Lori Emerson's Other Networks, a "Radical Technology Sourcebook," Opens for Pre-Order
If you've ever wanted to discover the networks that ran before and alongside the modern Internet, this is the book for you.
Media archaeologist Lori Emerson is preparing to launch a "Radical Technology Sourcebook" that investigates lesser-known networks outside the Internet on which we have grown to depend: Other Networks.
"This a speculative index of communications networks, a love letter to experimental art & technology, and a liberatory guide for escaping the corporate present," Emerson says of the book. "For years I have been compiling and cataloguing a history of communications networks, one full of alternatives to the monolithic, surveilled internet as we now know it. The result is this compendium of possibilities that existed before or outside of the internet and a tribute to their experimental use by artists, covering everything from pirate radio to barbed wire telegraph, from synthesizers that transmitted over the telephone to encoded messages bounced off the surface of the moon."
Emerson, an associate professor of the Media Studies Department of the University of Colorado Boulder, founding director of the Media Archaeology Lab, and director of the university's Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance Program, has written a book that covers networks both pre-dating and running alongside the Internet as we know it today. These include everything from groups of people joining together outside mobile libraries in the 1940s to semaphore signaling, slow-scan television (SSTV) transmission and reception to using barbed wire as a telegraph line.
"Because of the hard work and creative genius of Mark Iosifescu, Jesse Pollock, and everyone at Anthology Editions; Robert Beatty who made the breathtaking cover and section designs; and Ella Gold for book design, Other Networks is also a feat of beautiful design," Emerson adds, with Beatty contributing original artwork alongside archival photography and diagrams. "And as if that weren't enough, the talented Joanne McNeil wrote the foreword and the legendary Howard Rheingold wrote the epilogue."
The book is currently available to pre-order through Mexican Summer Artists at $50, ahead of an April 22, 2025 release date.