Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Lori Emerson
I’m going to give you the most boring and predictable answer possible. Given all of my investments in media archaeology and in excavating media from the past that could be repurposed or brought back to life today or tomorrow, the best answer I can come up with is that I would turn them into books or printed matter because that format has proven itself to have enormous longevity.
Something I talk about with students in my classes is, isn’t it wonderful that the book is a technology that’s not been copyrighted? It does not belong to any corporation. It is not a format that might be DRM or black-boxed in some way. The book is the most beautiful invention I can think of. So that’s what my answer would be.
Interviewer
MAL spends a lot of time preserving not just machines or software, but all the printed matter and content around them. What was your journey to realizing how important it was to not just preserve a machine or a piece of software, but the stuff around it?
Lori Emerson
I think one of the great joys of running the lab is that it has been and continues to be an emergent project. I know in the grand scheme of things, being a lab that’s existed since 2009 is not that long, but in the arts and humanities, it is actually a very long time for a lab to have existed. I understand new things about what we’re doing all the time. Over all of those years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of different types of people, volunteers, members of the public, people who work in tech, people who don’t work in tech, scholars, artists, and students. That’s helped me to understand that media objects have embedded within them ways of thinking about, creating, and perceiving our world.
The objects themselves are entrenched in larger ways of life. It’s very clear to me that that’s the case when we have parents or grandparents of students come into the lab and suddenly light up when they see an object that they might have grown up with in the 1970s. Someone walks up to the Altair 8800B computer from 1976 and it’s like playing the piano. It’s muscle memory, they suddenly remember how to use these switches. And that is coupled with, as you just reminded me of, all of the ephemera. The ephemera is really wonderful, hand-drawn maps of early video games, little notations at the backs of books, stickers, notepads, floppy disks with divorce agreements on them, all kinds of things.
I dislike the hoarding of collections behind closed doors. Even museums, who of course I love and adore and cherish, have to put things behind glass.
Interviewer
How do you approach assembling the collection? So much of the lab’s work is grounded in the practice of archaeology, of being a place for rediscovery or resurrection.
Lori Emerson
I believe in the value of the lab being constantly open, porous, and flexible, which means being receptive to whatever objects arrive at our doorstep. By and large, if we have room for them and if they work, then we take them. I think if I had a predetermined idea about what we want our collection to be, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting and totally bizarre and weird as it is. The charm of the lab is the fact that you can stand in a room and you can play with an Altair 8800B computer or you could play with a hand-built computer that somebody mailed us because their parent lived in a country in Eastern Europe where building your own computer was outlawed, but they still built it anyway. It’s this incredible Frankenstein machine. In the same room, you can hook yourself up to some Scientology e-meters or to some CIA-issued lie detectors.
On a more serious note, more and more as the years go by, I see how limited a notion of the archive is. It’s really embedded in mostly white Western ways of thinking about what deserves to be counted as knowledge and what does not deserve to be counted. And often what does not deserve to be counted are the things that are actually really important to people. Like the ephemera, like the hand-drawn maps, like oral stories of all kinds.
Interviewer
MAL has always seemed extremely conscious of accessibility. Even the website itself is an unusually open portal into your collections, so that a random member of the public 10,000 miles away can really look at the work you’re doing. What role does access play in the Lab and its practice?
Lori Emerson
I dislike the hoarding of collections behind closed doors. Even museums, who of course I love and adore and cherish, have to put things behind glass. If a teenager were to go to a museum and look at a typewriter under glass, how on earth could they possibly be excited or engaged with that object just by looking at it?Martin and Steffen at Cerabyte have a reverence for the actual materiality of clay and ceramics that grounds their approach to digital storage.
Interviewer
Preserving digital media involves objects in multiple formats and media. Some of those objects are mass-produced and there might be copies, but some are single copies. Some are replicable as recipes or through emulation. Is there a difference between preserving software versus hardware versus these paper documents? How do you think through all those differences and nuances?
Lori Emerson
We are always driven just by what is practical. We have to look at labor limitations, financial limitations, space limitations, know-how limitations. I think that the degree to which we think about preserving anything is just about what is feasible.
Sometimes we just have to be kind of hard-hearted about letting things go. If it’s just too expensive, difficult, or impossible to preserve it or find replacement parts. For example, if you come to the lab, you’ll find that we have an Edison diamond disc photograph player from 1912, which is great. Except that it’s super fragile. What we have now is kind of a charming but ugly Frankenstein version that is rigged from different parts from different eras. It all still works. It’s still miraculous. I can imagine that a lot of preservationists would have a heart attack if they took a look at what we’ve done. But we think that it’s more important to have one that works than to try to be meticulous about preserving each part.