Post #1080747

text of the short talk i gave today at the Temple U electronics faire: The Media Archaeology Lab at CU Boulder is by necessity a site of continual repair. Our mission, broadly speaking, is to give hands-on access to functional, obsolete technologies to anyone who visits. To do that, we have to keep those obsolete technologies functional. And when I say we, I often mean me but I always mean the community of collaborators and knowledge holders that the MAL has become. I have managed the day-to-day operations in the MAL to ever-greater degree over the past 9 and a half years, and often find myself in charge of either doing or coordinating repairs on everything from typewriters to 40 year old desktop computers to game consoles. But the lab constitutes a network of connections, both near and far, both more and less involved. I can and do call on all of that generously given information and time constantly.