U.S. Media Archeology Lab hosts Apocryphal Technologies
The Media Archeology Lab in Denver Colorado is the U.S.’s premier locale for practice-research and research-creation into the situated nature of our media-technological condition. Founding Director and author Lori Emerson (Associate Professor of English and Intermedia Arts, Writing and Performance at the University of Colorado at Boulder) hosts a physical archive and collection of ‘disused’ media artefacts, which supports research projects, events, workshops and teaching formats providing access to the unique material specificity of computer, interface, platform, and software history.
In May 2016, IXDM Critical Media Lab’s Senior Researcher Jamie Allen, will undertake a research residency with the Denver-based group, furthering work investigating the cultural and technological histories, specific materialities and contemporary issues surrounding ’truth telling’ machines, veracity technologies, psycho-galvanic devices and deception detection methods. A processual exhibition at the Dateline contemporary art space and performance venue in Denver, will feature an exhibition of The Lie Machine project, materials arising through the research residency, and will host a performance-lecture delivered by Jamie Allen (May 20th, 2016).
This work forms part of ‘Apocryphal Technologies’, a research project into the imaginaries and actualities of non-functional, belief-based technical objects, initiated by Allen. Apocryphal Technologies are not just obscure or of dubious authenticity, but are technologies and media systems created under suspect motives in order to propagate spurious or false content. They create faith-based technological imaginaries—they do not ‘work’, despite wide belief in their function (examples include lie detectors and the ADE 651). Jamie’s work at Media Archeology Lab Denver furthers collaborative endeavours with IXDM CML’s own Shintaro Miyazaki investigating psycho-galvanics and religious-electronics (e.g.: Scientology’s E-Meter) and elaborating artistic practice as a mode of media archeological research.
