PSA // other networks NYC launch
“what began as a mere sensation is beginning to take form, the form of another internet.”
Back in February, I posted about Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, Lori Emerson’s magnificent new book on the history and experimental uses of alternate communications networks that I edited for Anthology Editions. At the time, the book had just been announced for preorder, but the intervening weeks have brought gorgeous advance copies and happening promo opportunities and now I am in the extremely cozy position of highlighting the following info:
⊳ Other Networks’ NYC launch is this Saturday, April 26, at Rhizome World at WSA (161 Water Street);
⊳ Lori will be presenting from 2:00–3:00pm, as part of the weekend’s “Another Internet Is Possible” programming block;
⊳ and tickets are free.
Last weekend I checked out the exhibition, which is unsurprisingly sick and well worth taking some time to explore--to say nothing of the upcoming weeks’ programming on key topics in the historical overlaps of art and networked communication, including Berkeley’s Community Memory bulletin board system, which plays a large role in Other Networks. You should go, is what I’m saying, even if you can’t make it on Saturday.
Finally: I’ve written previously about the book itself--its origins, its lengthy five-year development, and the ways it delivered on and exceeded my highest editorial expectations. Other Networks is a gorgeous print object (thanks to the design by Ella Gold and original art by Robert Beatty), sure; but in its capacity as a liberatory sourcebook, its stated “attempt to activate radical imagination by pluralizing networks,” the refuge and inspiration it provides in an ugly present and an uglier future, it will be invaluable.
Below, some images accounting for a small fraction of the networks and experiments that Other Networks covers. For more, buy the thing.
See you Saturday.
Mark
Example of RTTY that appeared in “RTTY Art Made Easy” in 73 Magazine (January 1972).
Videofreex in 1977 with their multichannel video playback system.
John Giorno with his Dial-A-Poem answering machines in 1970.
A 1950s-era cable radio device used by Italy’s Filodiffusione system, with six different wired radio broadcast channels.
Faxes generated during the piece “Telecommunications via Facsimile” (1980), featuring Tom Klinkowstein and Robert Adrian performing live from Amsterdam and Vienna simultaneously.
Fifteen-year-old singer Keum Ja Kim using the Picturephone in 1965 to audition for the Metropolitan Opera while she was in Washington, D.C.
N.E. Thing Co.’s project “Telexed Triangle” (1969), which was sent “to scribe a triangle with corner points” from Inuvik (Canada), Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Canada), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (Canada), and back to Inuvik.
Chris Burden’s 1972 piece TV Hijack, in which he tried to subvert the norms of television broadcasting by holding interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans at knifepoint.
Sherry Miller Hocking, who ran workshops for the Experimental Television Center, pictured in 1972.
