other networks

Thanks to the Media Archaeology Lab and the College of Media, Communication, and Information, we have launched a pop-up that is themed around “Other Networks”! Stop by CASE W250 on the CU Boulder campus and take a break from the internet – we have functioning Minitels, a single line telephone circuit, One Laptop Per Child mesh network, CB radio and various other kinds of radios, videophones, and a gaming corner. Coming soon: four connected NABU computers!

You can find open house hours for the pop up here. We will also be hosting a series of workshops throughout the semester – the first is an open skill share “Give yourself a Valentine’s gift, break up with Corporate Social Media!“

More soon and we hope to see you in person if you live in the area.

We have one last talk related to the “Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II” installation, coming up on Monday Sept. 23^rd at 12pm on Twitch/Zoom.

Who: Professor Samuel Duwe
What: “Colonization at the Speed of Light: An Archaeological Study of Communication Technology and the Settlement of the American West”
When: 12pm MT
Where: Streaming on Twitch

This talk addresses the intersections between anthropology, history, and technology to explore how the development of two-way communication networks in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were tied to the American colonization of the American Southwest. While this takes many forms (railroads/telegraph, telephones, radio), I specifically focus here on one brief but dramatic event: the Geronimo Campaign of 1886. I am currently examining the network of heliographs (sun-mirror signaling) employed by the U.S. Army in southeastern Arizona to aid in capturing the Apache leader. Through a synthesis of archaeological material, archival records, and GIS analysis I seek to virtually reconstruct this network to address its debated effectiveness in warfare as well as begin to broach how the Apache conceptualized, responded, and adapted to a novel network of surveillance.

Samuel Duwe is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is broadly interested in integrating archaeology, oral history, ethnography, and historical documents to understand the development of worldview and society, particularly during colonial encounters. In addition to work on American colonialism he has spent two decades working for and with Pueblo communities to document dynamic histories of adaptation and survivance.

We would love to see you on the screen and please feel free to share with anyone you think might be interested.

Thank you so much for all the support you’ve shown us for Phil Peters and David Rueter’s “Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II” in CASE W250 (on the CU Boulder campus) that will be available for you to actually use until the end of September. Details on hours you can stop by and try making phone calls through a fence are below.

But! Just as importantly! We are very excited to host Professor Cheryl Higashida on Friday September 13^th at 12:00pm in the installation itself (CASE W250). 

Prof. Higashida will be giving a talk titled “Radiotelephony, Race, and Rights.” In the 1960s, as Black, Brown, and white Americans fought for civil, labor, and community rights, the mundane matter of telephone service was vital to coordinating actions, publicizing demands, and keeping activists and strikers alive.  This talk shows how the civil rights and farm workers movements developed their own radiotelephone systems, thereby challenging the whiteness of mobile telephony.  This history of social movement telephony amplifies linkages between the civil rights and farm workers movements as well as crucial differences between their respective pursuits of political progress through technological projects.

Prof. Higashida is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (University of Illinois Press, 2012).  She is currently working on a cultural history of U.S. New Left movements, sound technology, and race in the second half of the twentieth century.  Articles from this research are published in American Quarterly and African American Literature in Transition: 1960-1970.

If you can’t attend in person, we are also streaming her talk on our Twitch channel – just go to https://www.twitch.tv/mediaarchaeology. 

Finally, thanks to libi striegl and an incredible group of volunteers, open house hours for the installation are:

Mondays 3:00pm to 6:00pm
Tuesdays 1:30pm-4:30pm
Wednesdays 9:30am-12:30pm
Thursdays 9am-12pm and 3:00-6:00pm
Fridays 11am-2pm