of these machin ..read more

Below is the pre-print version of a book chapter I wrote for The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, edited by James O’Sullivan and forthcoming in 2022. Gratitude to James for the opportunity to write this piece! * In the face of entrepreneurs’ and tech companies’ attempts to over determine the shape of what’s to come, how can we participate in (re)claiming communal ownership of the future? In what follows I think through a series of possible answers to this question by first unpacking why and how the past keeps getting eclipsed by an ever-receding future we seem to have little to n ..read more

Below is a piece, part of my larger Other Networks project, I originally posted on my blog some years ago but then took it down in the hopes that it would find a home in a journal. I’ve since realized that it would be better to share this piece on my website after all! *** 1.0 media determine our situationTwo years after the release of the Apple Macintosh in the U.S. and three years after the protocol TCP/IP was standardized – marking the birth of an international network of networks we now call “the Internet” – German media theorist Friedrich Kittler proclaimed “media determine our situation ..read more

I forgot how pleasurable and meaningful it can be to write book reviews! I am, then, very grateful to the Los Angeles Review of Books for publishing my review of three books (“Alternative Internets and Their Lost Histories“) which all, in their way, excavate alternative visions of the internet: Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software, Cait McKinney’s Information Activism, and Jenna Supp-Montgomerie’s When the Medium Was the Mission. Writing for a broader audience being what it is, the editor smartly cut 1000 words from my initial draft – but since I am still fond of the longer version I am posting ..read more

Is there a difference–or, how big could the difference really be–between a defunct network that may have stuttered along for just a year or two, thirty or forty years ago, and a fictional network that never existed at all? If the late 20th century and 21st century have taught us anything at all it’s that the boundary between reality and fiction is constantly eroding, despite our best efforts, which also means that the boundary between what we call ‘history’ and fiction is equally eroding. I have been collecting examples of “other networks” (networks that preceded the internet or that existed o ..read more