Community

Our outreach work includes intra- and inter-institutional collaborations, curated exhibitions, conference presentations, workshops, and more.

Workshops

Hands-on workshops take a variety of shapes, usually related to getting familiar with - or changing perspective on - hardware and infrastructure. MAL PALs conduct some of our workshops, others are brought by special guests & artists/scholars in residence. Past workshops have included:

Disrepair

The Dis-Repair Workshop was conducted by visiting artist Rob Duarte, in partnership with the Unstable Design Lab.

Participants learned to hack broken and outdated mice and keyboards to create new physical interactions with computers. These are low-tech methods for creating sensors that allow for various forms of computer control without programming microcontrollers.

At the same time, participants were introduced to the politics of interface and to the practice of creating poetic, confrontational, and deliberately difficult interfaces.

differNet

Participants in DifferNet workshops are invited to manifest their invisible networks through drawing and movement exercises while exploring alternative network technologies including mesh networks and sneakernets.

We've conducted DifferNet workshops in classrooms around the CU Boulder campus, at CMCI's NEST Studio, at the ournetworks conference, and at the Radical Networks conference.

Take It Apart(y)!

A breaking-party! Take It Apart(y)s are a time to learn about the parts that make up various technologies - a sort of pre-requisite on the path to learning how to repair your devices. Taking apart broken already broken tech is a way to learn about the insides of things without the fear of destroying something precious.

We've conducted Take It Apart(y)s at our partner space the Blow Things Up Lab, in the Norlin Library CRDDS, at the Anythink Library in Thornton CO, at the Denver Art Museum, and even virtually with the Stanford Digital Aesthetics Workshop.

Conferences, Symposia, Festivals, &tc.

We are part of a rich artistic and scholarly community, which gives us the opportunity to be part of conferences, festivals and symposia both nearby and far away.

MAL has participated in:

• Conference on Community Writing

• COLT

• DEMA (Doing Experimental Media Archaeology)

• LEAF (Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival)

• Metaculture

• ournetworks

• Radical Networks

• Radio Preservation Task Force Conference

• SIGGRAPH

• Whaaat!? Festival

Exhibitions and Off-Site Visits

We've been fortunate to have the opportunity to take parts of the MAL collection to other locations on campus and around Colorado for visits - spaces including schools, museums and libraries. These visits provide a great opportunity to showcase our collection in new places and with audiences who may otherwise never find us.

Some locations and exhibitions have included:

• Alicia Sanchez Elementary After-School Enrichment

• Aspen Art Museum

• Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

• City Park Jazz Festival

• Denver Art Museum

• Library of Congress

• Mysterium Tremendum: Collecting Curiosity at the CU Art Museum

• Retro Media Pop-up at the Museum of Boulder

• The Pueblo Public Library

• Thornton Public Library