Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by Lori Emerson maps the communications systems that existed before and outside the internet — from barbed wire telegraph to pirate radio — as a pointed argument that our networked present was never inevitable.
About This Book
The corporatised, surveilled state of contemporary networked communications is, as Emerson frames it, only one possibility among many. This speculative index catalogues alternative communications networks — digital and analogue, state-sponsored and subversive, realised and imagined — with particular attention to their experimental use by artists and writers. Each entry combines an explanatory description with archival imagery and original artwork and design by Robert Beatty, producing something between a reference work and a manifesto. From synthesisers transmitted over telephone lines to encoded messages bounced off the surface of the moon, Other Networks recovers a history of radical media and network culture that mainstream technological history has largely erased.
Key Features
- 212 pages of archival images, explanatory network descriptions, and original artwork throughout
- Author: Lori Emerson; artwork and design by Robert Beatty
- Case studies include pirate radio, barbed wire telegraph, telephone-transmitted synthesisers, and lunar signal reflection
- Published by Anthology Editions
What You'll Discover
- A taxonomy of pre-internet and extra-internet communications networks spanning digital, analogue, state-controlled, and community-built systems
- How artists and writers historically exploited experimental networks as sites of creative and political resistance
- The material and social conditions that allowed alternative network cultures — including homebrew hacker communities — to flourish outside mainstream technological development
- A counter-history of networked communication that challenges the assumed linearity of technological progress toward the internet as we know it
About the Author
Lori Emerson is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on the history and theory of communications media and technology. Other Networks is her speculative index of alternative communications systems, drawing on archival sources and positioning experimental network use by artists and writers as central to any honest account of media history.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 212
- Dimensions: 24 x 28 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781944860653
- Publisher: Anthology Editions
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Researchers and practitioners in media theory, design history, and network culture; artists and writers interested in radical technology and alternative communications; readers tracing the political history of the internet and its predecessors.