Photo by Jenna Maurice.
Join us on November 6 at 12:30 pm PT for an online Ziegler lecture. Focusing on the theme of ‘networks’, CENES welcomes Dr. Lori Emerson from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Title: “How to Activate the Potential of Imaginary Networks”
Abstract: In this talk I explore how imaginary networks (never-, partly-, or even fully-realized but short-lived communication technologies) provide us with meaningful models for alternative future networks outside of or beyond the internet. In short, imaginary networks are envisionings of how networking could be otherwise. While media archaeology has explored some examples of imaginary media, the vast array of imaginary networks that have been proposed, depicted, and described since the 19th century has barely been accounted for. No doubt, these networks have been largely overlooked because it’s all too easy to reduce networks such as Jacques-Toussaint Benoît’s pasilalanic-sympathetic compass to mere curiosities or cruel thought experiments and thus relegate them to irrelevancy. Given that imaginary networks have been so thoroughly overlooked, it’s also not surprising that no one has yet noted the possible significance of the fact that other (cruelty-free) unrealized imaginary networks such as Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum and Hugo Gernsback’s radio-controlled television plane from the early twentieth century are depicted as wireless. Further, we have yet to explore how short-lived imaginary networks such as the Voice of Free Algeria or Radio Alice–radio networks that played a profoundly important role in numerous liberation movements throughout the world between the 1950s and the 1980s–(still) exemplify the possibility of new beginnings in the future
Biography: Lori Emerson is Professor of Media Studies; Director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program; and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at UC Boulder. She is also Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. Emerson is author of Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (Anthology Editions, 2025), co-author with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press June, 2014), and editor of numerous collections. A full list of publications, as well as details on the Media Studies Lab can be found on her website.
How to attend:
This lecture is an online event, and takes place on November 6, 2025, at 12:30pm PT. Attendees must register here for the Zoom Webinar ahead of time. Please note that this is a recorded event.
Questions? Please email cenes.undergrad@ubc.ca
