The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies 1517902185, 9781517902186

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E H T

B A L K O O B

SITUATED IN

PRACTICES

MEDIA STUDIES DARREN WERSHLER LORI EMERSON JUSSI PARIKKA

THE LAB BOOK

THE LAB BOOK

SITUATED PRACTICES IN MEDIA STUDIES DARREN WERSHLER LORI EMERSON JUSSI PARIKKA

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support provided for the publication of this book by a Eugene M. Kayden Research Grant from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Copyright 2021 by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0217-9 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0218-6 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Available as a Manifold edition at manifold.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION: EVERYTHING IS A LAB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Case Study: The French-­Language Lab (Middlebury College, Vermont) 10

1. LAB SPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Case Study: Menlo Park Laboratory (Menlo Park, New Jersey) 53 Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 1 (MIT) 60 Case Study: Media Archaeological Fundus (Humboldt University, Germany) 73

2 . LAB APPARATUS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Case Study: The Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University, Germany) 93 Case Study: The Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder) 102

3. LAB INFRASTRUCTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Case Study: Home Economics Labs and Extension on the Canadian Prairies (Manitoba, Canada) 116 Case Study: Black Laboratories and Agricultural Extension 127

4. LAB PEOPLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 2 (MIT) 159 Case Study: ACTLab (University of Texas Austin) 177

5. LAB IMAGINARIES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Case Study: Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and Parapsychology 198 Case Study: Bell Labs, a Factory for Ideas 204

6. LAB TECHNIQUES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 NOTES 249 BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 INDEX 303

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book was cowritten by three authors. We would like to acknowledge that, through various channels, Concordia University provided the infrastructural, financial, and administrative support for The Lab Book, which we have attempted to signal by listing Darren Wershler as the first author. That said, the research and writing behind the project has been evenly distributed among all three authors, prompting us to list the second and third authors alphabetically. We would also like to acknowledge that our respective labs and research centers have fundamentally shaped our thinking throughout: the Residual Media Depot in the Milieux Institute at Concordia University; the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder; and the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research group at the University of Southampton. All three authors would like to thank, sincerely, the more than seventy individuals who took the time and energy to be interviewed either by us or by our students. We would also like to thank the University of Minnesota Press for its unwavering support of our project, especially our editor Douglas Armato, as well as Terence Smyre for his hard work in developing a lively online presence for our book on Manifold. Manifold has given us the rare ability to publish nearly final drafts of each of the chapters as well as twenty-­eight interviews with lab directors and lab participants around the world on the philosophy, space, infrastructure, and projects of their labs—­interviews that heavily influenced the writing of our book. We hope readers of

vii

this book will also spend time on the Manifold site: https://manifold. umn.edu/projects/the-lab-book. Special thanks to Hilary Bergen and Alex Custodio for indispensable aid with the preparation of this manuscript. Darren would like to thank first and foremost Lori and Jussi, my coauthors, who are wonderful scholars and even better human beings. Writing this book was at times difficult, so endless thanks for your kindness over the years as well as for your intelligence. Thanks to Concordia University for supporting and funding all aspects of the research and production of this project through its University Research Chairs program and through direct funding from the office of André Roy, dean of Arts and Sciences, especially through the International Graduate Summer Schools program, which allowed me to run not only the Residual Media Depot but two sessions of a graduate media archaeology course (summer 2016 and summer 2017) that helped to form the ideas inside this book. Thank you to the students who attended these courses and to the students (especially Nathalie Duponsel, Bojana Krsmanovic, and Nic Watson), guest faculty (Stephanie Boluk, Ann-­Louise Davidson, Lori Emerson, Patrick Lemieux, Jussi Parikka), and staff (especially Marc Beaulieu, Bonnie-­Jean Campbell, Emilie Champagne, and Harry Smoak) who helped to run them. Thanks also to the students of my 2017 course on the Research Collection and my 2015 Mess and Method (“What Is a Media Lab?” edition) course, who conducted original research and interviews that were formative in our initial thinking around this book. Thanks to the Milieux Institute for providing the research space for the Residual Media Depot, and for all of the activity mentioned above. Milieux is a remarkable place—­an assemblage of hybrid labs—­and the ongoing generosity and support of its occupants is unmatched. The Media History Research Centre, TAG Lab, and the Milieux Maker Space have been particularly helpful. Knowledge is never produced in isolation. I owe a great deal to my friends and colleagues at Concordia, particularly Charles Acland, Jason Camlot, Ann-­Louise Davidson, Jill Didur, Sandra Gabriele, Fenwick McKelvey, Bart Simon, Johanne Sloan, Marc Steinberg, and Haidee Wasson. Thanks also to colleagues around the world who have been supportive of this work in a variety of ways, including (but not limited to) Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Matt Kirschenbaum, Henry Lowood, Shannon Mattern, Dave

viii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parisi, Jonathan Sterne, and Will Straw. Thanks to my mother, Fran Wershler, for carefully editing and describing the history of Home Economics Extension, which helped to inspire the basic model of this book. Endless love to my boys, Max and Gus, who asked their mom if she married me because I have a secret laboratory. And to Sandra, who is everything. Lori would like to thank the College of Media, Communication, and Information and the English department at the University of Colorado Boulder for their institutional support of The Lab Book as well as the Media Archaeology Lab—­a lab and its denizens that have taught me, in microcosm, everything I know about labs. Likewise, I have been deeply fortunate to work alongside brilliant and hardworking students whose influence is everywhere in this book: Kolby Harvey, Amanda Hurtado, Eric Izant, Laura Hyunjee Kim, Jaime Lee Kirtz, Maya Livio, Tim Roberts, and libi striegl. Maya and libi have been particularly important to my life at CU and life in and around the MAL—­I’ve been so fortunate to have them both in my orbit for the past four or five years. To my colleagues at CU Boulder—­Mark Amerika, Adam Bradley, Thora Brylowe, Jason Gladstone, Élika Ortega, and Nathan Schneider—­I am indebted to all the ways you have directly and indirectly shaped my thinking about labs, space, media, and infrastructure. And to my colleagues spread across the globe—­especially Wolfgang Ernst, Dene Grigar, Stefan Höltgen, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Elizabeth Losh—­I continue to be grateful for the work you have done in and around labs as well as the ways you have modeled collaboration, generosity, and successful lab management. To Jussi and Darren, thank you for the countless ways your collaborations have enriched and fundamentally changed, for the better, my intellectual life and my personal life. Finally, my contributions to this book wouldn’t be what they are without Benjamin Robertson’s constant encouragement, patience, kindness, and attentiveness. Jussi wants to extend his gratitude and warm thanks to institutions and people. Winchester School of Art has supported this research project in many ways both through resources and allowing me to have the time. The Archaeologies of Media and Technology research group, or AMT, which I codirect with Ryan Bishop is one key context for this work. AMT is not a lab, more of an office, or at least that’s the constant pun we use. Das Amt. But we worked

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

extensively on labs, including Ryan’s own book on Cold War and technology labs that emerged parallel to this one you are holding now. A big thanks to Ryan for the many inspiring conversations, panels, and other things we organized. My other affiliation at FAMU, at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, has offered key support as part of the project “Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations” (Czech Science Foundation: 19–­26865X). I thank the funding body, FAMU, and the colleagues in our project. Colleagues at other institutions, such as during my visiting professorship at University of Udine in Italy, have been kind and helpful in providing thoughts, questions, suggestions, and more. A special mention goes to the students of my class on media archaeology, where we had the opportunity for many discussions about spaces and practices of media archaeology labs. Over the years, many people have contributed directly or indirectly. Here’s a list of some of you, although I am sure there have been many others who shared ideas and material, thoughts and inspiration—I tried to include as many as I can remember! So, thank you at least to Maria-­ Luise Angerer, Caroline Bassett, David Berry, Samir Bhowmik, Jane Birkin, Ryan Bishop, Robin Boast, Benjamin Bratton, Kat Braybrooke, Mihaela Brebenel, Rossella Catanese, Daniel Cid, Stephen Cornford, Jordan Crandall, Lily Díaz-­Kommonen, Simone Dotto, Ed D’Souza, Tomáš Dvořák, Wolfgang Ernst, Kristoffer Gansing, Seth Giddings, Abelardo Gil-­Fournier, Ahmet Gürata, Garnet Hertz, Stefan Höltgen, Elise Hunchuck, Jannice Käll, Tero Karppi, Eric Kluitenberg, Joasia Krysa, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Alessandro Ludovico, Sunil Manghani, Shannon Mattern, Jesper Olsson, David Parisi, Eda Sancakdar, Bernhard Siegert, Yigit Soncul, Sandy Stone, Andreas Treske, Anna Tuschling, Pasi Väliaho, Simone Venturini, and Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young. A special mention to Darren and Lori for an amazing five years of ideas, chats, Skype calls, meetings, more ideas, and such perfect inspiration and friendship.

x  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION EVERYTHING IS A LAB Retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. —­Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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abs are everywhere, and we can’t stop talking about them. Media labs, hacker zones, makerspaces, humanities labs, fab labs, tech incubators, innovation centers, hacklabs, and media archaeology labs: these hybrid spaces, which sometimes bear only a passing resemblance to the scientific laboratories from which they take part of their inspiration, are liminal but increasingly powerful. They appear in universities and colleges, wedged uneasily between traditional departments and faculties. They’re also in basements, warehouses, strip malls, and squats. They are stable to varying degrees; many have long-­term addresses and an itinerant roster of occupants. Some pop up in one location for a few days, then relocate to another. Sometimes they’re even in mobile trucks in the streets, bringing tools and expertise to children in schools and the general public. When administrators streamline clusters of tools and talent to produce economic value, labs sometimes align with the most ruthless of venture capitalists; in other cases, they are free and open for all to use, disdainful of all commercial motivations. The first difficulty in talking about labs with any precision is that the metaphor of the lab has permeated contemporary culture to the degree that it can apply to just about anything. Throughout this book, we argue that labs have always already been hybrids and that we need a heuristic in order to study them. Ideally, such a heuristic would help labs of any sort describe themselves, with particular attention to the question of how their lab’s specific composition

1

enables them to go about the task of producing knowledge. As we gathered the writing on laboratories that we found most instructive, a number of analytical categories began to recur: space, apparatus, infrastructure and policy, people, the imaginary, and technique. Each offered a powerful, if partial, perspective on our subject. After some thought, and after conducting dozens of interviews with lab directors and lab participants around the world, we began to realize that the differences between the kinds of analyses that these categories produced were not a liability. When we considered them together, comparatively, a way of mapping the indisputable complexity of laboratory relations began to emerge. As a result, these categories became the components of our heuristic, which we call “the extended lab model.” Eventually, they also became the structuring principle of this book, with each chapter focusing on one category. Each chapter also includes a few case studies, some of which draw further on our collection of interviews, which provide an opportunity to think through the active relations between the aspect of the lab under consideration in the specific chapter and some, if not all, of the other aspects of the extended lab. This Introduction also includes a case study employing the extended lab model, focusing on a set of photographs of an early-­ twentieth-­century French-­language lab at Middlebury College. We then discuss why labs matter, including a clarification of the differences and overlaps between science labs and arts/humanities labs. We conclude with a section on the preemergence of hybrid labs, providing initial thoughts on the performative quality of the act of naming a space as a laboratory. In short, this Introduction offers a condensed summary of the aims of the book and situates it in the context of earlier research on labs as sites of practice. Finally, before we proceed to tackle the discourse in and around labs, we would like to draw readers’ attentions to the online home for The Lab Book on the Manifold publishing platform—­a home that has given us the rare ability to publish nearly final drafts of each of the chapters in this book as well the interviews which heavily influenced the writing of our book and expand on the philosophies, space, infrastructure, and projects of labs around the world. We hope to continue adding lab-­related material to the site over the coming months and years, and we invite readers of this book to peruse the

2  Introduction

materials we have posted so far: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/ the-lab-book.

LAB DISCOURSE, OR, LIFE IS A LAB The lab is deeply imbricated in all aspects of contemporary culture. Consider some examples. Bartenders have been modern since the mid-­nineteenth century, writing about themselves as “mixologists” to add an air of scholarly scientificity to the process of concocting cocktails. In the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, hipster bartenders interested in reviving some of the more elaborate old recipes from the last two centuries picked up this moniker with renewed vigor, taking a scientific-­historical approach to the process of making a fancy drink (David Wondrich’s Punch and Darcy O’Neil’s Fix the Pumps are exemplary in this respect; O’Neil, a trained chemist, works as both a university research technologist and a bartender).1 This contemporary combination of lab culture and mixology means that it’s not uncommon to find bars with the word Lab or with lab metaphors embedded somewhere in their name or branding. Cosmetics is another area where the appearance of scientific metaphors (especially ones from chemistry) makes a certain amount of sense. During the writing of this book, one of the things we came

Figure 1. The menu from Bar Lab, Montreal. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

Introduction 3

across was the Lab Series of men’s cosmetics. As with bartending, there is a basic connection between the cosmetics industry and organic chemistry, so the comparison makes a sort of sense. Here’s a short passage from their website: We believe life is a Lab—­one in which bold moves, big ideas, and innovation through experimentation rules the day. Since 1987, we’ve been formulating high-­tech, high-­performance products in our Lab—­so you have the confidence to go out and make the most of yours. As one of the original, men’s only skincare brands, we understand the difference between men’s and women’s skin. Each and every one of our cutting-­edge formulas is tried, tested, and tailored to suit the specific needs of guys across the globe. Now in over 30 countries, we’re committed to continually perfecting, improving, and innovating the ideal regimen ­for men, who, like us, have a true passion for progress.2

Not only is the ideology of progress alive and well here, but life itself has been subsumed to technological advance and its apparatus: Life is a Lab. There are echoes of this belief everywhere—­in universities, in government, and in the private sector. Because discourses of scientificity and creativity coincide in contemporary post-­Fordist branding, the lab is also a style . . . or an anti-­style. Lab Series is one thing, but what are we to make of the Design Lab clothing line of The Hudson Bay Company (in Canada) and Lord & Taylor (in the United States)? Launched in spring 2015 for “style-­conscious millennials,” Design Lab is not just a rapid-­fire, amorphous, and affordable series of clothes organized according to vaguely historical “key trends” aimed at the desirable millennial demographic (“Athletic Allure,” “Seventies Style,” “Woodstock Redux,” etc.). It is also a specific place, “a new young contemporary destination in store.”3 What is remarkable about Design Lab, though, is that there is no sign of the trappings of laboratories whatsoever in its displays, imagery, or promotional materials. There are no white lab coats, no safety goggles, no clipboards, no flasks, no beakers, Tesla coils, or scientific instrumentation in evidence. Nothing in the design of the typeface suggests scientificity; there is only a vague invocation of modernity. Recently, cult generic design chain Muji followed suit, with its own “Muji Labo” line, equally bereft of the traditional furniture of the lab. The semiotics in both cases are those of a kind of anti-­advertising that is no-­nonsense and, well, clinical . . .

4  Introduction

Figure 2. Hudson Bay Company Design Lab in-­store display, Montreal. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

Figure 3. Muji Labo display, Toronto. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

but even this connotation is muted. Like a Cheshire Cat, the lab has vanished from Design Lab and Muji Labo, and all that is left is its ostensibly pure product: a word so rational that it need not even flaunt its rationality with vulgar imagery. The idea of the lab is more than a metaphor. Throughout this book, we use the phrase “lab discourse” to describe how the word lab serves as a kind of pragmatic persuasion, ordering, and organization of material and discursive regimes, invoking an entire network of power relations that determine what is and is not possible to say or do within a space designated as a lab.4 The lab does more than mark a space and a genealogy; it also performs and reproduces its assumptions about those histories. “Laboratory” becomes an operative term. It does not simply signify, but operates in various institutional ways, in different conceptual contexts, and across historical periods to denote and connote what a lab should be, what a lab must be, and what a lab might be. The lab is an operational organization of space as much as the references, histories, and uses that include and exclude based on preference. Parts of this discourse are normative and regulatory, parts negotiated, and parts contestatory or oppositional. Every time the word lab is applied to a new kind of hybrid space, the entire network jostles around in an attempt to accommodate or reject this new usage.

LABS AS HYBRIDS Bruno Latour offers one of the key reference points for the academic analysis of the contemporary research laboratory. In “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” he writes, “people want to establish elsewhere conclusions as certain as those reached in the laboratory.”5 Because Latour sees the laboratory as “a moment in a series of displacements that makes a complete shambles out of the inside/outside and the macro/micro dichotomies,” the means to this end are obvious.6 Even for scientists, leaving the lab entails losing the power that has been accrued within its hallowed walls, so there is only one way to retain that power. Latour turns it into an exhortation: “If this means transforming society into a vast laboratory, then do it.”7 Still, in the wake of phenomena like the Design Lab clothing line, it’s entirely possible to imagine Latour with his face in his palm,

6  Introduction

muttering “No, not like that.” The truth of what you desire is often the inverse of what you expect. One way of thinking about hybrid labs, then, is in the negative. A hybrid lab might be any lab that could give rise to someone saying, “Okay, but that’s not really a lab.” (We talk about this in more detail in chapter 5, “Lab Imaginaries”; Thomas Gieryn calls this technique of exclusion “boundary work.”) The blunt exercise of authority in order to exclude something from the realm of “real labs” is a good reason to look at that thing more closely. In these pages you’ll find séance rooms, apothecaries, home economics labs with human babies living in them, factories, city streets, hackerspaces, industrial laboratories, language labs, railway cars, medieval abbots’ kitchens, laptop networks, basements full of moribund technological devices, performance spaces, wartime radiation labs, artists’ studios, mule wagons, media labs, machine shops, marine biology labs, university closets, and various other hybrids all busily producing knowledge via a range of orthodox and idiosyncratic techniques. How do we get to the point where we can say something useful about what, exactly, these odd spaces are that insist on their status as labs? A crucial entry point is the recognition that the lab is a way of understanding recurring forms of power and experimentality, not just as a part of the history of science and as a series of tropes that appear in contemporary discourses about labs in the arts, humanities, and culture at large. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour provides some hints, especially when he is discussing Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-­Pump. For Latour, what Shapin and Schaffer’s book describes is “the Modern Constitution”—­a division of powers between politics and science, where “Boyle is creating a political discourse from which politics is to be excluded [i.e., modern laboratory science], while Hobbes is imagining a scientific politics from which experimental science has to be excluded.”8 From Latour’s perspective, this arrangement characterized modern life for the better part of three centuries, but something interesting begins to happen toward the end of the millennium. The two discourses begin to move closer to each other, and modern certainties begin to crumble.9 Latour’s explanation for this shift is subtle: what characterizes modernity, he argues, is not the ascension of humanism, rationalism, industrialization, and

Introduction 7

the sciences but rather a bicameral set of practices that appear to be distinct in order to operate, but which are in fact deeply imbricated.10 The first set of practices, which Latour calls “translation,” corresponds to the production of networks and have to do with the production and proliferation of hybrid forms; the second, which he calls “purification,” produces “the modern critical stance” and regulates the division between the human and everything else.11 It is not that hybrid forms did not exist during modernity, but that the very practices that produced and circulated them with increasing efficiency also necessarily denied their existence. One of the ongoing tasks for media history, media archaeology, the digital humanities, science studies, and related fields is not only to chart and describe new hybrid forms but to reexamine what we believe we know of the historical record for evidence that this hybridization was always taking place. In other words, this task involves studying the multiple genealogies of labs that demonstrate conflicting forms of practice and values, imaginaries and infrastructures. It is also more about building a richer sense of what the lab is than it is about merely looking at recent forms of laboratories as they appear in media, art, and humanities. However, as laboratory discourse became increasingly imbricated in the description of various forms of everyday practice, beyond the hybrid objects coming out of labs, labs themselves have also become hybrids . . . and perhaps always were. This is different from observing that, say, artists can and do talk about their studios as labs, or that scientists might imagine (and write about) themselves as poets or artists, or even that a lab might occasionally have a writer or an artist in residence.12 Such practices do not conform to strict borders between art, science, and the humanities. One premise of Siegfried Zielinski’s studies of the deep time of the media and variantology, for example, is that science and poetry have always been entangled.13 The history of the last century is the history of people pointing to the blurry area between art and science, from both sides of the divide. Marxism is a philosophy that, since Marx himself, has insisted on its status as a science.14 Since the dawn of the twentieth century, practitioners of Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics have used its rigorous close observation to lead to absurd conclusions and problems that don’t require resolutions.15 The Bauhaus was a major source of modern aesthetic sensibility, but it was also deeply rooted in the tradition

8  Introduction

of logical positivism.16 The history of film and film research is full of early examples of laboratories measuring the human body as a physical and emotional, affective entity: Hugo Münsterberg’s early-­ twentieth-­century Harvard laboratory is a case in point.17 Later, in the context of bioart and technological culture, groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble mobilized a potent mixture of performance, critical theory, and scientific method for aesthetic and activist ends. But as Latour, C. P. Snow, Isabelle Stengers, and many others have observed, a division has always been maintained which ensures that, in the dichotomy between science and culture, the sciences always maintain the superior role. This division was established and maintained through modern forms of governmentality that are still very much in effect. Governments create institutions that bestow power onto regulatory bodies, which create policy instruments that outline the approved use of that power in particular locations, according to specific practices. At the same time, hybrid practices continually emerge outside and around the officially approved ones, sometimes feeding back into the system and altering official practice, sometimes creating rogue or alternative practices, sometimes fizzling out entirely. We are interested in labs, both orthodox and hybrid, because they are specific spaces in which the process of production takes place—­ hence our subtitle.18 In labs, a particular kind of situated practice occurs, and we want to open the question of how knowledge is produced via these practices, while also taking their infrastructures, architectonics, and intellectual furnishings into account.19 Stengers poses the intriguing question of whether it might be possible to invent a kind of scientific practice not through the development of new forms of lab apparatus but through a different kind of relation to the lab and its equipment by way of “the positive, practical invention of scientific authors who address themselves to nature without waiting for it to confer on them the power of judging.”20 Thus, we are also curious about a related question: what kinds of authors and other subjects do hybrid laboratories produce, and what kinds of statements are they capable of making? Assessing this question requires the creation of a heuristic that will allow us to take an inventory of a heterogeneous range of hybrid lab spaces and their associated practices. We begin describing this framework by way of the following case study on an early-­twentieth-­century French-­language lab.

Introduction 9

CASE STUDY: THE FRENCH-­L ANGUAGE LAB (MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, VERMONT) Consider these photographs of a French-­language lab from the archives of Middlebury College in Vermont, dated 1928. A photograph of this lab (Warner Hall, room 5) appeared in print for the first time in the 1929 Summer Session catalog for the French and Spanish Schools at Middlebury. The Middlebury archives hold two versions of this photo session, one of which had been turned into a halftone for printing in the college’s 1929 summer catalog. Both versions depict French school instructors and students at work in the lab. In many respects, these images are the epitome of the way we still think about labs in the arts and humanities. As a case study, they point to many of the issues we should consider when writing about labs today—­“the configurations of instruments, practices, and signs that comprise the a priori of a given technical and cultural system.”21 Labs are constituted of such configurations—­or, to use the current term of art, “cultural techniques”—­that bundle materials and symbols,

Figure 4. Middlebury College French-­language lab, 1928. Courtesy of Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives, Middlebury, Vermont.

10  Introduction

Figure 5. Middlebury College French-­language lab, 1928. Halftone prepared for printing, with crop marks. Courtesy of Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives, Middlebury, Vermont.

technologies and discourses into operative chains.22 In particular, the space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, imaginary, and techniques comprise a checklist of aspects that we use as a heuristic when we consider a lab of any sort. There is a processual and inherently interdependent dynamism between these aspects; thinking about all of them in terms of any specific object of study is always helpful, though in many cases the accent will fall on some rather than others. We call this checklist “the extended lab model.”

Space When we write about the production of space, what we have in mind is the fabrication of differences, divisions, passages, anchors, movements, and positions (whether for resting or working, activity or observation). For Latour and Steve Woolgar, labs can emerge as a result of very subtle differential relations between kinds of space: “The spatial relation between office space and bench space is sufficient to distinguish the laboratory from other productive units.”23

Introduction 11

At the same time, the lab is always articulated to different kinds of spaces that help to make sense out of what emerges from its operations. For example, the lab is never far from the office. In this sense, labs are as much a product of social dynamics as they are of stable architecture (which is not to say we are attempting to ignore the material dimensions of labs). The sense we have of the lab as a space is a product of relations among the people, objects, practices, institutional infrastructures, policies, and discourses that it brings together.24 One of the implications of the observation that labs emerge from relations is that a lab is as much a process as it is anything else. At the same time as they allow (or disallow) certain kinds of ongoing, compelling professional and social interactions to occur, labs are themselves always in process, which makes them attractive and frustrating by turn. As John Urry notes, despite all of the discursive claims about the lab being a neutral, static temple of reason, labs are affective and emotional.25 This affective and emotional register is another one of the connotations of “situated practice.” The process of producing a lab folds together various kinds of relations in order to encourage specific forms of space, time, and agency to emerge. Thus, returning to the images of the French-­language lab, we ask: what sort of space is emerging? One of the first things to notice is the amount of staging that is occurring. The photographs are posed; seeing two versions together drives this point home. The images are not a record of everyday occurrences in the lab, captured without the notice of the lab’s occupants while they go about their business, nor are they a documentary record of an experiment in progress. Instead, a fairly large number of people, objects, and devices have been brought together artificially, in a relatively small area at the front of the room, in order to produce an image that conveys something meaningful about what, exactly, this lab does. Above all, the photographs strive to convey the sense that this lab is both heavily populated and busy. Everyone and everything is in the midst of doing something. Some people are operating machinery, others are assisting with the operation of machinery, and still others observe those operations as they unfold. Three or four people are gazing directly at the camera while doing their work or observing others, drawing attention to the nature of their actions as a performance for remote witnesses.

12  Introduction

The images, like the room itself, are designed for the process of instruction. This may be a lab, but it is also evidently a classroom. The people in the images are clustered around a teacher’s bench. Students’ writing desks are visible in the foreground, and blackboards and teaching charts (vowels on top, voiced and voiceless French stop consonants below) are in the background. When experiments occur in this space, it is for the purpose of demonstration and communication of ideas about research techniques. Staging happens in any lab, because it is an attempt to convey the importance of what a laboratory space makes possible. As Gieryn argues, the laboratory is one of the most powerful contemporary versions of what he calls “truth-­spots”—­particular locations that are privileged sites for the production of truth and economic value through innovation. The Oracle at Delphi is one of Gieryn’s favorite examples from antiquity, but he also writes of the “ultra-­clean” lab that Clair Patterson built in the 1950s to study what he suspected were increasing levels of lead in the biosphere. In order to make accurate measurements, the lab had to be free from all ambient contamination via the air, water, or the clothing and bodies of the lab’s occupants. Hypothesizing that the accumulation of polar ice over time might present a gradient measure of increasing levels of lead over time, he ventured to Antarctica to extract a deep-­core ice sample and created a “mobile truth-­spot” to conduct measurements in situ.26 The lesson in this case is that the space of the lab is not fixed or permanent. It can and does extend its influence out into the world, in a variety of ways, and reconfigure itself or vanish entirely after its work is complete. Returning to our observation that a lab is a hybrid bundle of various kinds of aspects and relations, while a lab may be a specially designated place for the production of knowledge that can appear in the most unlikely locales, a lab is also a lab because of the performance of particular kinds of techniques. Likewise, the cultural techniques in question are the techniques of science in part because they are performed inside the lab. When and if people begin to perform other activities inside a lab, it may cease to be a lab.

Apparatus Back in the French-­language lab, the cross-­section diagram of a human head on the blackboard indicates that the focus of the research

Introduction 13

and teaching taking place here is also material and processual. What is of concern is not limited to the circulation of signs, as the linguistic charts alone might suggest. Rather, the object of investigation is the physiology of speech production, and the means of investigation is the process of producing analog audio recordings through interaction with the lab’s apparatus. For many viewers of these images, the presence of technological apparatus and the interaction of the people in the room is what will identify the space as a laboratory of some sort. But the lab’s apparatus is never passive decoration, or secondary to lab operations. The objects and phenomena studied in the lab “are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory,” and this fact becomes most evident when key pieces of equipment break down or when new equipment appears.27 Laboratories are all about the specificity of their articulations. A laboratory is not just a particular bundle of technologies; where they are plugged in, so to speak, matters, as do the articulations of knowledge that enable that bundle, and the ones it enables in turn. As Latour and Woolgar put it, “The strength of the laboratory depends not so much on the availability of the apparatus, but on the presence of a particular configuration of machines specifically tailored for a particular task.”28 Having the right apparatus and keeping it running are vital not just for particular experiments but for entire discursive systems. As Thomas Kuhn notes, scientific paradigms are partly maintained by a “multitude of commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments may legitimately be employed. . . . As much as laws and theory, [instrumental commitments] provide scientists with rules of the game.”29 In this light, the emergence of hybrid labs and their unorthodox use of equipment become a sign of changing material, methodological, and metaphysical commitments in both the academy and our larger intellectual culture. One way to describe some of the kinds of objects that can and do appear in contemporary hybrid labs, especially in media archaeology labs, is in terms of what Latour and Woolgar call “material dictionaries.”30 These are collections of objects, preprints, data sheets, and other aggregates of things that the denizens of labs need to keep at hand in order to do their work.31 A historical analogue for these material dictionaries is research and teaching collections, especially collections of scientific instruments, which have a long and storied

14  Introduction

history that also differs from the oft-­recurring reference to the archive in humanities theory. In the left foreground of the images of the Middlebury French-­ language lab there are two wax recorder dictaphones (different but related models) from Alexander Graham Bell’s Dictaphone Corporation. A third dictaphone, on the instructor’s podium in the center of the image, has been rotated on its stand to make a different aspect of the machine visible, and it is being used in playback mode for listening. Just like the lab’s occupants, its apparatus can also be staged. In Figure 5, both women students are listening to recordings; in Figure 4, the woman in the foreground is speaking into the horn. Interestingly, there is a sort of media archaeology being portrayed here, as the people in these images are engaging with what was arguably already dead media.32 The machine with the large, dark drum on the right is probably one of Édouard-­Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograms, which were invented in 1857, almost half a century before the trademarking of the word “dictaphone” (which itself occurred several decades before this image was taken). Like a wax cylinder recorder, the phonautogram was an analog device for recording sound, but its inscriptions were intended for visual analysis rather than playback. As Jonathan Sterne has described, Scott, a typesetter, was interested in finding a way to literally transform sound into writing.33 The “phonautographs” the machine produced were part of the early modern “interest in the scientific use of graphic demonstration and automatic inscription instruments,” and part of the scientification of culture in general and humanities labs in particular.34 Consider also the range of tuning forks on the teaching podium, which were probably used in conjunction with the phonautogram. Tuning forks create a sound at a stable (and therefore verifiable) frequency. When recorded on the phonautogram, that sound was used to create a reference image to measure other inscriptions against. In speech research and linguistics, the machines would be replaced by sonograph machines and spectrographic analysis within several decades. The technique remains the same, but the apparatus changes as science equipment manufacturers sell new equipment to lab directors to add to their assemblage. For Tony Bennett, museums and other hybrid lab-­like spaces manipulate objects to make “new realities perceptible and available

Introduction 15

for mobilization in the shaping and reshaping of social relationships.”35 This is part of “the productive power of institutions.”36 In other words, objects in labs are about more than themselves, because their importance lies in the relations they bear to each other, to the physical world, to the space in which they appear, to the people in those spaces, and to the institutions that position them.

Infrastructure Spatial relations and descriptions of apparatus alone will not solve the problem of what a lab is. Artists can have labs and scientists have offices; in some cases, their spaces and equipment can be indistinguishable from each other. What matters is how these spaces and practices are articulated by discourse to particular institutions that authorize them. The objects in the images of the French-­language lab, and the lab space itself, are also components of a much larger assemblage of institutional and disciplinary infrastructures that allow certain activities to take place. One of these infrastructural assemblages consists of the relations between commercial brands. Much earlier than the current MakerBot brandscapes of hybrid labs, the prominent labels on the machines for the Dictaphone Corporation are a reminder that the technological machinery in this image are also commodities. Brands are also part of the environment of making, and through them the media commodities in this room are part of a network of intercommunicating things that extends far beyond the bounds of the image and the room.37 As Susan Leigh Star points out in “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” the common notion of infrastructure as a system of technological substrates that is basically invisible until you need it to perform makes clear two of the properties she assigns to infrastructure, namely, embeddedness and transparency.38 But infrastructure also has other characteristics, some of which only become apparent when it breaks down. Infrastructure is always built on top of something else: an installed base, like the infrastructure of the classroom itself, in the case of our French-­language lab. Its scope extends beyond single sites and local conventions of practice, and, though it ostensibly embodies professional and technical standards, it can and does cause conflicts for those used to doing things differently

16  Introduction

in another context.39 In order for any work in the room to be meaningful to anyone beyond its walls, there needs to be a community of people using the same devices in similar ways for similar ends. Infrastructural scale expands out from the lab in both directions, to the macro and the micro. The larger system that makes it possible to communicate research results and publicize the lab’s existence and activities, from the institution itself down to the documents that it produces and circulates, is also relevant. For example, we know from the Middlebury College archives that the school authorized the existence of a College Press Club, an organization peopled by undergraduates under faculty supervision that served as the official news bureau for the college, produced the newspaper that circulates the image, and so on. In short, considering infrastructure is important because it leads toward an analysis of the institutions that defined, designed, and created that infrastructure in the first place. For Bernhard Siegert, such an analysis is a crucial step that transforms a history of material technology into a history of technology as media; the study has to serve “as a reference system for the analysis of bureaucratic or scientific data processing.”40 What such an approach enables, for Siegert, is the realization that the human and the nonhuman always already have been mixed together inextricably. Modernization, scientification, and militarization do not “dehumanize” a previously whole and sovereign subject. Institutions and their infrastructures manage their various complex mixtures of human and nonhuman components as they see fit, all of which provides the necessary context for the aspect of our model.

People We could observe the design and construction of lab equipment on a minute level, obtain and operate or fabricate models of the equipment, and then measure signal quality, but the only way to make sense out of why different choices occur in a lab is via their cultural articulations, which assign value to particular techniques at a given time for reasons that are as discursive as they are technical. In other words, a focus on infrastructure and technology will inevitably return to people, practices, and techniques, as long as they aren’t fetishized as the center of the analysis. People are as much (or

Introduction 17

more) products of labs as they are producers of them. Labs operate to train and refine their denizens into different kinds of subjects that are all part of the hybrid assemblage, but with varying degrees of power and agency.41 In our French-­language lab images, archival records indicate that the named figures in this particular collective include the following (left to right): Gaston Louis Malécot; two female students holding receivers to their ears; Marc Denkinger (rear); Renee Perrot; two male students; Marcel Vigneron. All of the named figures were faculty at Middlebury and their vitae are easily locatable online via the institution’s online databases; the students are identified solely by their station. This is a reminder that, as in any other location, there are gender and power relations at work, shaping knowledge production, including who is identified as what kind of subject, and how they are identified. As such, inside any lab, people interact with the infrastructure in ways prescribed by those power relations. Students interact with the equipment; faculty and staff observe, correct, and coach the students, helping them to perfect their technique. That is, bodies are disciplined to make them amenable to the functioning of the infrastructure, according to existing standards and protocols. The lab is an operative, recursive chain of techniques that applies to bodies as much as technologies. There are also people who are vitally important to the operation of the lab despite their absence from these images, and those absences are also telling. For example, where are the lab technicians? As William E. Burns describes, early lab spaces, like the Royal Society’s public experimental spaces, had already developed knowledge production systems that required the stratification of subjects as part of their knowledge production processes. Unlike private laboratories, where scientists and natural philosophers could develop and practice their work without fear of failure, public experimental spaces were designed for the performance of tried and tested experiments before witnesses. “Such viewers were expected to be male and upper class, or else their witnessing would have little weight. By contrast, the artisanal-­class lab technicians employed by Boyle and other wealthy natural philosophers were expected to be as invisible as possible, except when receiving blame for an experiment gone wrong.”42 Even today, it is all too common for the technical knowledge and industry of the technicians who maintain the lab space,

18  Introduction

set up experiments, and log results to have their efforts attributed to the professors or to “the lab” in general. The photographer of the French-­language lab is also part of this apparatus and played a considerable role in shaping how the lab is depicted here. Like the others who work closely with the infrastructure, it is all too easy to forget their presence. Paradoxically, this erasure is due in part to their technical proficiency.

The Imaginary Counterintuitive as it might first seem, the concept of the imaginary is very helpful in terms of determining how labs function. This is true of both the conventional Lacanian usage of the term and its more specialized media-­archaeological usage. After Lacan, Slavoj Žižek writes of the imaginary as the realm of fantasy, which serves as a kind of psychic wallpaper, covering over the cracks and traumas of lived experience in order to provide a consistent sense of reality.43 In this sense, we can think of the Lab Imaginary as the various sustaining cultural mythologies of laboratory life, both those in media representations of the lab (e.g., Frankenstein’s iconic “mad scientist” lab in James Whale’s Frankenstein, with its Tesla coils and chains and dials and buttons, or Walter White’s meth labs in Breaking Bad—­the makeshift one in the RV and the humming stainless-­steel factory under the laundromat both loom large right now) and the nonfiction, ideological myths that constitute our sense of the lab in culture at large (the biological lab, the nuclear test facility, food labs and consumer testing labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the list goes on). There also is the more specialized sense of the term imaginary that media archaeology uses, which is closer to our own usage in this book. Imaginaries of media relate to the many ways in which uses and materialities, functions and contexts of media are not merely real and actual but fabulated and created in various discursive practices from dreams to consumer branding. Zielinski groups imaginary media into three broad classes: the untimely, which was designed and realized either too early or too late for the historical moment in which it would be appropriate; the conceptual, which only ever appeared as ideas on paper; and the impossible, which are entirely symbolic machines that convey meanings with real impact but could

Introduction 19

not actually be built.44 In this usage, “imaginary media” becomes a kind of shorthand for discussing these “not quite material” but undeniably effectual forms of media that are not only emerging from science labs but being employed in novel and unforeseen ways in labs across the disciplines, including the humanities.45 Many of the instruments produced by Hugo Münsterberg, the German philosopher and psychologist whom William James invited to direct the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1892, are imaginary in the media-­archaeological sense. Giuliana Bruno has written in detail about Münsterberg’s lab at Harvard in a way that demonstrates the deep interrelations among the imaginary, lab space, apparatus, people, and infrastructure. Münsterberg’s instruments, she writes, “palpably rendered new worlds thinkable, representable, designing a shareable, common space of knowledge and even crafting a space of imaginary circulation between science and the arts.”46 In this early hybrid laboratory, Münsterberg crafted apparatuses that demonstrated the roles of optical physiology, memory, and imagination in the production of emotion, with a particular interest in the function of film, which he, and Friedrich Kittler after him, identifies as the imaginary media technology par excellence.47 Crucially, Münsterberg was also interested in the larger cultural imaginary, and he circulated his instruments themselves and image catalogs of his instruments to disseminate his ideas and create international scientific congresses for like-­minded researchers.48 In that spirit, some of his apparatuses continue to circulate, like his model of the horopter (horizon of vision), seen in Figure 6 at the Lab Cult exhibition in Montreal in 2019, more than a century after its manufacture. Bruno concludes with the observation that, because of such circulation, Münsterberg’s instruments helped people to imagine “modern ways to inhabit sensible worlds and mobilize mental space”; their materiality conveyed a “graphic design of mental life,” which migrated to cinema, turning “experiments into experience.”49 Let’s return for a moment to the phonautograph in the French-­ language lab. Scott’s agenda for the phonautograph was deeply imaginary in that he wanted to establish that it was possible to produce a form of writing that bore a direct, indexical relationship to sound. For the subjects of these photos, the imaginary motives for using it and the other bits of apparatus on display could have been any one of a range of possibilities: historical interest; teaching method;

20  Introduction

Figure 6. Hugo Münsterberg’s demonstration model of the horopter (horizon of vision) from the Psychological Laboratory at Harvard, ca. 1900. Photograph by Darren Wershler, Lab Cult exhibit, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

creating a general air of scientificity in the lab; demonstrating the difference between an indexical analog image of sound and the phonetic notation on the classroom charts; or many other things, depending on for whom the photographer (and ultimately the institution itself, in commissioning and circulating the lab photographs) is performing. Long before media archaeology emerged as a set of theories and methods that investigates the persistence of old media in contemporary media cultural practices and discourses, ostensibly “obsolete” media had its place in the lab environment, making other kinds of arguments than the ones for which it had originally been intended. The photographs remind us, then, that there is a long and honorable tradition of scrounging equipment for labs.50 Moreover, teaching laboratories are often associated with research collections of scientific instruments. Obsolete equipment from an instrument collection can be used to introduce students to fundamental lab techniques at little or no risk or cost.

Introduction 21

Technique As Sterne writes, technique “connotes a connection among practice, technology, and instrumental reason: it is a form of ‘reasoned production,’ ‘a way of revealing,’ a ‘means with a set of rules for the game.’ Under the sign of modernity, technique carries a special value and a special valence—­it is connected with rationality. Technique brings mechanics to bear on spontaneity.”51 And, as Latour and Woolgar note, laboratory practices extend outside the lab in many areas of culture, even if they ultimately depend on the lab for their existence.52 Learning lab work, then, involves being trained in specific operative chains that can be formalized under the more general heading of a technique, and the deployment of that technique in a specific space is part of what makes a lab into a lab.53 However, Sterne’s The Audible Past provides ample evidence that a seemingly natural practice such as listening is both technical and culturally constructed. Labs train us from ear to hand, from making to thinking, speaking to listening. Learning to speak for recording and learning to hear recordings involves a chain of operations that configures machines to work in concert with people and with other machines, including things like setting reference tones with tuning forks, learning to rotate recording cylinders and drums at the correct speed, reading waveforms, and transcribing recorded sounds into orthographic notation. The collecting and processing of data involve other operations and techniques: gathering inscribed surfaces, establishing grounds for comparison, transforming linear data into numeric form, processing and charting it, and so on. Our discussion above mostly concerns the symbolic content of the images of the French-­language lab. However, the production of images is also technical, which reveals another aspect of how the imagery and imaginaries of labs are produced. Again, the two photographs of the French-­language lab serve as a helpful tool for thinking about current labs. We have two different versions of this image, and the differences between them point to the way in which a photograph is always staged for particular audiences to produce particular connotations. First, the figures in the images are tightly packed into a single corner of the room and arranged so that the viewer can see them demonstrating and practicing the activities that apparently take place in the lab on a routine basis. In both the photographic

22  Introduction

print (Figure 4) and the halftone image (Figure 5), the woman in the center of the composition (identified as Renee Perrot) is blurry. In the halftone, which was prepared for use in the campus paper, she is not facing the camera at all. The other notable difference is that the unidentified female student seated behind the front dictaphone is speaking into the tube in the photograph but listening to it in the halftone. The crop marks on the halftone image indicate a further operation in the editing and production process. There is nothing disingenuous here; the goal of the overall process of photography in this instance is to produce a sense of the lab as a busy space, one where significant and serious acts of student training (and perhaps intellectual discovery) occur. In this particular case we see an active use of electromechanical recording technologies in a scientific exploration of the topic of language use. There is also a strong sense of conviviality here. These people are enjoying their investigations, or at least the production of an image of their investigations. The fact that we can see the artifice gives us a sense in miniature of how the feeling of labs as a space of richly generative activity was produced on a larger scale and embedded itself in the cultural imaginary.

THE EXTENDED LABORATORY MODEL These aspects—­space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques—­are what will help us describe situated practice in hybrid laboratories from modernity to the twenty-­first century. We have taken them as the chapter titles for this book and use them as a framework for our own thinking about labs, in a model that we refer to as “the extended laboratory.” Any method for studying labs has to be processual and relational, because labs themselves are continually shifting assemblages of cultural and technical components. As with the famous “circuit of culture” heuristic developed by British cultural studies scholars Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Anders Koed Madsen, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, one can begin an analysis anywhere in the extended laboratory model and adjust course according to which aspect of the object of study requires the most emphasis in any particular case; labs emerge in dissimilar situations and at variable scales, so our approach needs to be supple. What’s important is to pass through all of its aspects and to remember that each aspect will be imbricated into the others

Introduction 23

Figure 7. The extended laboratory model: every aspect is imbricated with all others. Courtesy of Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka.

because real-­world lab assemblages are messy, complex, and contingent.54 One of the virtues of such an approach is that it’s inherently comparative. Many aspects of labs are invisible from a singular perspective. A method that requires a comparative approach is, at least, a gesture toward minimizing gaps in analysis, in the tradition of media historians we admire, from Harold Innis to Lisa Gitelman.55 The authors of this book are all interdisciplinary researchers, with a particular focus on media archaeology, but thinking about labs has pushed us far outside our comfort zones, making us delve into the literatures of many scholarly fields, and beyond. Building a heuristic is also a way of acknowledging the impossibility of presenting a comprehensive survey of the topic at hand. As we describe in chapter 3 (“Lab Infrastructure”), there are far too many labs in general, and far, far too many kinds of hybrid labs in particular, to summarize them with any kind of authoritativeness or certainty. Over the course of this project, our guiding questions shifted from “What are we talking about?” to “How are we going to

24  Introduction

talk about it?” and “How can we make something that might help the occupants of hybrid labs to describe their own work?”

WHAT SCIENCE LABS DO AND WHY LABS MATTER Operating a lab is a valuable activity in every respect, because it involves the ability to make some kind of truth claim. Even if implied and involved in various cultural and media imaginaries, labs fabricate realities. Consider Latour and Woolgar’s most concise descriptions of what a laboratory is and what it does: Scientific activity is not “about nature,” it is a fierce fight to construct reality. The laboratory is the work and the set of productive forces, which makes construction possible. Every time a fragment stabilises, it is reintroduced into the laboratory, (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, deduction, programme, and so on), and is used to increase the difference between statements.56

In this formulation, labs literally “make a difference.” Labs and lab-­ like spaces matter because they construct new “forces and realities” out of the objects they work with, and then “those who are empowered to act as their credible interpreters” mobilize these realities and forces in social programs.57 Science labs determine what counts as fact, as opposed to, say, artistic “truth,” which is often relative, multiple, paradoxical, and complex—­ostensibly “higher” than fact but often less powerful in a modern context. So, we could also slightly change the wording of the passage from Latour and Woolgar to reflect on the other aspects of the humanities and media labs. Perhaps something like this: Cultural and media (studies) activity is not “about culture,” it is a fierce fight to construct and deconstruct the material contexts of how culture comes about. The laboratory is the work and the set of productive forces, which makes construction and deconstruction possible. Every time a fragment stabilizes, it is reintroduced into the laboratory, (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, habit, meaning, affect, and on), and is used to increase the difference between statements.

Before we move on to other labs that do this work of constructing and deconstructing technological worlds of culture, it’s worth

Introduction 25

reviewing the literature that describes what we know of the function of scientific labs. One reason science labs themselves were historically neglected as an object of study is that laboratory practices and techniques have always differed in substantial ways from their official description. For this observation, scholars of labs are indebted to Ludwik Fleck, a microbiologist and one of the first to think about the history and philosophy of science in a manner that also pays attention to practices. In On Historicizing Epistemology, Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger has the following to say about Fleck’s contribution: The “living practice” of the natural sciences must be distinguished from their “official paper form.” It is differently structured, not proceeding as described in books of logic or in textbooks. The practice of the natural sciences in general “cannot be learned from any book,” it can only be found in and learned from the reality of the laboratory. With this demand, Fleck—­himself both observer and participant in laboratory life—­largely anticipated the sociology of the laboratory that would develop only in the last decades of the twentieth century.58

It wasn’t until the 1970s that science studies scholars like Latour and Woolgar, Karin Knorr Cetina, Stephen Shapin, Owen Hannaway, Andrew Pickering, and Ian Hacking began to really consider what science labs actually did as entities unto themselves. Before that, the notion of “lab” and “experiment” were deeply commingled in the academic literature. For our purposes, Knorr Cetina’s “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory” is an excellent place to start to understand how the practices of scientific activity have come to the fore and how they have been articulated through space, discourse, and the various combinations of materials and symbols that constitute the universe of a lab in a society.59 Knorr Cetina argues that “far from being just the physical space in which experiments are conducted, laboratories have emerged as carrying a systematic ‘weight’ in our understanding of science” (114). For Knorr Cetina, labs make the difference that Latour and Woolgar mention through a process of “reconfiguration” (114, 116, 134). Inside a laboratory it is possible to construct an order that upgrades “the ordinary and mundane components of social life” (134). Different areas of science accomplish their reconfigurations in a variety of ways that “are neither uniform nor consistent” (135). One

26  Introduction

type of lab uses a variety of technologies to create representations or simulations of real-­world phenomena; a second type uses treatments and interventions to process partial versions of phenomena; a third type works semiotically, with the “signatures of the events of interest to science,” employing a “language-­transcending” set of technologies to derive significance from their work (123, 135). The first of these three types, the simulation lab, may be most familiar to humanities scholars, and the most evanescent, because it can be everywhere and nowhere. Thanks to the ubiquity and power of software simulation, anywhere you can take a computer can become a lab, and any computer can be a lab of this type (123). Nevertheless, simulation labs have a long and honorable pre-­computer history inside and outside of science; Knorr Cetina also includes war games and psychologists’ observation rooms with one-­way mirrors in this category. In this model, the lab is a virtual space, a kind of stage that is only visible when an experiment is being conducted and is for most purposes coterminous with the experiment (125). The prevalence of this type of lab is perhaps one reason why the notion of the lab and the experiment were inextricable for so long. For Knorr Cetina, the second type of lab is when “laboratories come of age and are established as distinctive and separate entities” (127). This type of lab is a “workshop” or “processing environment” with its own goals, activities, personnel, and apparatus, all of which work together in carefully designed combinations to explore particular effects (127, 128). According to Hacking, this confluence of forces is where laboratory science proper occurs, outside of those sciences “that are chiefly observational, classificatory, or historical”; for him, the laboratory “is a space for interfering under controllable and isolatable conditions with matter and energy, often done in museums . . . but seldom in archives.”60 As with the others who insist on the inscriptive quality of lab work, for Hacking, much of lab work “is about marks and the manipulation of marks.”61 Knorr Cetina is also careful to emphasize that this second type of lab is not sealed off from the world; it is a kind of hub or switching node, “a link between internal and external environments, a border in a wider traffic of objects and observations” (129). In the laboratory’s circulatory regime, people, objects, data, records, and even chunks of experiments constantly flow in and out as they are prepared, transformed, and tested. This type of lab treats all natural objects as though they exist only in

Introduction 27

an endless series of transitory states, “decomposable entities from which effects can be extracted through appropriate treatment” (126). An analog version of these labs would be the French cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with the “observation circuit” between them that architects and artisans traveled to see how various changes affected the overall performance of the buildings over time: an instructive example precisely because its spatial quality is all about its relation to the larger outside world. All sciences involve processing signs and producing texts, but in the third type of lab, “the construction of objects as signs shapes the whole technology of experimentation” (131). For Knorr Cetina, this third category would include both particle physics labs and the psychoanalyst’s office. In both cases, though experiments in such labs begin with signs, they “constantly transcend” the limitations of the symbolic, as they become, “with a certain likelihood, attached to events” that occur in laboratory experiments (131–­32). In all three categories, labs serve as the infrastructure that enables experimentation with benches and apparatus, offices and computers, management and custodial staff, utilities, a physical address, and so on, but it is in the second and third categories that laboratories become “objects of work and attention over and above experiments” (128). In these kinds of labs, scientists have to spend at least part of their time taking care of the lab, and at this point a stratification of labor and reward also becomes visible. On the low end of the spectrum, a whole class of people (custodial staff, lab monitors, etc.) becomes necessary, whose job is never to go near the actual experiments but simply to care for the lab and its apparatus. On the other end of the reward spectrum are lab directors and other personnel who have to spend an increasing amount of their time not doing science, but applying for grants, filling out expense reports, promoting the lab and its work, attending meetings, hiring new personnel, and so on. The foregoing, however, should not be dismissed as irrelevant. Hacking considers this sort of work as part of the intellectual infrastructure that is part of what makes a lab possible.62 As many current examples in the media and humanities disciplines testify, labs tend to become associated with such leaders, and having a lab becomes a career goal for many ambitious academics. As Knorr Cetina observes, as the lab becomes a distinct, permanent facility, experiments can become less so, dissolving into

28  Introduction

“experimental work” that runs continuously and in parallel (128). In hard science, experiments can reemerge with a vengeance as “counterparts” of laboratories, becoming so large that they require entire international lab networks to run, and can, as a consequence, deplete entire fields of resources for anything else. At this point, the political nature of labs and experiments becomes impossible to ignore (133). They spread across multiple institutional and geographic sites and become, again, less identifiable only as one place. Knorr Cetina’s closing thoughts are about the deep imbrication of labs and the everyday; they are embedded in it and extend out into it (135–­36). Latour and Woolgar also note the connection of labs to the spaces of everyday life while they articulate ways to start discussing the different disciplinary boundaries that are established through having a lab, as well as the boundaries that are established in having a text (not that labs and texts are necessarily separate entities). As they argue in Laboratory Life, there is nothing “special or mysterious” about the difference between the activity of social scientists (and humanists) and scientists: “Both were engaged in craftwork; differences could be explained in terms of resource and investments, and without recourse to exotic qualities of the nature of the activity.”63 The major difference, at the end of the book, is that “they have a laboratory. We, on the other hand, have a text, this present text” (257). On the one hand, we are back to the power of the possession of space itself, whether it is on a laptop or in its own building, and the power of the claims that can be made because of the possession of that space. Small wonder that those outside the sciences have claimed the space of the lab as their own, whether for the necessities of symbolic power or, as is clear in some cases, for hosting specialist apparatuses. On the other hand, texts and inscription are part of even the most scientific of labs. After a few weeks of observing Roger Guillemin’s lab at the Salk Institute, Latour and Woolgar infamously note that “the laboratory began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription” (52). Perhaps in an effort to defamiliarize this inscription process through humor, Latour and Woolgar describe the life in this laboratory as involving a “strange mania for inscription,” noting the “proliferation of files, documents, and dictionaries” around the lab space and its immediate environs (48). Science, like the humanities,

Introduction 29

is deeply textual in nature, at least at one point in its chain of operations (to refer back to the vocabulary of cultural techniques). It stands to reason that scientists, like other academics, do a lot of writing, because text is still the most efficient medium for research communication. But what is the nature of the writing that inscribes more than just alphabetic utterances and even becomes more akin to the work of technical media? One of the most relevant aspects of Latour and Woolgar’s formulation for us is that in science studies, writing is always deeply material and relational. It requires a range of types of “inscription devices,” which they define as “any item of apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space” (51). In other words, the apparatus for inscription involves a particular combination of machines, apparatus, and technicians (58). Somewhat counterintuitively, what makes a given inscription device valuable is not whether it turns abstract ideas into tangible results but rather how quickly it allows its users to move from “craftwork to ideas” (69). This formulation gives us yet another way to think about the presence of various technologies in humanities labs as mediating relations among machines, humans, materials, from hands-­on to conceptual work. In our earlier example of the phonautogram in the French-­language lab, its job is not so much to produce a mark that will be read by other machines or humans, but to make students think about sound as a continuous material phenomenon that can be recorded, measured, studied, translated, and discussed by others in the field and by interested members of other publics. In order to answer the question of how scientific writing differs from other kinds, Latour and Woolgar refer to the work of Kuhn (54). The answer they produce is that the difference between scientific writing and other kinds of writing has nothing to do with the essential quality of the writing. This distinction is a result of scientists locating themselves with a paradigm, or, to follow on Roland Barthes, a “mythology”; Latour and Woolgar eventually settle on “culture” “to refer to the set of arguments and beliefs to which there is a constant appeal in daily life and which is the object of all passions, fears, and respect” (5). In The Mangle of Practice, Pickering concurs: “The most direct route toward a posthuman analysis of practice is to acknowledge a role for nonhuman—­or material, as I

30  Introduction

will say—­agency in science.”64 Pickering proceeds to argue for the semiotic as a primary axis of analysis because it treats things and people symmetrically.65 As this definition makes clear, material technologies are articulated to specific techniques employed in a particular space by particular people in order to produce a form of knowledge recognizable by that group. Problems arise when we assume that it’s easy to translate between communities (including a general public). What holds scientific communities together in the first place, then, is discursive: a shared belief in what Kuhn called a paradigm.66 Though Kuhn does not employ these terms, the function of paradigms is largely ideological or disciplinary, and they are far less homogeneous than he suggests. The study of particular paradigms in school, along with their rules and standards, prepares people for group membership; it is largely involuntary in that you get what your instructors give you. Paradigms and disciplines are constantly performed and repeated. This is not to say change is impossible. According to Kuhn, when a new paradigm does emerge out of some anomaly that normal science can’t account for, its successful reception also involves a lot of textual work: the formation of professional societies, the establishment of new journals, and calls for inclusion in curricula.67 Latour and Woolgar proceed along similar lines, observing that, when labs do manage to constitute a fact, it is then incorporated into a textbook or becomes the condition for the production of a piece of equipment (87). This last operation is important because it is precisely the creation of standard textbooks that allows scientists to continue their “normal” research and rely on the classroom and its literature to do the interpellating.68 Manuel De Landa adds that while textbooks are “notoriously unreliable” as either historical or methodological accounts of scientific practice, they nevertheless contain a sufficient record of what knowledge was transmitted in a given period, and of what a particular generation of researchers holds in common.69 The caveat De Landa imposes is that any analysis of consensus formations “must be complemented by the variation in personal practices, as each practitioner confronts new phenomena, finds new uses for old tools, or is forced to adopt new, unfamiliar ones.”70 Carolyn Marvin contends that technical communities are deeply textual in that they gather around “authoritative texts and their

Introduction 31

designated interpreters.” Much of the authority of community members derives from grammatical/symbolic functions: “The proper naming of persons, gadgets and concepts in their electrical contexts and relations [is] among the most important performative indicators of technological literacy.”71 Textual cues are also a primary device for identifying outsiders and enemies. If you take its productive and interpretive communities into account, research communication is always partially an exercise in border policing—­“who is inside and outside, who may speak, and who has authority and may be believed.”72 As we will see later in this book, humanities and media labs have long been engaged in this border skirmish with the sciences. What really differs (or what differed historically) is the status of the knowledge that the humanities, arts and sciences produce, with or without their own labs.

THE PREEMERGENCE OF HYBRID LABS What is really happening when someone points at a space that has not previously been considered a lab and asserts, “This is a lab”? The performative quality of this act—­using the word lab and all of its attendant connotations to coordinate vast sets of relations between institutions, discourses, people, objects, texts, and practices—­comes out in many different contexts and creates effects at many different scales. Such an act of naming can shift entire economies, restructure major cultural institutions like universities, change the nature of the work academics do, and alter many other forms of personal experience, both public and private. This process is ongoing, and its lasting effects are far from predictable. Shifts between traditional humanities spaces (libraries, seminars, lecture halls), artistic and design studios, and science labs can be tracked historically, not only as a particular modern form of hybridity with a very intensive transformation witnessed across the past decades, but also as a theoretically and thematically insightful way to read modern institutional change, including in universities. The question of whether it is helpful to think about studios or other forms of hybrid labs as labs involves the extent to which the term helps us to consider how they produce and deploy new types of objecthood and subjecthood that can help scholars to enrich their own fields or

32  Introduction

Figure 8. Bioinformatics lab door (formerly a graduate student study space), Concordia University, Montreal. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

to solve certain kinds of practical problems outside the lab (what Hacking calls “mission-­oriented” work).73 Raymond Williams’s notion of the preemergent is also helpful at this juncture. Perhaps the most useful way to talk about hybrid lab forms that seem to be particularly successful at the current moment, such as media labs, digital humanities labs, maker spaces, and research-­creation labs, is as preemergent phenomena. Williams cautions that understanding emergent culture requires seeing beyond immediate practice to new forms, or adaptations of existing ones. This shift in perspective requires a certain hesitancy on our part. Rather than immediately pronouncing that hybrid labs are here to stay and that they function in a specific manner, we need to think carefully about these forms in terms of their relations to dominant practices (such as those that take place in science labs proper) and residual ones (the lab also has a deep time).74 Even in terms of the dominant understanding of how science labs function, Hacking and Kuhn offer some relief from the feeling of impostor syndrome that those working in contemporary hybrid labs

Introduction 33

might experience. One of the strengths—­and limitations—­of scientific laboratories and their attendant methods is how they restrict relations with the outside world in order to solve the problems at hand. In “The Self-­Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” Hacking contends “that as a laboratory science matures, it develops a body of types of theory and types of apparatus and types of analysis that are mutually adjusted to each other . . . ‘a closed system’ that is essentially irrefutable.”75 Labs and their theories verify themselves, but for Hacking this has little or nothing to do with the production of truth. In other words, the various research problems and techniques that scientists undertake do not occur under the sign of total comprehension of some theoretical “fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions.” Instead, they relate by “resemblance and modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes.”76 What Hacking means is that scientists themselves use the models that they acquire through (textual) research, “often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms.”77 This process of taking up models without fully considering how they achieved their prominent status is not all that different formally from something like contemporary computer and video-­game console modding culture, where it’s possible to learn a set of operations and techniques on, say, YouTube, and employ them step by step without understanding anything more about basic electronics theory. As Kuhn writes, for many people “neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research.”78 Nevertheless, the problem for scholars is different. The general public doesn’t have to theorize their own work, but we do. The homeostasis that Kuhn and Hacking describe allows labs to accomplish certain kinds of work, but it also forecloses on others. Perhaps some of the leakiness and heterodoxy of hybrid labs is helpful in this respect. As Kuhn notes, both artists and scientists must be able to function “in a world out of joint.”79 The “Why hybrid labs?” question may not be as pressing as it seems; their existence is a fait accompli. However, at the very least we would like to reframe the question in terms of how these labs work. Objects, practices, and tools inside labs may retain their names

34  Introduction

across the divide of a paradigm shift, but they will not mean the same thing when they are articulated differently, in different relationships. Transfiguration and knowledge transfer are key to understanding why labs are appearing in the humanities and arts. Kuhn reminds us that this is not the same as saying that practitioners in hybrid labs can make truth claims about whatever they please (perhaps a corrective to the worst excesses of reader response theory). “But in some areas they see different things [than the sciences], and they see them in different relations to one another.”80 Our thinking about hybrid labs in this preliminary way has revealed an object that is still very much in process. Accordingly, due to the nature of the object of study as historically dynamic, there is a pressing need for a certain methodological and theoretical eclecticism. As Latour notes, there is a real division between “scholars studying organizations, institutions, public policy on the one hand, and people studying micronegotiations inside scientific disciplines on the other.”81 We want to begin to break this division down, so we will be looking at the categories of the extended lab we have just outlined—­space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and technique—­in a series of chapters designed to demonstrate how each of these aspects contributes to a broader understanding of what hybrid labs are and how they function in current iterations of lab discourse. The rest of this book will continue to outline key aspects of labs as performances, labs as (constituted by) technologies, discourses of making and experimenting, and, among other topics, the institutional transformations of which labs in universities are a part. As we pointed out when we described why we chose to develop a heuristic rather than conduct a survey, there is more to be covered. We can only barely touch on the topics of hacklabs, fab labs, and bioart labs, and our notes on makerspaces originate from a particular university perspective that may not be shared by the denizens of non-­academic labs. We offer The Lab Book and the extended laboratory model as a platform for further investigations and as a catalyst for continuing research that demands both more specific historical takes and perspectives that differ from our own.

Introduction 35

1 LAB SPACE Construction plays the role of the subconscious. —­Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

A

t the same time as this chapter attends to the foundational role of the production and power of lab space, it also initiates a refrain that appears across the entire project: despite the singularity, certainty, and individuality of the moniker “the lab,” labs have never been static, unchangeable, unitary entities with clear-­cut histories. They are, and have always been, shaped by communities of people both inside and beyond their walls, by these same communities’ intellectual trajectories, and, of course, by the labs’ physical locations and configurations. Since lab space shapes and is shaped by its human denizens (whose own shaping of the lab space is both unconscious and intentional), readers will note many continuities between this chapter and chapter 4 of this book. While much of our analysis of hybrid lab space necessarily draws on terminology and concepts from a range of disciplines (including history, science and technology studies, media history, philosophy, architecture, and design), two works have been particularly helpful to us. The first, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, provides a background to our investigations, as it furnishes us with conceptual parameters for thinking about space as a “mode of production” in which members of a society engage. Lefebvre also helps us to see our work as part of a project to produce a common language for understanding how space precedes and produces the subjects populating lab spaces.1 Lefebvre proposes a conceptual triad that’s helpful for thinking about the production of space:

37

1. Spatial practice, or the “production and reproduction” of a given space and its subjects, as well as specific locations and their relation to various social formations. Spatial practice is what creates a given society’s social space. 2. Representations of space, or what we write and say about these spaces, which is in turn tied to relations of production and how those relations establish order. This is the space of bureaucrats and planners—­the “official” version of what social space is supposed to be. 3. Representational spaces, or the “complex symbolisms” tied to “the clandestine or underground side of social life.”2 Representational spaces are spaces where actual lived experience takes place, including the unsanctioned areas for doings that cannot happen in the “official” areas.3

While we deal with representations of labs in discourse, Lefebvre’s “representational spaces,” we are also concerned with the practices, relations, and subjects that develop in the particular spaces of the hybrid lab. The second work that informs this chapter is architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, written with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. Published just a few years after Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), A Pattern Language (1977) provides an extensive and clearly delineated set of architectural patterns that can aid in solving problems related to the organization of space. While they do occasionally cite laboratories as particular spatial entities, their work is most useful to us in terms of how it includes patterns that can form larger assemblages that include labs. According to Paul Dourish, a technical report circulated in 1993 by Mark Weiser (the so-­called father of ubiquitous computing) on the spatial properties of Xerox PARC is the only known instance of a computer scientist using A Pattern Language to talk about lab space.4 Despite the rarity of the approach, the language and methodology of the work of Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein help us to articulate the significance of individual particularities of spatial design coupled with the relations between those particularities that form a lab environment. Before we attend to lab space and its relations, we will address the contemporary trend of referring to assemblages that seem to lack any kind of bounded space (e.g., websites, ideas, and products) as “labs.” We are also interested in how assemblages that do have

38  Lab Space

bounded space but do not resemble traditional science labs at all have also come to be referred to as “labs.” This discussion of naming is important, because it demonstrates that an analysis of lab space must begin with a determination of how and where particular communities delineate the inside and outside of their labs, as well as how that delineation (often arbitrary yet always important) defines what is possible within the lab’s confines. We then provide a brief commentary on some of the histories and historical narratives of spaces that existed before laboratories began to emerge in the sixteenth century. From the ninth century through the present moment, those spaces, which are often named and referred to as “laboratories,” provide evidence of how, both discursively and materially, spaces of technical knowledge production have always had blurry, porous boundaries. Moreover, we argue that both historical and contemporary examples of lab discourse show how blurry lab boundaries may be beneficial or detrimental, depending on the nature of the work involved and depending on attempts to control the boundaries between inside and outside the lab as a way to (in turn) control who has access to the lab (a textbook example of a knowledge monopoly). We subsequently provide in-­depth case studies of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory (opened in 1876) and the MIT Media Lab (opened in 1985). Despite these labs’ implicit and explicit claims to being completely new and without historical precedent (a claim that is completely characteristic of many modern phenomena), both draw on and reconfigure the long history of lab spaces and their antecedents. The contemporary uncertainty around what is and isn’t a lab historically finds an echo in Bruno Latour’s observations about the Janus-­faced nature of contemporary science, with its black-­boxed, hermetic practices facing one direction and the open controversies of “science in the making” facing the other. If this sort of doubleness characterizes contemporary scientific discourse in general, then it should come as no surprise that it also typifies lab discourse in particular.5 In our discussion of the MIT Media Lab (later in this chapter and then again in chapter 4), this double discourse is supple enough that it can describe a lab’s innovativeness, entrepreneurial spirit, and anti-­institutionality (and even radicality) at the same time as it lays out how such labs are busy producing institutionality and various means and methods of control. Further, the Janus-­faced functioning

Lab Space 39

of contemporary lab discourse also depends on an opacity about what goes on within the lab’s space and spatial practices. Building on Latour’s work, Robert E. Kohler pinpoints the ways in which a quality of “placelessness” is necessary to the practices that many modern labs use to establish their authority: “Placelessness marks lab-­made facts as true not just to their local makers but to everyone, everywhere. It marks the lab as a social form that travels and is easy to adopt, because it seems rooted in no particular cultural soil but, rather, in a universal modernity.”6 As the following discussion of the Strategic Communication Laboratories shows, placelessness or opacity about space is sometimes strategically (and cynically) necessary, as placefulness would reveal the double discourse for what it is . . . at which point the entire edifice of the lab as a machine for the production of universal knowledge would effectively crumble. By contrast, as we illustrate in our discussion at the end of this chapter of the Media Archaeological Fundus, and our discussion of the ACTLab in chapter 4, Janus-­faced lab discourse can also produce the inverse effect. Hybrid labs might appear to produce institutionality while they actually unsettle the structures of organization and control underlying such institutionality. In these instances, the placefulness of spatial practices is a must. In short, the techniques that produce, organize, and account for lab space act as a barometer for other parts of the hybrid lab assemblage. How these techniques operate broadly implies assumptions about who is allowed access to the space and which knowledge practices appear as legitimate within that space.

IN THE BEGINNING . . . : NAMING BEFORE BEING Before we tackle the particularities of the space inside a lab, we need to attend to how we delineate that space. What are the boundaries of the lab? What is the inside and what is the outside? Given the fairly recent proliferation of virtual labs, how do we delineate the inside and the outside of a lab that lacks a physical presence? Part of the answer begins with a performative statement. Very often the answer to the question of where a lab begins and ends is that “this (whatever ‘this’ points to) is a lab because I say it is.” For example, within higher education we have come across numerous entities that identify as labs but whose existence is either partly or

40  Lab Space

entirely virtual—­entities such as the website Hook & Eye (dedicated to writings on “the realities of being women working in the Canadian university system”); SpiderWebShow.ca (a “practice-­based network” for the performing arts in Canada); and the Queer Media Database (an online research and curatorial tool for Canadian and Québécois queer film). All of these entities may have physical meeting spaces associated with their activities, but they also all situate a substantial amount of their identity and their output online.7 While we can point to scholarship in media studies dating back at least as far as the 1980s which recognizes that online networks have their own unique spatiality, what’s interesting for us about this cluster of online labs is that most of the contributors live in geographical proximity to each other (in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada), making it clear that even labs which appear to be labs in name only are part of and produce spatial relations.8 In this case, the spatiality of the physical and the virtual are in constant conversation with each other, such that the boundary separating the inside from the outside of these labs lies within an online network and within a network of social relations. The power to utter the performative sentence is also institutional. In the case of Hook & Eye and the Queer Media Database, professorial power bestows on someone the ability to declare something a lab. The space of the university makes the founders and editors of these websites professors, which in turn gives them the ability to designate their spaces (no matter how heterodox) as labs; the designation points to the long chain of space and discourse that is threaded together by power relations. A lab is always a set of social relations, technologies, and inscription devices that includes the object of study, even the largest objects of study. Another example of how performative acts of naming delineate spatial existence comes from outside higher education, shortly before the total solar eclipse that took place in August 2017. A news outlet out of Northampton, Massachusetts, reported that University of Massachusetts Boston professor Kiersten Kerby-­Patel and two George Mason University professors were going to use “the sky as a laboratory.” In order to monitor changes in the ionosphere during the eclipse, they organized a crowdsourced experiment to gather data from observers across the United States.9 Here, the space of the lab is the very sky itself, bounded not by walls, windows, or doors but by the horizon and Earth’s movement around the sun. Calling the sky a

Lab Space 41

“lab” does the discursive work of providing coherent boundaries for the study of the solar eclipse, presumably along with a methodology for such study, such that this naming and delineation legitimize the findings of citizen scientists. As we note in the Introduction, there is also a clear and obvious trend outside higher education to use “lab” to refer to anything from men’s grooming products to cocktail bars to department store displays. In these cases, contemporary lab discourse, which normally uses the trappings of lab space to derive its legitimacy, has abandoned spatiality altogether for the sake of pure symbolic content. Such double discourse connotes scientificity and legitimacy to market otherwise ordinary products. Beyond the discourse of advertising, “lab” does often indicate some kind of bounded space. In such instances, the stakes are often much higher than whether customers will buy an item of clothing or a skincare product. For example, the “lab” in Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company to Cambridge Analytica, seemed to indicate a collection of linked office workers and spaces all dedicated to the study, tracking, and manipulation of public opinion and political will via an online platform such as Facebook. SCL, which described itself as a “global election management agency,” has been linked to so-­called influence operations relating most recently to Brexit and the U.S. 2016 presidential elections. SCL was also linked to a series of stories that broke in 2017 and 2018 about the manipulation of psychometric data obtained from Facebook.10 While the SCL Group announced on May 1, 2018, that it was closing operations, its website and staff continue to operate. SCL Group’s now-­virtual existence, combined with the fact that there has never been any publicly available documentation or account of its physical space, infrastructure, and daily operations, illustrates the stakes of a total lack of transparency about lab space and lab operations: an exploitation of both lab naming and lab black-­boxing makes possible the control and manipulation of information on a global scale. In some instances in the realm outside of higher education, capital coexists with and even supports a kind of self-­conscious critique of rationality. (Toby Miller and George Yúdice have noted that this apparent contradiction is one of the hallmarks of “postmodern” cultural policy. In the name of social inclusion, many institutions

42  Lab Space

routinely legitimize and fund individuals and groups that oppose them as a form of governing strategy.)11 The stakes in these cases are not so much about the exploitation and manipulation that a lack of transparency about space makes possible, but whether one can literally make space for playful, open-­ended experimentation and/or education that has no particular investment in profit. Take, for example, HICapacity, a hackerspace in Hawaii. Both its virtual and physical spaces meet a wide variety of community needs, and their arrangement reflects those needs. Edward Kim, the main contact for HICapacity, elaborates on the organization’s purposefully flexible and variable community-­oriented goals: We constantly grow and evolve as the community evolves and we try to meet the needs of the community as that happens. We were originally a makerspace with the intention of focusing on both traditional hardware topics like Arduinos and other microcontrollers but also shared a focus on a lot of software related topics like JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. Having grown in many directions at once (carpentry, t-­shirt making, robotics, and more recently fashion tech and wearables), we tend to rebuild our organization and our goals as is needed. As of right now, we more broadly define ourselves as an advocate for technology within the state of Hawaii. This is a very broad goal and was intentionally picked to be so. We want to focus on both the sharing and increasing the knowledge between professionals within our community and general advocacy of technology as a viable industry in Hawaii.12

At HICapacity, the organization’s goals influence and are influenced by its space. As Kim goes on to explain, HICapacity is both a virtual space that enables “meet-­ups” and a community-­funded physical space that lends itself to collaborative efforts. We include his thorough description of the space below because it delineates all three parts of Lefebvre’s conceptual triad for understanding space. It is itself a representation of space; it describes the organization’s spatial practice insofar as the space shapes and is shaped by the subjects occupying that space; and it also describes itself as a representational space for a whole range of lived experiences. Membership fees go to paying rent on an office located at the “Manoa Innovation Center.” . . . The office itself is a cozy 400-­ish square foot space with windows that face out the exterior of the building toward the

Lab Space 43

street. This is great because it lets in a lot of sunlight and has windows that open to let out air. This is important because we do have movable soldering stations and although we do have a single fume extractor, an open window is also handy to have around if there is need for more than one soldering station. Moving on, we have lockers, two small desks for personal use, and one larger desk for hardware-­specific work. There is also one conference-­style desk that most people sit around during our events to not only work but converse with others as well. We feel that this setup allows people to freely work off to the side if they have a deadline, or join the group at the conference table for whatever discussion is happening . . . As for the items in the space—­about a dozen office chairs of various brands, a few computers . . . a few monitors, a number of Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, robots of all shapes and sizes and brands, a bike rack . . . a bookshelf with many engineering-­related books, and a lot of assorted cables. There’s also a single projector if anyone wants to throw something up for everything to look at or for movie nights. Lastly, there are many random microcontrollers and microchips, and one (working) 3D printer. The majority of these were donated or found on street corners. . . . The current infrastructure is adequate for most nights but on nights where there’s a large event happening, the biggest trouble is locating more chairs. There have been times where we’ve had to ask neighboring offices to donate chairs for larger events or unexpected crowds. . . . But given that membership funds just barely cover rent, and there’s no critical need, we get by and hope for more donations.13

Everything in and of the space matters: the square footage; the size and location of the windows; the nature, quantity, and organization of the furniture; the specific lab apparatus; the lab’s sources of funding and/or dependence on donations; the backgrounds of the lab’s denizens and visitors; and the type, size, and frequency of the events they host. In some instances in the private sector, capital coexists with and supports not just rationality but a kind of self-­conscious postcritique of rationality. Our final example in this section is simply called THE LAB—­an event space attached to Ada’s Technical Books and Café in Seattle, Washington. This space serves as one more instance of an attempt to make room in the public realm for playful, open-­ ended experimentation. Its proprietors advertise THE LAB as a space that will give you “the feeling of old-­science, meets modern inventiveness—­with a dash of mystery in the mix. So you walk away having experienced something special—­and hopefully having

44  Lab Space

learned something new, maybe mysterious, and always fascinating.”14 THE LAB is part of a larger cluster consisting of a bookstore, a café, and a co-­working space, all of which help support their goal of producing educational experiences within the constraints of the current cultural order. Yet THE LAB does not seem to be interested in invoking objectivity, science, futurity, or innovation; nor does it seem interested in the complete eradication of labness. Indeed, for co-­owners Danielle and David Hulton, why not take advantage of the capaciousness of the term “lab” while playfully drawing attention to the ways in which labs have long been leveraged for the production of supposedly legitimate knowledge and instead invoke feeling, invention, and mystery? The invocation of mystery in this context does not mean black-­ boxing the nature of the space along with what might be possible within it. While SCL is intentionally opaque about where its lab space is located and the precise nature of the activities that take place there, THE LAB is utterly transparent not only about its space but also about the sorts of spatial practices—­activities, events, and relationships—­that it makes possible. According to its website, THE LAB’s 545 square feet includes a completely stocked bar, a coat room, an in-­house sound system and mic, Wi-­Fi and high-­speed internet access, air-­conditioning and heat, and numerous flexible seating options. Their website even provides architectural plans outlining classroom-­style seating for thirteen to fifteen people, theater-­style seating for forty to forty-­three people, and open-­space seating also for forty to forty-­three people. These diagrams illustrate the influence that the production of space has on who accesses lab space and how. Think, for example, about how the seating size and arrangements can accommodate certain body sizes over others, and how the location of the sound booth will likewise affect the experience of sound for people in the room. What these examples show in concert is that, taken on their own, location, funding sources, or mission statements don’t necessarily indicate anything about whether a given lab seeks to be innovative, experimental, and radical or whether the orchestration of its everyday activities reflects its stated values. A more accurate measurement of the distance between the lab’s discourse and its actual goals and activities is the extent to which the lab self-­consciously and transparently accounts for its organization of and responsiveness to space.

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HISTORIES AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVES OF LABORATORY SPACES In spite of the bewildering range of things and arrangements called labs, hybrid labs around the globe are disarticulating the term from its current rootless commercialism and rearticulating it to indicate a heterogeneity of techniques, objects, and experiments. As we put it earlier, nearly all labs are Janus-­faced. Janus was the Roman god of transitions and doorways; today’s hybrid labs are passages with connections to both the future and the past, and to both the inside and the outside of institutions. In order to develop a vocabulary and method that will allow us to think and talk about hybrid labs, the trick is to figure out to which pasts and which futures they look. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford described the labs that emerged in the early modern period as a hybrid of medieval spaces of knowledge production—­“a new type of environment . . . combining the resources of the cell, the study, the library, and the workshop.”15 While we touch on monasteries, apothecaries, and labs in terms of how they are all part of a family of related situated practices, each space is also specific to the discourse network of its own time and place, even while they are all tied together in a longer continuity or genealogy. Just as the boundaries of contemporary labs may be difficult to locate for a variety of reasons, medieval and early modern research spaces were also not clearly bounded, distinct places. But they were often connected to other, more established kinds of space, such as the monastery or the home. While many of the things that are necessary to make a lab already existed before modernity, they were not articulated in the manner that we imagine as “the modern lab,” nor were the environments in which they operated necessarily recognized as distinct. It’s important to avoid anachronism by not imposing the character of the modern laboratory onto such spaces, but it’s also crucial to be able to invoke these spaces in order to understand how a tension between the dictates of institutional power and the activities of actual individuals has always shaped the production of knowledge. The consequence of entirely excluding these spaces from consideration would be a perpetuation of what Harold Innis calls a “monopoly of knowledge”—­that is, a set of limits on who is excluded and included from sanctioned lab spaces throughout the historical

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record and into the present moment.16 As a result, the historical narratives around lab space are often conflicted and dependent on the distinctions that scholars make, consciously or not, about what counts as legitimate practices for the production of knowledge. While our discussion of contemporary labs can attempt to measure the distance between a given lab’s statements about itself and its actual goals and activities as reflected in the availability of information on its space, most labs prior to the late nineteenth century did not usually account for themselves or their space in writing, so our discussion of early spaces of technical knowledge production looks instead at architectural plans, illustrations, and historical narratives to investigate the shifting, variable, and sometimes duplicitous nature of lab discourse. Graeme Gooday introduces the notion that, given certain contingencies of gender and geography, “boundaries between laboratories and other spaces—­especially domestic kitchens—­could be permeable or nonexistent.” Therefore, “some spaces served as experimental laboratories without ever being designated as such.” He goes on to list the three primary modes of activity that historically took place in laboratories: “organic genesis, practical experimentation, and material manufacture.”17 Although Gooday does not mention the famous Plan of St. Gall—­the never-­realized architectural plan from 820–­30 C.E. for an entire monastic community in Switzerland, which also stood as an ideal for nearly all Benedictine monasteries built thereafter—­the plan does include spaces for all three modes of activities. Documents for the plan describe all the elements (or, in the terms of Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, “patterns”) one would also find in a laboratory, but in different configurations and combinations as part of an abbey. They are articulated differently and named differently, and the discourse around them differs as well. The Plan of St. Gall lays out a complex visual proposal for a community of 110 monks and 160 laypeople. Their interactions with each other and their various labors are carefully controlled via an imagined space that’s both open and closed—­dedicated to contemplation, quiet, and learning but also amenable to the labor of making and doing. For example, consider the arcades in the plan; Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein remind us that such “covered walkways at the edge of buildings, which are partly inside, partly outside—­play a vital role in the way that people interact with buildings” insofar as

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they “create an ambiguous territory between the public world and the private world.”18 Strategically placed architectural features create a dense, variable, and porous structure that would allow monks to exist in a central, enclosed inner cloister while still having access to surrounding buildings and services. The Plan of St. Gall also specifies the production of a space dedicated to a range of labors and laborers. For example, the health and medicine buildings to the northeast of the cloister include an infirmary complex; a house for physicians that is connected to a pharmacy and a sick ward; a house for bleeding; two bathhouses; and a (highly organized, methodically designed) medicinal herb garden, all of which are also spatially arranged to enable very specific traffic patterns among the abbot, physicians, monks, and serfs. Such arrangements put entities that would later be extracted from the complex and become self-­contained into close relation with each other, much like apothecaries and pharmacies.19 Similar structures and traffic patterns also exist in the buildings to the west of the inner cloister that contain connected workshop spaces for saddlers, shoemakers, shield makers, sword grinders, turners, curriers, blacksmiths, and goldsmiths. These workshops are arranged around two central fireplaces, with dwelling quarters on the outer edges of the complex. Just because the Plan of St. Gall was never built and remains in the realm of the ideal doesn’t mean that it didn’t do real work; it is a textbook example of imaginary media in this respect. Many spaces of knowledge production drew on it for inspiration, notably the Benediktbeuern Abbey in Bavaria, Germany, originally a monastery of the Benedictine Order built in 739–­40 C.E. and rebuilt numerous times thereafter. As Myles W. Jackson argues, the architecture of the cloister shaped and was shaped by the three philosophical pillars of the Rule of Saint Benedict: labor, silence, and secrecy.20 To underscore the historical impact of the cloister’s architecture, Jackson also shows how the particularities of this space (beyond the library and the garden) and its use for a thousand-­year-­old tradition in the manufacturing, cutting, and polishing of glass influenced Joseph Von Fraunhofer’s eighteenth-­century manufacture of achromatic lenses for telescopes. Specifically, Jackson provides an extensive description of the space within and around the cloister to make clear that other spaces for the production of technical knowledge had existed

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for many centuries prior to the proliferation of laboratories or “elaboratories” in the sixteenth century. The articulation of such spaces to larger communities, especially ones that included sites of material production, was also vital. For example, the Benediktbeuern Abbey cloister was a large, well-­lit space “located in the midst of a large forest, where wood for fuel was in abundant supply.” Also, “a quarry of quartz, a key ingredient of glass, was only ten kilometers away,” no doubt co-­emergent with the fact that Benedictine monks and artisans from the surrounding communities were well versed in optical theory and practice and, in later centuries, possessed “lavish collections of physical instruments and texts dealing with glass manufacture and optical theory.” Even the large, open space of the cloister itself was perfectly suited for experimenting with rays of light emitted from sodium lamps.21 Despite the fact that all of the elements for the singular entity that will later be dubbed a “laboratory” are here, they are articulated differently, and the assemblage of the abbey is distinct in its own right. This discussion of the architectural features of medieval monasteries demonstrates not only that there are numerous, unaccounted-­ for genealogies of spaces related to the modern laboratory but also that these spaces have their own histories and other trajectories; as such, tracing the contemporary lab’s relative beginnings is far from straightforward. There were, for example, anatomical theaters dating back as far as 1594 in Padua, Italy, that were designed to educate the public about human anatomy through dissections. These dissections took place on a central, sunken table, surrounded by tiered viewing areas. Around the perimeter of the space, there was an array of skeletons with instructional signage. Such theaters rearticulated the boundaries between public and private in a manner different from the monasteries, in this case bringing the public into a clearly defined space and turning dissections into pedagogical performances rather than the more informal, loose mode of instruction that might have taken place in abbey workshops. However, while the architectural spaces and possibilities for observation for the public are a key form of this constellation of knowledge, the notion of “public” was very limited and, in this case, might only include male students and faculty. The history of apothecaries and their work spaces (both of which are designated by the word apothecary, highlighting the strength

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of the articulation between space, technique, and people in this instance) also deserves mention. As Maurice Crosland explains, the earliest accounts of apothecaries date back to ancient Babylon. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England, they had attained enough stature to form a professional organization. Most were dedicated to the manual preparation and sale of medicines to physicians and patients. Like the denizens of the anatomical theaters, apothecaries required a well-­lit space with windows and a central table for preparation and demonstration of their medicines. They also usually featured abundant shelves and cupboards for storage, with counters running along the lower half of the shelves, creating another family resemblance to a domestic kitchen. While apothecaries were eventually viewed as inferior to other sites of experimentation because of their reliance on manual work, this emphasis on labor puts them in the same lineage of spaces as the Benedictine abbeys. It also anticipates the reversal that took place in university life in the coming centuries to include rather than shun laboratories as places of hands-­on, physical work.22 That said, apothecaries were distinct from later university-­based laboratories in that they served a clear public and profit-­oriented function and not an educational function.23 We have already noted that many scholars of science history consider the sixteenth century the official point at which entities called “laboratories” start to proliferate, particularly as alchemical laboratories.24 If we are to include the many sites at which experimental work took place in the late seventeenth century, we need to include, as Steven Shapin points out, a variety of other venues: [the] instrument maker’s shop . . . the coffeehouse, the royal palace, the rooms of college fellows, and associated collegiate and university structures. But by far the most significant venues were the private residences of gentlemen or, at any rate, sites where places of scientific work were coextensive with places of residence, whether owned or rented. The overwhelming majority of experimental trials, displays, and discussions that we know about occurred within private residences.25

However, as Ursula Klein writes, while Shapin’s intervention regarding the private residences of gentleman natural philosophers in the history of laboratory spaces is important, it requires some tweaking. Klein is deeply invested in the material culture of laboratories, and

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she argues that Shapin’s focus on experimental philosophy and epistemology is too narrow to provide a workable account of how experimental investigation became linked to modern labor practices and commercial innovation (a crucial topic for the history of media labs especially). Like us, she is deeply interested in the “hybrid experts” steeped in the practical, hands-­on business of material production as well as the weightier philosophical concerns of the gentleman scientists.26 If the history of labs is always told solely in terms of those entities properly called “labs,” and if that same history is always coupled with assertions about what does or does not count as a lab, then that history is not only significantly foreshortened but also incomplete. Such a truncated history inaccurately legitimizes some techniques for the production of knowledge over others. If we are going to make sense of the history of labs or of contemporary hybrid labs, we need to juxtapose that history with traditions, practices, techniques, and perspectives from other times and places. And we probably need to venture into the literatures of other disciplines in order to do so. When Crosland goes on to assert that “It is not enough to bring apparatus into an ordinary room to make it into a laboratory” and that, for example, “one would not describe a room as a kitchen unless it had special facilities for cooking,” not only is he overlooking the very wide range of doings that might fall under the category of “practical science,” but he is neglecting the very wide range of things that have counted as part of an apparatus as well as the long history of spaces that served as labs.27 By contrast, we argue that the spaces of the hybrid labs we explore in this book need to be considered in terms of a much richer and longer set of histories than a certain line of thinking in the history of science might lead us to believe. In other words, contemporary hybrid labs are not merely part of a genealogy of modern research university or R&D labs, but also of various other spaces of making and doing, of interacting, and of imagined communities. In later abbeys, such as the fourteenth-­century iteration of Glastonbury Abbey, we can see the continuation and gradual isolation of a space called the “abbot’s kitchen.” This was both a more specialized and more elaborate space than the cluster of workshop spaces in the Plan of St. Gall. It was attached to, but still separate from, the abbot’s main residence, and featured four fireplaces for

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roasting, boiling, baking, and washing. There were smoke outlets above each fireplace, which provided necessary ventilation, and a substantial lantern. Consider the fact that women have, of course, long been relegated to the kitchen as the heart of the domestic sphere, but also that, as Alix Cooper points out, in early modern times, “kitchens and basements or root cellars formed improvised laboratories for women to tinker with and write down medical recipes.”28 However, over the coming centuries, women saw the gradual appropriation and renaming of the kitchen as laboratory, which meant they were essentially told they might belong in a kitchen, the kitchen might be a lab, and a lab might even be in a kitchen, but a lab is not for them. In the 1860s the University of Oxford decided to extend their science museum by attaching a new chemistry building to it. Informally, they called it a laboratory, but it was modeled on and named after the abbot’s kitchen because of its “chimney-­based architecture.” This kitchen/laboratory space—­emphatically not a domestic kitchen occupied by women, separate from but connected to a science museum at a major institution of higher learning—­is an appropriate spatial allegory for the genealogical relationship between the modern lab and earlier articulations. The naming and architectural strategies at work here are shot through with power relations, as always. Women (who had in effect been working in kitchen-­cum-­laboratories for most of their lives) were not allowed to attend Oxford until the 1870s. At the time the abbot’s kitchen opened, women were allowed inside physics and biology teaching laboratories, but they were not permitted to undertake research in any of these laboratories, as they were not considered actual members of the university community and could not take exams or graduate until 1920.29 By 1881 the rearticulation was complete, as the field of metallurgy used “kitchen” as a synonym for “laboratory,” denoting the “space between the fire and flue bridges of a reverberatory furnace in which work is performed.”30 Delineating the discursive, spatial, and technical connections between kitchen and laboratory reminds us once again how the spaces that preceded laboratories were not necessarily separate and isolated. There is a complex history of gender and power relations behind the many turns and twists involved in establishing labs as separate, special places for chemical experimentation.31

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CASE STUDY: MENLO PARK LABORATORY (MENLO PARK, NEW JERSEY) By and large, it is not until the nineteenth century that we have access to historical records of lab denizens and directors documenting or describing lab space. According to MIT’s Norbert Wiener, Thomas Edison’s greatest invention was the industrial research laboratory. In this section we draw on the astonishing amount of archival, historical, and critical material on and about Edison and his various laboratories, especially the Menlo Park laboratory, which launched in 1876. Menlo Park was an “invention factory” that was the largest private laboratory in the United States in the 1870s, and it simultaneously built on and departed in significant respects from the long tangle of kitchens, apothecaries, theaters, and chemistry labs from which it emerged. While Menlo Park drew on elements from earlier research spaces such as workshops and libraries, its dedication to the “rapid and cheap development of a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so” was deeply modern.32 After being fired from Western Union in 1867 and subsequently working independently on patenting inventions, Edison opened a shop (which he did not yet refer to as a laboratory) in 1870 in Newark, New Jersey. There he developed the Universal Stock Ticker, numerous types of telegraph systems, an electric pen, and more. This first “shop” was a series of rooms on the top floor of a padlock factory a block off Main Street in what is now Orange, New Jersey. Once Edison started looking for a larger, alternative location for what he would eventually call a laboratory, he found that Menlo Park was, by contrast, secluded and spacious; it granted him the opportunity to build not just a lab but an entire surrounding community dedicated to invention. According to Michael J. Gall, when Edison chose Menlo Park as a location for his lab it consisted of only a few homes and dirt roads. It was relatively inexpensive and convenient for him to simply purchase seven adjacent property lots (all of which set the stage for buildings that could signal grandeur because the lots were on a hillcrest overlooking the surrounding rural area) for $5,200 from Menlo Park Homestead Association trustee George Goodyear.33 Edison used six of these lots for the laboratory complex and one for his personal home. According to Edison’s longtime laboratory assistant Francis Jehl:

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Menlo Park was at that time nothing more than a spot on the map. Situated several miles below Rahway on the Pennsylvania Railroad, its principal attraction was a quiet atmosphere of peace. . . . He bought the site on December 29, 1875, and then purchased another tract nearby, 150 x 300 feet, for his residence. . . . The long gray laboratory had to serve as both office and shop for Edison, as well as experimental headquarters. Power was furnished by an upright steam engine in the rear room on the ground floor. The place was lighted by illuminating gas. . . . A plank walk bordered its edge from the laboratory a distance of 850 feet to the Edison home.34

In this description there is already a family resemblance to the Plan of St. Gall and actual Benedictine abbeys in terms of the importance of sources of power and/or heat, of a series of work spaces that are flexible and configurable enough to accommodate multiple purposes, and of the adjacency of a nearby domestic sphere. These historical precedents also come into view once we start looking at photographs of the lab complex as a whole. In one photograph, presumably from around 1876, the main rectangular structure that Jehl calls the “long gray laboratory” has white clapboard siding and abundant natural light because of the twenty or so windows on all faces of the building, and it is surrounded by a picket fence such that the lab resembles both a church and a schoolhouse.35 It’s also worth noting that, in an image in Jehl’s Menlo Park Reminiscences, the boundaries between inside and outside the lab have not yet been clearly constructed. The image includes a bear chained to a tree near the front entrance of the lab—­a fact that would be more strange if it weren’t for the fact that demarcations of what lies inside and outside a lab can also be mapped onto attempts to demarcate where (supposedly wild, uncontrollable) nature ends and (supposedly controlled) culture begins. In another photograph from roughly the same period we can see that the bear and tree have been removed and that a large machine shop, office building, and carpenters’ and glassblowing sheds had been added around the original main building.36 A handful of houses surrounded Edison’s house and the main Menlo Park complex where his employees lived. The entire town was, “in short, Edisonia, and nothing else.”37 While we are considering the external structure of Edisonia, it’s worth invoking one of the patterns that Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein dedicate to the “Building Complex.” Edison’s decision to

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Figure 9. The main laboratory complex on the left and Edison residence on the right, 1870s. From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

Figure 10. The entire Menlo Park complex during the winter of 1879. From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

build a complex rather than a monolithic structure resonates backward to the Benedictine monasteries and forward to the designs of later labs. In Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s words, “when human organizations are housed in enormous, undifferentiated buildings, people stop identifying with the staff who work there as personalities and think only of the institution as an impersonal

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monolith, staffed by personnel.”38 By contrast, a complex allows for the manifestation of “the actual social facts of the situation. At low densities, a building complex may take the form of a collection of small buildings connected by arcades, paths, bridges, shared gardens, and walls.”39 The success of this design lies in its power to persuade lab denizens to wholly identify with the lab and passionately work long hours. Accounts from workers describe how working in the lab was a “strenuous but joyous life for all, physically, mentally and emotionally. We worked long night hours—­frequently to the limit of human endurance.”40 Similar statements appear in lab discourse to this day, notably around “the crunch” involved in working on new media campuses. In André Millard’s elaboration on the atmosphere in the lab, there is also a clear implication not only that Edison designed a lab complex to encourage complete worker identification but also that this identification specifically supports male bonding in a way that very much anticipates the spaces of contemporary tech/start-­up culture, like MIT’s Media Lab, which feature pool tables, lounge chairs, and couches for exactly the same reasons: “Experimenting at the first invention factory at Menlo Park was punctuated by gaming, practical jokes, and rowdy singsongs at the large organ that filled one end of the building. . . . Far from being sedate, intellectual environments with library quiet, Edison’s laboratories were noisy, crowded places that often seemed on the verge of uproar.”41 While Millard is right to point out the influence of “machine shop culture” in the Menlo Park laboratory and the flexibility to produce a wide range of tools and parts that a shop offered, there is a much longer, deeper history of spaces that served the same purpose in terms of flexibility and porous boundaries. The latter comes more clearly into view when studying the layout of the first floor of the lab building. To begin with, the main entrance is on the side of the rectangular complex facing the street, so the lab is at least partly open to and part of the outside world. As Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s description of the pattern for “Main Entrance” indicates, the position of the front door controls the “movement to and from the building, and all the other decisions about layout flow from this decision.” Everyone using this primary access point had to immediately pass Edison’s office on the right of the entranceway,

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Figure 11. “Edison and His Principal Assistants at Menlo Park, 1878.” From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

establishing Edison as the most important aspect of the lab. To access the rest of the complex, visitors had to continue through several open rooms divided by function before they could access the machine shop at the back.42 The first long room contains on one side a hydraulic press, several cabinets containing models of instruments and early inventions, and then shelves of batteries and a table for a galvanometer. On the opposite side of the long room and beyond Edison’s office were stairs to the second floor of the lab, more cabinets, an “analytical nook” (as it’s labeled in the floor plan that appears in Jehl’s Menlo Park Reminiscences), table, and sink.43 This large front room flows into the machine shop at the back, which brings in more conventional aspects of lab spaces such as a chimney, furnace, fume chamber, sink, benches, tables, and abundant machinery along the floor and ceiling for experimentation. Just as lab discourse at the Menlo Park complex encouraged worker identification with their place of employment as an incentive to labor for long hours, the spatial configuration of the main laboratory building reinforces that

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ethos, as it is both open and closed, fluid and segmented according to the type of work. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein make sense of the power of this particular spatial configuration for encouraging utmost efficiency via a pattern for “Self-­Governing Workshops and Offices,” which is not so much self-­governing as a kind of local fiefdom or seigneury: A man enjoys his work when he understands the whole and when he is responsible for the quality of the whole. He can only understand the whole and be responsible for the whole when the work which happens in society . . . is undertaken by small self-­governing human groups; groups small enough to give people understanding through face-­to-­face contact, and autonomous enough to let the workers themselves govern their own affairs.44

It is important to note here that from the gender assumptions in “a man enjoys his work” onward, the authors’ explication is deeply modern. Despite the importance of Menlo Park to later media labs, internet start-­ups, and other hybrid spaces, its underlying assumptions about where and how work takes place and how it can be governed do not hold in the work “spaces” of a twenty-­first-­century digital networked culture any more than would the assumptions of a medieval abbot about how work would take place in his abbey. Every

Figure 12. Edison’s machine shop at the Menlo Park laboratory, 1877. From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

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intellectual genealogy is always such a series of long continuities and abrupt breaks. On to the second floor. New York Daily Graphic writer William Croffut describes this floor as being “walled with shelves of bottles, like an apothecary shop—­thousands of bottles of all sizes and colors. In the corner is a cabinet organ. On benches and tables are batteries of all descriptions, microscopes, magnifying glasses, crucibles, retorts, an ash-­covered forge, and all the apparatus of a chemist.”45 (In chapter 2 we elaborate on how lab apparatus prepares knowledge because its mechanisms, arrangements, spaces, and situations define what counts as knowledge.) Croffut’s comparison of the Menlo Park lab to apothecaries points once again to the long spatial genealogy that is at play here. What makes the space at Menlo Park historically distinct is the way that familiar patterns from arcades, paths, flexible and configurable workshop spaces, furnaces, and kitchen areas were extracted and reconfigured in order to embody late-­nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­century discourses of innovation, industry, and workplace efficiency. Although the individual elements may seem familiar, and may even bear the same names, their positions in the larger assemblages of their own past and our present are different, so they enable different practices and the production of different kinds of knowledge and different ideologies.

Figure 13. An illustration of the second floor of the Menlo Park laboratory in 1880. From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

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CASE STUDY: MIT MEDIA LAB, PART 1 (MIT) The MIT Media Lab also has a long history of capitalizing on its appearance of newness as a way to assert its ontological newness, despite the fact that it too draws on the long genealogy that informed modern labs and informs many contemporary hybrid labs.46 It is particularly important for our book as a whole, because it opened as one of the first university-­based (but largely privately funded) interdisciplinary media labs dedicated to hands-­on practice. Partly housed in a school of architecture, and designed by internationally renowned architecture firm I. M. Pei and Partners, this lab, more than any others, was intended to be spatially responsive to and reflective of the work going on inside it. The MIT Media Lab exemplifies the ways in which hybrid labs in general and media labs in particular are distinct and porous, private and public in their spatial configurations, simultaneously embracing and rejecting their historical precedents. The MIT Media Lab is a complex entity consisting of many labs grouped under the singular name of “the media lab”; it is, in fact, more a lab of labs than a single entity. It is constantly evolving and has exerted considerable influence on the creation of media labs around the world. Our analysis of the naming and space of the MIT Media Lab, however, must by necessity be focused and brief in this chapter, although we discuss it again in chapter 4 in terms of the history of its founding, its leadership, and its politics. Our discussion here focuses on the exterior design and interior space of the first media lab building, which was completed in 1985 (E15), with some attention to the second building, which was completed in 2010 (E14), as a way to set the stage for our later, more extended analysis. The delineation of the MIT Media Lab as a lab begins with a heady mixture of institutional policy, emergent cultural techniques, lab discourse, and the ability of those in power to bring something into existence by naming it. In the early 1980s, Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder and director of the Architecture Machine Group (AMG) at MIT, began working with MIT’s president, Jerome Weisner. Their goal was to launch a lab that built on the ethos and the success of the AMG but also embraced interdisciplinary collaboration and rapid prototyping of communication technologies rather than relying on a more staid, methodical, theoretically and historically informed

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academic approach. As Stewart Brand put it in The Media Lab, his popular mid-­1980s account of the lab: Students and professors at the Media Laboratory write papers and books and publish them, but the byword in this grove of academe is not “Publish or Perish.” In Lab parlance it’s “Demo or Die”—­make the case for your idea with an unfaked performance of it working at least once, or let somebody else at the equipment. “We write about what we do,” comments Director Negroponte, “but we don’t write unless we’ve done it.”47

Naming this entity “the Media Lab” signaled a desire to position it as something new in higher education. Unlike the disciplinary implications in the name “Architecture Machine Group,” Negroponte claimed “media” belonged to no discipline (though the discipline of communication studies in Canada, which was well established by that point, would take exception). Certainly the lab’s “demo or die” mantra signaled its departure from traditional modes of academic research.48 Lab discourse is hard at work here, trying to establish itself as exceptional. While the MIT Media Lab’s claim to novelty might hold up if we compared it to the vast majority of its contemporary labs in higher education, its infrastructural funding model was nothing new at MIT. The university has long embraced funding from ARPA, DARPA, and large corporations—­think of the Radiation Laboratory from the 1940s and the Lincoln Laboratory from the 1950s, the latter of which still exists today.49 The MIT Media Lab was a continuation of the longer legacy of art and technology labs at MIT (such as the Center for Advanced Visual Studies) that stood as central parts of the Cold War incorporation of artists into the university sector.50 The naming of the lab also signaled that it wanted to position itself as part of the lineage of private-­sector technology labs (such as Menlo Park, Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC). The Janus-­faced aspect of lab discourse is at work here too. At the same time as the MIT Media Lab was trying to align itself with the private sector, it was also regularly and consistently making claims to avant-­garde radicality. In Negroponte’s 1995 best seller, Being Digital, he recounts the following: The original concept for the Media Lab was to take both human interface and artificial intelligence research in new directions. The new wrinkle

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was to shape them by the content of information systems, the demands of consumer applications, the nature of artistic thought. The idea was marketed to the broadcasting, publishing, and computer industries as the convergence of the sensory richness of video, the information depth of publishing, and the intrinsic interactivity of computers. . . . As in 1863, when the Paris art establishment declined to let the Impressionists into its official show, the founding faculty members of the Media Lab became a Salon des Refusés and had one of their own, in some cases too radical for their academic department, in some cases too extraneous to their department, and in one case with no department at all. . . . We came together in the early 1980s as a counterculture to the establishment of computer science.51

Despite the historical continuities between the Menlo Park laboratory and the MIT Media Lab, much of the latter’s discursive identity hangs on its self-­proclaimed assertions about its countercultural status and its belief in a philosophy not just of interdisciplinarity but of antidisciplinarity.52 For example, following in the footsteps of previous MIT Media Lab directors, from Negroponte to Walter Bender and Frank Moss, all of whom wrote books that uniformly tout the lab’s unconventional methods and wild successes, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe’s 2016 Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future begins with a curious disavowal of any influence by Edison. Ito and Howe criticize Edison for his lack of foresight in merely inventing the phonograph without thinking to invent the recording industry, as did Eldridge Reeves Johnson. They eventually move on to generic assertions about how “the lab . . . [has] always been something of an island for misfit toys” and even more generic, ahistorical assertions about how, as a result of its supposed countercultural status, “the culture of creative disobedience that draws innovators to Silicon Valley and the Media Lab is deeply threatening to hierarchical managers and many traditional organizations.”53 Given the lab’s consistent discourse about its exceptionality over the last thirty-­five years, it should not be as astonishing as it is that, when we spoke with the current associate director of the lab, Hiroshi Ishii, in 2017, he asserted the following: I have no idea what you’re talking about with the general term “media.” . . . Also some people use the same name . . . it is copyright infringement

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probably. I have no argument, but  .  .  . you’re the first person to use “media” as a general term. So it’s confusing. . . . If your name is Lori, it’s very important. It’s attached to you. And the Media Lab is attached to here. So, if you can clarify, you’re talking about a general laboratory, about media research, versus MIT Media Lab. . . . I encourage you to carefully use the term “media lab” because otherwise it confuses not only me but also the audience. It’s very serious.54

Under U.S. and Canadian law, of course, a name cannot be copyrighted (though it can be trademarked), so this is an assertion, not an argument (“I have no argument, but . . .”): an exercise of power in an attempt to control larger and more ambiguous cultural meanings via a well-­established version of lab discourse with hefty institutional backing. The MIT Media Lab was successful in its use of this strategy for many years, though, as we will see, cracks have appeared in the monolith. As we noted earlier, there are a number of labs that have no physical space and that may simply be a group of people with common interests (whether intellectual or profit-­oriented). We also noted the number of historical entities that were only referred to as labs if their denizens were male scientists. The space of the MIT Media Lab bears a strong resemblance to those historical entities that explicitly referred to themselves as labs in order to give it a certain coherence or make it resonate with a particular lineage of labs. Like Menlo Park, the MIT Media Lab contains many open, closed, and porous spaces for hands-­on experimentation: a wood shop; a metal shop; areas for spare parts; a kitchen; an area for recreation and socializing; and administration offices. Unlike Menlo Park, it also has a lecture hall as well as designated areas for exhibitions, receptions, and conferences. All the same, given its fairly obvious ties to historical precedents in both name and spatial design, it is odd that its discourse desires complete ownership of the term “media lab,” despite the existence all over the world of myriad other, unaffiliated media labs. Regardless of Ishi’s reaction, the MIT Media Lab has in fact been remarkably successful in becoming practically and unquestionably synonymous with a lab dedicated to, as Brand puts it, “inventing the future.” This is partly because of a dogged thirty-­year marketing

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campaign whose success we can measure by the fact that almost any discussion of “the future” of technology is a discussion about some project at the MIT Media Lab. The specific way in which the MIT Media Lab discourse is double—­claiming to be part of a long lineage of labs while at the same time positioning itself as utterly new and singular—­is evident in its documentation, design, and use of its space. As we noted above, the MIT Media Lab was initially housed in a four-­story, cube-­like modernist building (E15) designed by I. M. Pei and Partners. In an attempt to point to its long-­standing dedication to interdisciplinary or “antidisciplinary” collaboration between artists, architects, and engineers, the exterior of the building is reminiscent of both graph paper and Piet Mondrian’s grid paintings, as it is covered with square, white metal panels with primary-­colored lines wrapping around the length of the tiles. But, as the authors of Artists and Architects Collaborate attest, because of the cube-­like structure’s “strong and definite character,” pronounced even more by the flat, metal panels, the building has a way of immediately communicating self-­containment and inaccessibility. They continue: “Very little that happens inside the building can be seen from outside, nor for the most part are the activities inside the building visible to one another. The building gives the sense of a set of isolated boxes packed one within another.”55 It is intentionally both isolated (or at least gives the appearance of being isolated) and open to the public, albeit only to that very specific demographic of the public involved in venture capital. The lab expanded to a second building in 2010. The majority of its current discourse seems to disavow E15 (referring only to the six floors/163,000 square feet of space in E14 rather than the four floors/114,000 square feet in E15) in favor of celebrating the supposed transparency offered by the new building’s glass-­and-­steel exterior. As the campus news outlet put it shortly after the building opened, “The aluminum and glass curtain walls that surround the steel-­framed building extend the feeling of openness and transparency to the exterior and make the building appear like a luminous jewel at night.”56 While the building might evoke the feeling of openness, opacity masquerades as transparency in that all of the windows are covered with a tight metal mesh on the outside and, during the daytime, blinds on the inside. (We elaborate on this paradox

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Figure 14. The exterior of the new MIT Media Lab building, opened in 2010. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

Figure 15. The point at which the two MIT Media Lab buildings conjoin. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

of opacity masquerading as transparency in chapter 4.) From an outsider’s perspective, the seams between the old and new buildings materially embody the lab’s discursive shift from appearing more closed and secretive to wanting to appear more open. Despite the physical (dis)continuity between the two buildings, the message embedded in the distinctly different style of the newer building is a disavowal of the earlier one. The tension between openness and inaccessibility continues as one enters the atrium of E15 and is instantly brought into an eerily quiet, empty, and forbidding space that’s punctuated only by skylights above, one small balcony for each floor, and a few interior windows. Nearly ten years after writing his breathless account of the lab in The Media Lab, even Brand had to admit that the “Media Lab’s atrium cuts people off from each other. There are three widely separated entrances . . . three elevators, few stairs, and from nowhere can you see other humans in the five-­story-­high space. Where people might be visible, they are carefully obscured by internal windows of smoked glass.”57 Originally, you would have found the majority of the lab’s denizens in a structure simply called “the Cube.” While the exterior and the atrium of

Figure 16. The atrium of E15. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

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Figure 17. The Cube in 2008. Photo credit: Zenovia Toloudi.

E15 are notably unwelcoming and devoid of any evidence of human activity, the Cube is an open, two-­floor structure embedded deep in the heart of the lab. Thanks to the office cubicles located peripherally around a large, central open space that could be and was used as a place to “work, live and eat,” openness and accessibility is turned inward.58 Certainly this spatial design is reminiscent of, though not identical to, its predecessors insofar as it’s effectively closed to the outside world and open as well as flexible largely to and for its inside world. The design of the Cube appears, at first glance, to be a direct answer in the affirmative to a question Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein pose in the pattern called “Flexible Office Space”: “Is it possible to create a kind of space which is specifically tuned to the needs of people working, and yet capable of an infinite number of various arrangements and combinations within it?”59 In many ways, however, the Cube also indicates the answer to the foregoing question is no. There are limits on spatial possibility; infinite flexibility is a postmodern fantasy that is driven by the desires of management (for a rhizomatic “flat” neoliberal workplace) rather than the needs of individuals in a building.

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Greg Tucker, director of facilities at the lab from 1985 to 2014, described the Cube as follows in our interview with him: Architecturally, it’s a raised floor that doesn’t fill the space, so you get this two-­story thing. That idea is just about wrapping as many people as possible around a social space. . . . In the early days of computing . . . the way mainframes worked was you had a room down the hall that was air conditioned to the moon and back. And there was a giant machine in there. And there was a room next to it where all the terminals were, those old VT100s and stuff. And in order to do any work, everyone had to be in that room, not in their office. The offices became somewhat of an afterthought, a place to throw your coat. And because everyone was in the same room, lots of interactions went on. And Negroponte was just going, “This is cool. This is the way this is supposed to work.” So that’s the model. All these lab spaces that you see, and it’s more obvious in the other building, it’s a bunch of offices wrapped around an open space that everyone’s supposed to share.60

The Cube was designed to insist on (more than allow) interactions and collaborations around specific technologies. Looking ahead to chapter 2, it’s worth noting the roles that other parts of the extended hybrid lab model—­especially apparatus—­play in the production of lab space. The people in the lab adapt to the dictates of the lab machinery, despite the discomfort it can produce, and this practice becomes formalized as policy. Further spaces develop according to this logic, where machines have as much as or more agency than the people working with them, and the lab produces different kinds of subjects and different kinds of knowledge accordingly. Even when the need for a terminal room went away in the era of the personal computer, Tucker maintains that Negroponte insisted on remaining dedicated to the model of an open workplace: It was all about this very simple thing: use space to force people to consider this as a collaborative exercise. . . . When he built the new building, and he put glass on the walls in every office, people on the design side were like, “Well, what about their privacy?” Negroponte’s response was classic. He was like, “I’m not offering these people privacy. I’m offering them an opportunity in a collaborative enterprise that was built according to our rules.”61

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Once more, there is a tight fit between the design of E15, Negroponte’s views on spatial design, and Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s Pattern Language. The last asserts that “the totally private office has a devastating effect on the flow of human relationships within a work group, and entrenches the ugly quality of office hierarchies”; thus, one should always “avoid closed off, separate, or private offices. Make every workroom, whether it is for a group of two or three people or for one person, half-­open to the other workgroups and the world immediately beyond it.”62 What they miss is the way in which even after office space is reconfigured, power and hierarchy can and do reconfigure themselves on another level. Now that the lab has expanded to E14, the Cube is almost completely empty of any equipment or people, yet the practical difficulties in what Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein call “half-­open” spaces come to the fore in different parts of E15. On the opposite side of E15’s third floor, the tension between the lab’s much-­touted openness—­partly expressed via decades of assertions about the wildly creative and disobedient collaborations taking place there—­ and its closedness is striking in the ways that the lab’s denizens have attempted to undermine the original building’s spatial design and infrastructure. For example, Ethan Zuckerman, a former director of the Center for Civic Media housed in the MIT Media Lab until August 2020, had an office with a door that cannot close, as his predecessor removed the door’s closer because of “Latour’s argument about the agency of the door closer as the embodiment of certain systems about what is supposed to be open and closed.”63 After pointing out the idiosyncrasies of how the physical space of the lab ends up embodying research projects, and after touring the seemingly open and glassed work space outside of his office, Zuckerman asked us to answer our own question: “Is this an open or closed work space? It’s mandated to be an open work space . . . [by] the powers that be because we are supposed to look busy and active and energetic. But when students are trying to get work done, they cocoon.”64 The theme of undermined openness also continues throughout the space via wall-­less work spaces dominated by large meeting tables and surrounded by panels that have been hung up to create a very small measure of privacy or (ultimately ineffective) boundedness.

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Figure 18. Semi-­private panels hung around open work spaces in E15. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

It is also worth mentioning that, three years after our interview with Zuckerman about his office and the MIT Media Lab, on his last day at MIT he published a blog post detailing yet more idiosyncrasies of his office space—­such as how the air-­conditioning unit in his office had been disabled as part of a research project undertaken by the previous tenant and the years it took before the problem could be fixed. Toward the end of the post, he also describes some of the more wonderful and fraught things he witnessed through the enforced openness of his office door: Late one night, I saw a young woman walk past my door wearing a massive pair of delicate, filigreed copper angel wings. When I stopped her to inquire, she explained that the wings were attached to a Peltier junction, which rested between her shoulders. As she radiated heat, the Peltier junction cooled her off and generated electric power in the process. The copper wings served as a heat sink. It was one of the most beautiful projects I’ve ever seen. Only tonight, writing this note to you, did I realize that she’d solved the same problem our roommate [the previous tenant] was obsessed with, albeit more poetically. The young woman left the Media Lab after two years here to pursue a startup. But she also left because a

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man in her lab began working on the same problem she was fascinated by. He ran his own lab here for a while, gained a lot of attention, then got thrown out for research fraud.65

In short, power and privilege are embedded in and live on in the very space and infrastructure of the lab. This is a topic we explore further in chapter 4. The design process for an additional building to house the MIT Media Lab began in 1998, with architect Fumihiko Maki; the building, named E14, eventually opened in 2010. While the exterior of the new building might look as if it is disavowing the old building, Maki designed the interior such that it would replicate the structure of the Cube in E15. More specifically, directly above a large public atrium that opens onto the campus street, seven two-­story glass cubes are arranged around an upper atrium, with each cube intended to be home to a particular lab or research group. Each is vertically staggered so that moving from one lab to another involves returning to the central atrium and using the stairs or elevators. Since all of the walls facing the atrium are made of glass, the staggered verticality appears to be a creative way to make the individual workgroup

Figure 19. Looking down on the open space of a research group in E14. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

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Figure 20. The machine shop in E14. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

spaces only half-­open. Regardless of the stacking, the space of E14 is unnervingly exposed, with the balance between open and closed weighing heavily on the side of open, as one can look into and onto nearly any space one wishes. The space of the lab’s central, upper atrium also adheres to Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s recommendation in the pattern “Common Areas at the Heart” to “Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies.”66 However, despite the design of the central meeting space, with its apparatus of couches, armchairs, and ping-­ pong table, it turns out that most users of the space engage solely in individualistic work, perhaps because E14 is already overridden with a kind of panoptic openness. Other attempts at communality throughout the building, such as the “food cam” or the “reuse cam,” also produce individualistic rather than community-­oriented interactions, as those with extra food or electronics leave their items on a designated counter, push a button, and a camera above sends a notice to people who are in the lab that there is available food or electronics.

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Hearkening back to Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the most open and communal areas in E14 are the machine shop and wood shop on the lower levels. These spaces are open to any MIT Media Lab student at any time and have nearly any kind of equipment (from shop bots to water jet cutting machines) to allow students, especially those enrolled in the “Make Anything” class, to learn how to do just that.

CASE STUDY: MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGICAL FUNDUS (HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, GERMANY) While never explicitly positioning itself in contrast to the MIT Media Lab, Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF) presents a radically different model of how a hybrid lab might shape and be shaped by its space. The MAF is not only substantially smaller in terms of its total square footage, the number of denizens in and around the lab, and its operating budget; its guiding principles are also nearly diametrically opposed to those of the MIT Media Lab. Rather than being driven by a dedication to newness, invention, innovation, and profit, the MAF is dedicated to uncovering the material life of technological devices. Furthermore, quite unlike Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory or the MIT Media Lab, the MAF inherited a lab space that was already institutionally built and previously occupied rather than ordering a made-­to-­measure space to embody its philosophies, goals, and activities.67 However, despite its inheritance of institutional space, the MAF is the inverse of Menlo Park and the MIT Media Lab insofar as it is adept at existing within the strictures of institutionality while actually unsettling its systems of organization and control. The MAF came into being in 2003 when the seminar for theater studies at Humboldt University in Berlin became a seminar for media studies.68 What a reader not well versed in the German higher-­education system might not understand from this statement is that the German word Seminar can refer not only to a weekly meeting of graduate students led by a professor but also something akin to a program headed up by a chair. Thus 2003 is also the year Ernst was first hired as full professor of media theories and was commissioned with the foundation of the seminar and master’s

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program in media studies. With the hiring of Ernst and the founding of the MAF, the individual, institutional, and philosophical merged around a particular space inherited from theater studies. As Ernst puts it: All of a sudden, spaces like the student practicing stage and its related fund of objects for rehearsal were empty. This was the ideal moment for the Berlin school of media studies (insisting on the materialities of communication and epistemic technologies) to claim such rooms under new auspices. The stage became the Media Theatre where technical devices themselves become the protagonist, and the fund became the space for a collection of requisites of a new kind: media archaeological artefacts.69

Name, space, and philosophy became entangled under the sign of the MAF, which provides the literal and figurative stage for media archaeology, and perhaps even the impetus for the importance it places on hands-­on experimentation. In Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst describes it like this: “Media archaeology is both a method and an aesthetics of practicing media criticism, a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, and an awareness of moments

Figure 21. The center of the Media Archaeological Fundus. Photograph by Thomas Fecker. Courtesy of the Institute of Musicology and Media Science, Humboldt University, Berlin.

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when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active ‘archaeologists’ of knowledge.”70 In contrast to the hands-­on experimentation and making at the heart of Menlo Park and the MIT Media Lab, hands-­on practice in the MAF emerges from the subversion of a theater space in order to encourage the treatment of objects of media technologies as bearers and creators of their own temporalities. Yet despite the MAF’s difference from Menlo Park and the MIT Media Lab, its media-­archaeological practice also would not be possible without buttressing from a very particular kind of institutional space strongly reminiscent of the anatomical theaters and apothecaries we discuss earlier as well—­one signaled by a bare, orange table in the middle of a sunken rather than raised central space whose walls are lined by shelves of media arranged not chronologically but rather by their core, underlying units of operational affinity. Before we delve into the particularities of the MAF’s interior space, we must attend to the larger, exterior, spatial qualities of the lab, as we did for Menlo Park and the MIT Media Lab. The MAF is located in the basement of a building belonging to the Institute of Musicology at Humboldt University, about half a mile north of the main university campus. It is in a dense urban area on the south side of the Spree River, across from Berlin’s Museum Island, as if the MAF uses geography to take an oppositional stance to the hands-­off mandates of institutional museums. As an indicator of the status of the neighborhood, it is also located right next to the private flat of German chancellor Angela Merkel. According to a plaque affixed to the exterior of the building, no less than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lived there from 1828 to the time of his death in 1831. The building’s exterior produces a sense of itself as a monolith. The building dates back to the early nineteenth century and includes features that Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein both endorsed and warned against. Working in its favor is the fact that the building opens directly on the street and so appears to engage more directly with the public world than a more cloistered university environment would permit. While this potential for greater communication (and even learning) with the public is supported by the row of street-­level windows looking down into the MAF, it is also somewhat undone by the nondescript main entrance, whose architectural importance seems equal to the building’s windows.71

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Figure 22. The building that houses the MAF with the entrance to the MAF opening directly onto the street. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

Figure 23. Curator Stefan Höltgen stands outside the main entrance to the MAF. Photograph by Lori Emerson.

Upon entering the MAF, one finds oneself on a landing that, like many anatomical theaters, provides a bird’s-­eye view of the space and the collection. Since the MAF does not aspire to become a popular stopover on Berlin’s museum circuit, another effect of the raised landing is the sense that the space is more for the life of technological devices and less for human denizens. Descending a set of stairs places a visitor at eye level with the shelves of items, wrapping around the perimeter of the main room. In the center is the lab’s main workbench, for analyzing technological items “in action to reveal their media essence.”72 The MAF also extends into a smaller, rectangular adjoining room that includes yet more technological devices as well as a small collection of reference materials, placing it in the long genealogy of lab spaces that contain libraries. If the MAF is intentionally placeful—­a bounded space that also responds to its situatedness—­then how does that placefulness, combined with the lab’s particular modes of thinking, play out in the activities that take place there? One of the results has to do with the teaching that occurs there, by way of an explicit acknowledgment of bias. Ernst explains: The bias of MAF-­based teaching is to train students to resist the nostalgic or even melancholic impulse which is normally associated with so-­called “dead media,” and to discover the retro-­futuristic element instead. The electric telegraph e.g. operates with discrete signal transmission: a code which after an age of AM media (such as radio) returned in unexpected ways. Whereas digital data transmission is much too fast to be perceivable directly to human senses, the classic telegraph “dots and dashes,” when connected to an acoustic mechanism, may serve as a way of slowing down and sonifying the nature of coded signal transmission. Retro-­futurism, understood in this way, hints at a non-­linear relation between past and present media technologies, a short-­circuiting of media tempor(e)alities [sic] which escapes traditional, narrative history of technology. Instead of one media system resulting from another, there are sudden recursions.73

The MAF assemblage demonstrates how institutional and disciplinary shifts, the inheritance and undermining of a physical space and a specific scholarly nomenclature, and the hiring of a particular person with frank “biases” and specialized pedagogical practices all play out across this network of forces. The MAF is both an

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exemplification and a microcosm of these forces as it demonstrates once more how labs are insistently unique. Each is shaped not only by its physical space but also by those within and beyond their walls.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has focused on the configuration of a range of lab spaces as a way to underscore the deeply situated nature of each and to describe how that situatedness informs the philosophies of those working within them. As we emphasize throughout this book, all parts of the extended lab assemblage are deeply entangled, and space is a vital part of this dynamic. We move next to the related topic of lab apparatus: the technological objects that are part of the bundle of practices that manifest in these same spatial sites of knowledge production. Lab apparatus produces agential relations between humans and nonhumans; as such, chapter 2 returns to the MAF. Likewise, chapter 4 will return to the MIT Media Lab as a way to further explore how management techniques inform the spatial configuration of labs, along with these same agential relations. In short, labs are more about social dynamics of space than they are about stable architecture; the lab as a space is a product of relations among the people, objects, practices, institutions, and discourses that it brings together.

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2 LAB APPARATUS

O

ne of the reasons we recognize a lab as such is because of the objects it houses. From Victor Frankenstein and Rotwang to Walter White, popular culture is replete with mad scientists surrounded by impossibly complex thickets of laboratory equipment: microscopes, test tubes, Tesla coils, banks of computers, and flasks of colored liquids—­all smoking, bubbling, and sparking away as they produce things too terrible to comprehend. The relatively standard visual clichés of lab apparatus over the last century also testify to the stability of the laboratory as a place of knowledge production. The interactions in the lab between a bewildering array of human and nonhuman agents play a role in the production of culture, pointing to limit cases, aberrations, and exceptions even as they are responsible for the production of norms and regularities. But labs and their various technologies also produce something else: particular kinds of subjects suited to function in specific situations. As Henri Lefebvre takes pains to explain, any space (labs included) exists in productive tension with its subjects. The space conditions the “presence, action, and discourse” of the subject, but that same subject’s presence, action, and discourse also push back against the limits of the space, resulting in the emergence of particular kinds of spatial practices. In other words, the “texture of space”—­the particular quality of its apparatus—­is what creates specific kinds of occasions for the people inside.1 Show us your instrument, and

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we will tell who you are, which discipline you belong to, and which spaces you frequent during your working day. Take one normal morning at the Spatial History Lab at Stanford University as an example: It is a summer morning and the Spatial History Lab . . . is running at full throttle. Large tables configured in rectangles bristle with screens and keyboards. Students, staff, and faculty hunch or slouch at nearly every available workstation. The coffee mugs are half-­empty and the sound of half-­a-­dozen conversations, carried on in hushed voices, which rise from time to time into animated exchanges, filter through the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall. This is what practicing spatial history in the lab looks like at first glance. It is a collective enterprise, diverse in objects and methods, bound together by a common desire to work in teams, to learn new technologies, and to conduct exploratory research through the creation of models of spatial relations and movement over time.2

So much activity! Even this short description of a typical lab morning is replete with gestures, postures, situations, imaginaries, assumptions, devices, spatiotemporal coordinates, and methods. The richness of environments buzzing with action is a constantly recurring theme in lab descriptions and imaginaries (see chapter 5). Labs are transformational in more senses than one. Compare the passage above with Bethany Nowviskie’s description of a morning at the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia Library: “Art objects, little mechanisms and technical experiments, cultural artifacts reproduced for teaching or research—­cheap 3D printing is one affirmation that words (those lines of computer code that speak each shape) always readily become things.”3 Pen, words, text, and descriptions all function as part of an apparatus as much as any other set of technologies, whether analog or digital. Spaces such as classrooms, schools, factories, and hospitals employ their apparatus to forge material and discursive connections between the organization of knowledge and relations of power in order to determine the contexts in which we function as subjects and collectives engaging in action.4 Lab apparatus prepares knowledge, because its mechanisms, arrangements, spaces, and situations define what counts as knowledge, as well as who can legitimately produce it and circulate it. In this chapter, “apparatus” refers to the technologies around which lab practice mangles and entangles, but it also refers to more

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than tools or collected objects. Taking lessons from science and technology studies, we emphasize that technological objects are part of the performative bundle of practices that manifest in spatial sites of knowledge production. Agential relations thus emerge between humans and nonhumans. To quote Andrew Pickering: machines “variously capture, seduce, download, recruit, enroll, or materialize that agency” in ways that produce a rich body of relations that exceed their predefined and explicitly designed tasks.5 This speaks effectively also to the theme of hybrid practices of labs. For any given site, various elements of the apparatus will partly define what the site is about and what its affordances are—­a fact that is as true of apparatus in the humanities as it is in the sciences, or outside of the university and industry completely. Despite the omnipresence of digital technology in contemporary labs of all sorts, it remains important to consider nondigital technologies in hybrid labs that run against the grain of the focus on the new—­or “inventing the future,” as the MIT Media Lab’s motto put it. Not all technical lab apparatus is about the invention of a digital future, nor should it revolve around the one-­sided narrative of the digital revolution, data analysis, and high-­resolution screens. We need to consider the many other sorts of situated practices in media, pedagogy, and critical readings of technological culture: alternative imaginaries emerge from hybrid labs that are not merely about the digital but are also about the longer history of technology, where the transformation from theoretical statements to object collections allows lab denizens to practice a more media-­archaeological stance. One powerful way to analyze a lab is through what it includes, and one of the most efficient ways to perform this analysis is through a description of its technological apparatus. The scientist, the media theorist, and the humanities scholar are only as smart as their labs and their respective apparatus. What makes a lab special is not merely the quality of the people working within its walls but the extended lab assemblage, in which apparatuses play a key role in forming the lab’s epistemological backbone.6 In this chapter we tackle the topic of lab apparatus by continuing our discussion of the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University from chapter 1, along with a discussion of the Maker Lab at the University of Victoria, the Signal Laboratory (also at

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Humboldt University), and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. In these examples we are dealing with hybrid labs where material technology plays a central role. Some of the discussion returns to themes of media archaeology, a term that features in many of the sections of this book: media archaeology labs build on the methodological work of investigating so-­called old media discourses and objects through lenses of digital culture; they also problematize discourses of “new” media with insight to historical contexts and material archives. The theoretical and practical work of media archaeology—­and related developments as featured also in this chapter and throughout the book—­offers an alternative to linear media histories and emphasizes the material qualities of the apparatus. Many of the points are defined in more detail, though, in the practices of the labs, not just as theoretical statements. This is why we are interested in this aspect as well: how do media archaeologists work in relation to labs and collections, not just by bringing theoretical statements into the space, but also by way of the methodologies that emerge from those spaces? We also discuss the collection of apparatuses in research and teaching collections, which is one example of the longer history of humanities infrastructure that has reemerged recently in the context of the digital humanities.

AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF DEVICES Since the appearance of the earliest digital media labs, our sense of the promise of digital technologies has become considerably more complex. Also, newness has a history, and often it is complex, layered, recursive, and not necessarily progressive. In the 1980s, running a digital media lab entailed a straightforward display of enthusiasm that seemed apt for an elite institution’s understanding of itself as a role model for culture at large. Boosters of early digital labs read the novelty of the digital against more mundane analog worlds, which were inevitably found wanting. “What will remain analog? Only live face-­to-­face conversation and performance—­which may become newly valued,” as Stewart Brand famously narrated. Brand quotes MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte: “I can see no reason for anyone to work in the analog domain anymore—­sound, film, video. All transmission will be digital.”7 Perhaps. But the ongoing importance of standard maker, design, and media lab apparatus

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such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and hot-­air desoldering stations, as well as also screwdrivers, magnifying lenses, and rolls of Velcro, has relativized the totalizing narrative of digital media, because such equipment points relentlessly to the materiality of the digital.8 The complex materiality of lab apparatus is also indicative of the messy social and economic forces that define the wider social and institutional field in which a lab sits. It is useful to consider the messiness of lab apparatus because it is a source of interesting clues about the uses, histories, and places of those technologies in wider technological culture.9 Investigating apparatus closely might also provide the occasion to describe the digital as more than just a marketing term. Contemporary labs are places where the “digital” is specified, historicized, sampled, materialized, discussed, fabricated, printed, and theorized, often in conjunction with much older (media) technologies. In hybrid sites such as media archaeology labs, material objects are in a historical situation that stymies blithe assumptions about the status of the analog as antiquated or of the digital as brand new. One of our favorite examples of this sort of messiness is the Coach House Press in Toronto, which has been producing finely printed small-­press literature since the 1960s but was also the source of the HoTMetaL HTML editing tool and the Empress database in the 1990s. Around the turn of the millennium, they used an antique Challenge Gordon letterpress from the mid-­1890s, equipped with photopolymer light-­sensitive resin plates (made with the help of digitally designed negatives and then exposed in a darkroom) to hand-­stamp lettering on CD-­ROMs. Such hybrid apparatus challenges linear histories of technology and narratives of technological progress through its ongoing role in everyday practice. Many contemporary hybrid labs regularly perform forensic and archaeological analyses of the underlying material and temporal layers of particular technological media. None of this is news to media theorists occupied with the study of technical media culture. Working with technical media is part of a longer legacy of work that affected the humanities long before Roberto A. Busa’s work with IBM computers (often cited as the relative beginnings of digital humanities as a discipline). So, let’s look at some of the sites that offer a different epistemology for the digital (and a bit of analog too) in hybrid humanities laboratories.

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Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF) is a case in point. To revisit our study of the MAF in chapter 1, it was originally part of the old address of Berlin media studies—­the Sophienstrasse 22a—­an important location because it housed many key Humboldt University departments, including Friedrich Kittler’s chair and seminar before it moved to its current location next to the central museum district of Berlin. Claiming some of the space in the building meant understanding this underground cellar as part of the space of the institutional apparatus of knowledge, but also thinking of it as part of an assemblage of other related spaces, inherited from earlier times. As Ernst elaborates: “The stage became the Media Theatre where technical devices themselves become the protagonist, and the fund became the space for a collection of requisites of a new kind: media archaeological artefacts.”10 In the wider context, this space emerges as a stage for postdigital materiality. The MAF is a classic example of a hybrid lab that lies somewhere between a collection, museum, archive, laboratory, and space of play for encountering media objects: The Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF) is a collection of various electromechanical and mechanical artefacts as they developed throughout time. Its aim is to provide a perspective that may inspire modern thinking about technology and media within its epistemological implications beyond bare historiography. Students, researchers and interested people are welcome to visit but also examine the so-­called Dead Media technologies.11

The MAF is quite literally a fundus: both an underground cellar and the belly of material media studies. Inside, scholars have developed not only a research collection of epistemological objects but a pedagogy to go along with it.12 Together, as an apparatus, the various epistemological objects incorporate an unfolding narrative about what sort of research and knowledge space the MAF is. It is worth revisiting our point from chapter 1 that lab space is always about external relations as well as internal resources. The MAF is located next to some of the most frequently visited Berlin tourist spaces and museums, including the archaeological collections at the Pergamon Museum, which feature Islamic and antique objects as well as the massive architectural reconstructions of the Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus, the Ishtar Gate and Processional

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Way from Babylon, and the Mshatta Façade. But as noted in the previous chapter, the MAF refrains from trying to be a museum. Although the vast exhibition of colonial collections awaits nearby, the MAF’s objects are of a different sort. Even its methodologies invite a different attitude than the majority of research collections, encouraging touch and the direct manipulation and operation of its objects rather than merely looking at them. This tangibility is a large part of what distinguishes the MAF from the usual functions of spaces where old media objects are on display and the different functions and modalities of knowledge are incorporated in spaces like the museum, the archive, and the lab. The MAF and the Signal Laboratory (located in the same building) are hybrid spaces of research-­teaching-­collecting that form the infrastructural core of the media studies “school” at Humboldt University. They structure their spaces through the presence of apparatus. Machines sit on shelves running around the perimeter of the room. Empty tables in the middle invite visitors to remove machines from the shelves and use the tables for hands-­on experimentation. The apparatus of these labs emphasizes an unapologetic rejection of the aura of the museum and an affirmation of serious hands-­on research. The table is crucial in that it invites visitors to use the devices, catering to a sense of media that demands to observe technological devices while they are operating. As Stefan Höltgen from the Signal Laboratory puts it, “we have a ‘hands-­on imperative’ which is the opposite of materialistic preservation for the idea of preserving the knowledge within the apparatuses (that therefore often have to be damaged). We say that to all of our donators so they can decide if they want to donate their stuff.”13 “Hands-­on” is the recurring rallying cry that signals the central imperative of these labs and what they aspire to accomplish. It also serves as shorthand for a whole range of assumptions about the space as a particular situated apparatus for media-­theoretical practice. The tidily organized rows of different technological objects constitute an expanded understanding of what qualifies as “media” or even “technical media” in the MAF. Besides optical toys, computers, radio instruments, and other clearly identifiable “media,” the lab includes, among many other things, oscilloscopes, galvanometers, Geiger counters, a Biofeedback Psychometer, and vacuum tubes—­a whole range of technical tools and measurement devices that are

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also media in a way that is not necessarily obvious to some media studies scholars (though they would not surprise anyone familiar with McLuhan’s broad conception of media).14 Some of these devices are measuring and recording instruments that are commonly part of a science lab’s apparatus, demonstrating once again that the supposed epistemological gap between sciences and the humanities is largely imaginary. If we think of it as a laboratory, the MAF brings a different epistemological angle to the nature of the apparatus in and of the media lab. Like other labs, it is also a place of specific, personalized relation with the machines that make up the lab’s apparatus. One of the characteristics of the relation that the MAF strives to develop is the sense that machines are not black boxes and that you can interact with them on many levels. For Ernst, media are media only when in operation. As a result of various interactions and manipulations, the machines in the MAF collection open up as electromechanical assemblages, and their functioning principles become available for study. The individuals who have just performed these interactions go away changed as well, having practiced techniques that will alter their perspective on media in general. A similar enthusiasm for building and reverse engineering burgeoned over the twentieth century, not only in the tradition of popular mechanics but also in contemporary hackerspaces and digital humanities labs (in which building and making have become central to digital humanities–­related analyses). However, in Germany, media studies has its own connotations: instead of “studies,” Medienwissenschaft translates as “media sciences.” Often the particular difference between media studies and media sciences was tied to attempts to differentiate between the two traditions, the German area from the Anglo-­American (emerging partly from cultural studies). To speak of media sciences in this sense was meant to articulate the practice of archival and philosophical media analysis as applied to a different set of connotations and, somewhat implicitly justifying the term “(media) lab” in novel ways. In some ways, it also thus facilitates the justification of hands-­on lab work too—­not merely as artistic engagement but as epistemic investigation. Even before the current moment, in which lab discourse is omnipresent, the connotation of media sciences served the academic community in Germany very well. Since work by Kittler and others

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on the “materialities of communication” in the 1990s, German media scholars have insisted that the methodological focus of the field is not merely a matter of writing, documentation, and interpretation, but rather is integrally related to interacting with engineering and scientific infrastructures. The realization that the roots of modern technical media in the scientific laboratory go back to the nineteenth century—­Helmholtz and others—­is what drives some of the key definitions of media in the context of so-­called German media theory.15 Media studies—­or sciences, based on your linguistic and epistemic preference—­is a late arrival to the site where the scientific lab was already operating as a locus of experimentation, invention, and technical media practice.16 Ernst elaborates both the laboratory functions of the humanities in general and the activities of the MAF in particular as part of an established set of practices. He points to the wave of emerging new media (art) institutions in the 1990s, which imagined the “studio-­ lab” as part of the European media art scene—­an important precedent. In the late 1990s, Ernst complemented his background in history and classics with his work in the media lab at the (then new) Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. At the time, access to new media technologies was restricted and broadly speaking, was considered a luxury in most humanities institutions. Since the earlier wave of artistic collaborations with institutions of engineering and science during the Cold War, questions of access and sharing have been part of the larger formation of lab discourse. From the 1960s to the 1990s, in the context of grassroots media labs in both Europe and North America, a particular communitarian angle emerged, based on the idea of providing access to resources and tools (as in the famous motto of the Whole Earth Catalog). However, media device collections like the one in the MAF take a different turn from the arts perspective that focused on providing access to new technologies. Ernst elaborates the function of the space and its old media instruments as something like a research and teaching collection that a historian might maintain. However, as we mention in the context of media archaeology labs in general, it comes with a different function that does not imitate historical methodologies. The aim of working with the research collection at the MAF is not to offer a linear lesson about media history, nor is it to develop a narrative of progress that leads inexorably to the digital.

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Instead, working directly with the devices in the collection allows researchers to stage important principles that govern technical media in terms of their operations. Bit by bit, the MAF and the Signal Lab unfold as platforms for operative staging that attach to concerns in engineering, mathematics, and logic incorporated in modern media machines, as well as to critical and philosophical questions from the humanities tradition. One object that Ernst often uses for staged demonstrations for MAF visitors is the flip-­flop circuit. As one might expect, the flip-­ flop has two states, on and off (or one and zero), which together can store a single bit of data. The flip-­flop, then, provides access to the fundamental building blocks of any digital system and visualizes what is otherwise left hidden in digital machines: the switching function that defines circuit-­based electronic culture. As Ernst puts it, this physical demonstration provides an opportunity to investigate fields such as the digital humanities, which “require synchronous self-­critical reflection of their own technological condition—­a kind

Figure 24. The flip-­flop circuit that Wolfgang Ernst uses for staged demonstrations in the Media Archaeological Fundus. Photo credit: Stefan Höltgen. Courtesy of the Institute of Musicology and Media Science, Humboldt University, Berlin.

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of ‘humanities of the digital’ in the sense of material media philology and classical auxiliary sciences of material investigation. What has been paleography or numismatics on the traditional humanities nowadays becomes media forensics (in Kirschenbaum’s sense).”17 In other words, integration of specialist skills—­including technical skills—­is not new to the humanities, but it has changed with the entry of digital—­including networked—­technologies where mere importing of traditional methods is not sufficient at all. Juxtaposition, comparison, and other sorts of techniques that the lab apparatus enables are, then, a second order of apparatus, in that they are components in the construction of an argument. Consider how Ernst explains and narrativizes the role of the flip-­flop as part of the research collection and as part of media-­theoretical work: As an example of the role of the mathematical mode of media-­ archaeological reasoning in the MAF, we juxtapose artifacts from telephone technology (an electro-­mechanical relay element, a variation of Strowger’s Automatic Telephone Exchange or a Manual Telephone Switchboard) with devices from early electronic computing to demonstrate how the hardware performs discrete numerical operations—­ nowadays almost exclusively ones that are associated with the digital computer—­that have been literally transferred from a voice communication technology, just like the vacuum tube which had been invented for amplification of weak electric signals but was later “mis-­used” in Flipflop circuits of early stored-­program computers. Such hybrid cross-­ overs defining “the mode of existence of a technical object” (in Gilbert Simondon’s terms) media-­archaeologically remind us of the two-­faced meaning of technology: techné on the one hand (impressions of physical hardware) and lógos on the other (the logical and mathematical intelligence resulting in software).18

Imagine this description as a performance. Someone takes an object off the shelves, from its box perhaps, and places it next to another one on the table in the center of the room. The table then becomes the platform for a media-­operational comparison. Hands and words show the way, pointing out particular details for more careful observation. Lab practices are techniques for interfacing with the reality of the lógos without forgetting the role that hardware design must play. The space of the hybrid lab operationalizes the constant interplay between theory and practice. Indeed, operationality is a key feature

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in such a setting, both in terms of the operationality of the machine and how its operations are explained to MAF visitors. The machines demonstrate their own performance when in operation, but the operator and observers also become part of the lab apparatus. Picture another scene that further illustrates this point. Ernst is standing by a table, gesturing toward a phonograph that is playing an old recording. He insists that we should not be mistaken; it is not the symbolic content to which we are listening that interests him, nor is it the revolving disc of the recording that he is pointing at, nor the usual parts of the device on which the eye is focusing. What intrigues him is a curious little device that regulates the phonograph’s operations before it performs its usual media function of delivering sounds for the ears of the audience. This particular device is an Excelsior Edison Phonograph (1903–­6), which includes a component called the Fliehkraftregler—­the regulator or centrifugal governor, which is something like a protocybernetic part that regulates the speed and keeps it from becoming too fast or slow via a feedback loop. Originally a component in steam engines, where it moderated the engine’s thermodynamic overflow, the regulator was incorporated into media devices in miniature form. Instead of a machine that we recognize as media object, the regulatory device, the part that makes the phonograph operational and regulates the audio signal into something available for our auditory enjoyment, becomes the focus of the investigation. Ernst raises his eyes from the machine (which continues playing in the background) and articulates that this is the object of our interest in the MAF: definitely not the content, and not merely the sound, but the performance of devices in terms of their minor functions and the controls that enable their operations. This refocusing of scholarly attention is more cognitive than visual or audile; it means an increase of attention to the inconspicuous elements that regulate technological devices but which are irreducible to being merely effective solutions to engineering problems. Along with this incorporation came the realization that time-­critical operations are hugely important to such media devices: fine-­tuning a signal for human listeners requires finding the right tempo. It is a helpful reminder that the laboratory setting can render visible a whole range of mediated, embodied relations with technical media that often remain below the level of awareness. As Jesper Olsson puts it while explaining what archaeological media labs can do:

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The re-­contextualization of media objects from their circulation in everyday life into the lab environment would, potentially, produce new knowledge about them. And in a similar, de-­familiarizing manner, the transport of methods, operations, and the very conceptual and material framework of a lab from the history and practices of science to the field of the humanities might turn out to be epistemically productive in itself.19

By virtue of its connection to the lab’s apparatus, the machine that is the object of the demonstration, including all of its various interlocked components (like the centrifugal governor we discuss above), is rearticulated as a “lab object,” which leads to the production, recording, analysis, and circulation of knowledge. In this process, a humanities seminar becomes a laboratory operation table for the close observation of time-­critical media. When thinking about “apparatus,” then, we need to consider all of these aspects: the preparatory dimension; the role that the lab’s apparatus (including lab personnel and visitors) plays in the production of epistemic objects that demonstrate something; and the way media objects themselves, in terms of their conditions of existence and their operational principles, become part of the apparatus. Another key recurring term in Ernst’s explanation of the lab’s intellectual work is “epistemology,” which signals a specific relation to objects that are not high-­tech or futuristic, but untimely in different ways. The MAF presents many of these objects as epistemological toys (Spielzeug), inviting lab occupants to play with them. As playful instruments, they are central to the apparatuses of knowledge that define the lab’s infrastructure. Manipulating these instruments in the MAF allows visitors to understand the wider technological and scientific contexts in which all instruments emerge. After all, measurement instruments were also media before they were ever incorporated as part of a media collection.20 A sentiment that William Thomson voiced in his 1885 lecture “Scientific Laboratories” rings familiar even if transported to the humanities labs of the sort one finds in media studies in Berlin. Thomson observes that measurement is a core part of the scientific apparatus of the lab, whether it’s the “thermometers, electrometers, [or] galvanometers.”21 With this statement, he points to the need to guarantee the quantification methods of the experiment, or what media theorists of our own age

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consider to be the extended object of media studies: the larger apparatuses of science and technology. However, as the MAF demonstrates in its capacity as a lab space for experimentation, this emphasis on the scientific basis of the lab object is not merely theoretical. The theoretical distance between observer and observed is complemented by a particularly hands-­on way of engaging with old media objects: Academic media analysis . . . requires a pool of past media objects which teachers and students are allowed to operate with, different from the “don’t touch” imperative in most museums. The Media Archaeological Fundus is populated with core technological molecules which at first glance look outdated but become a-­historical once they are deciphered with media-­archaeological eyes, ears and minds. A telegraphy apparatus turns out to be “digital” avant la lettre, surpassing the age of so-­called “analog” signal media like the classic electric telephone.22

Another way to think about what Ernst does in and with the MAF is as a media-­archaeological invention of the past. This in turn allows us to unfold a larger story about the technical media lab as an important element of pedagogical and research infrastructures, because it is a place where proximity to technological objects allows for the production of complex ideas about invention, innovation and time. Finally, the MAF is also related to a range of other hybrid labs with similar aspirations: the Humanities Maker Lab at the University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada) which we discuss below; the Trope Tank at MIT; the Residual Media Depot at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada); the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, which we also touch on below; and the PA-­ MAL Media Archaeology Lab at L’École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon (Avignon, France) among others. The provision of material access to the objects that are part of the apparatus in these spaces moves beyond historical reconstructions to the possibility of multisensory engagements with the past. In such spaces, material access becomes a performative re­staging—­what the PA-­MAL Lab calls the “second original” as a synthetic form of an afterlife for some earlier time-­ critical media objects that are otherwise lost as an ephemeral part of dead media infrastructures.23

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CASE STUDY: THE SIGNAL LABORATORY (HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, GERMANY) The Signal Laboratory, directed by Stefan Höltgen, is focused on more recent technologies than is the MAF. Upon entering the Signal Lab, one is struck by the centrality of hardware. However, the focus on hardware in the Signal Lab is not on the hardness of the shells but on the technical principles of signal processing, making it another useful example of a hybrid lab. Though the Signal Lab resembles many seminar rooms for humanities activities and teaching, it is also similar to the MAF in that it features a large desk in the middle for practice-­based tinkering. The Telefunken TA-­742 catches one’s eye first, and then, gradually, one notices artifacts that are more familiar to anyone who has spent time in a media history lab—­a Commodore 64, an Amstrad CPC 6128, an Atari 800XL, and a TRS-­80. Once new media technologies, these now-­obsolete computers are the sort of antiquated curiosities that one might find in a nostalgic collector’s media-­technological curiosity cabinet—­a visual performance of the evolutionary dead ends and terata of the technical world. Such apparatuses and collections bear a strong family resemblance to the labs of the nineteenth and twentieth century as places of technical experiments. But here the collection is less for the sake of accumulating oddities to spark conversation than to serve as a monument (in Foucault’s sense) of the era of signal processing. Höltgen narrates how the focus for the Signal Project grew out of his personal research interests, but also how it resonates with the wider media-­archaeological work at the institute and with the wider retrocomputing community outside the university. Collecting is one central activity in the creation of the lab: When I joined the Center for Musicology and Media Studies in 2011, I began to collect vintage computer hardware, peripherals, and software for my research project (“on the archaeology of the early microcomputer and its programming”) and as examples for my teaching lessons about hardware, programming and computer history. The SL [Signal Lab] soon became a place where my colleagues and I repaired and restored those old machines to learn about their functioning. . . . The intersection between the SL and the Fundus is the question we both ask: How do those technologies relate to their history and their presence when you don’t look at them as economical, techno-­historical, or social (e.g. the

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effects on the user, the society . . .) gadgets but as “signal processing” media—­where the media in the SL mostly produce programmable digitally coded signals and those of the Fundus are of both sorts: analogue and digital—­but not programmable.24

As the eponymous center of the Signal Lab’s work, signals take on material form via the artifacts that make up the collection. In the aggregate, the collection stages a kind of argument that differs in some important respects from other narratives about the digital culture of signals.25 In Brand’s version of the argument, which popularized the work of the MIT Media Lab in his 1987 account The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, the grand narrative prescribes a turn to immaterial signal worlds. Unlike books and literary culture and unlike the Industrial Revolution and its “mass-­ produced hardware,” Brand saw the information culture of signals as the defining characteristic of the computational future.26 As he puts it, emphasizing the necessity of digital labs as the privileged sites of informational culture, “Power was shifting from the material world to the immaterial world.”27 Instead of resolving the question about signal culture, though, he moves swiftly from the assumption of wirelessness to that of immateriality. It was a powerful narrative at the moment of its inception, but the emergence of spaces like the MAF and the Signal Lab and their attendant infrastructure provides a necessary and useful set of qualifications to it. Research collections of signal artifacts present a range of different ways of framing what, exactly, the materiality of the “digital” is. Cables, antennas, consoles, emulators, and other components become ways to investigate the materiality of the signal itself as an object of analysis. As a form of lab apparatus, hardware collections like those in the MAF and the Signal Lab provide one vehicle to those epistemological and material questions.

EXPERIMENT AND PERFORMANCE IN THE LAB Closer to design than media arts, the question of how to prototype the past is a guiding motivation at the Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab) at the University of Victoria. Founder Jentery Sayers and graduate student (as of this writing) Tiffany Chan talk about the MLab as a site of media theory and design methodologies: “The

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technologies we prototype are dated anywhere between the 1850s and 1950s, which give us a sense of media history prior to personal computing but after early feedback control and related mechanics. These prototypes usually inform present-­day technologies—­ wearables, cloud computing, and optical character recognition, for example—­by giving them a sense of texture and change.”28 As a type of inverted speculative design, this approach resonates with Garnet Hertz’s idea of the past as a storehouse for invention and with philosophical and media-­archaeological observations that the new is the result of an active engagement with moments in the past that have been betrayed, forgotten, or put aside for any number of reasons.29 Prototyping the past looks for “absences in the historical record” but is more than just documenting. Instead, it creatively reengages, reframes, and rearticulates pasts as experiential.30 The MLab approach expands on the discourse of makers and making by way of a practice-­based history that picks up on established design techniques from other professional and amateur contexts, such as “the kit.” The MLab’s “Kits for Cultural History” are a key part of the lab’s methodology, which they explain in terms of a specific humanities approach to research: Rather than communicating humanities research solely in a written format, these open-­source kits encourage hands-­on, exploratory engagements that playfully resist instrumentalism as well as determinism. In so doing, they prompt audiences to consider how the material particulars of historical mechanisms are embedded in culture, without assuming that, in the present, we can ever experience the world like “they did back then.”31

More than a model of a historical artifact, the kit serves as both a prop and a conceptual device. For example, the “Early Wearable Technologies Kit” is a wooden jewelry box containing prototypes of Victorian electro-­mobile wearables that renders media history tactile.32 Through its simulation of artifacts from the “actual” past, the kit reconfigures the possible imaginaries around a particular technology or historical situation (see also chapter 5). As a sort of time-­axis disjuncture, the kit works to enrich the sense of the contemporary as an overlapping set of temporal layers. It becomes an interface for a world of considerations about the social relations and imaginaries that stretch between actual pasts and potential presents,

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offering a set of temporal relations more complex than conventional linear accounts of history. These spaces and their attendant apparatuses enable the practice of something close to what Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever describe as “experimental media archaeology”—­their term for a hands-­on, embodied, and situated methodology for investigating media history through restaging or reenactment. They do not, however, offer a shortcut to an authentic version of how something operated in its original historical context. Rather, they offer methodological support for other forms of historical work: “The heuristic value of doing historical re-­enactments lies therefore not in the (impossible) reconstruction of an ‘authentic’ historical experience, but in creating a sensorial and intellectual experiment that will demonstrate the differences between textual, visual, and performative approaches to the past.”33 In the case of the MAF, the object of reconstruction or performative knowledge is not particular texts or past works. Instead, work with the apparatus (which includes the lab collection’s holdings) leads to a set of theoretical ideas that become something other than a rewriting (of a particular case study, for example). Through interactions with its apparatus, the MAF starts to tell a story that complements the work of those involved in digital humanities in particular ways. That is, it provides a way to consider the persistent uses and reuses, collections, and reconstructions of media as a set of practices that expand what digital humanities might mean. For example, thinking of early telegraphy as a digital technology shifts and perhaps even undermines assumptions about technological change. Even if simplistic accounts of what constitutes the digital still persist in current rhetoric even in academia, this change in perspective complicates the usual assumption of “progress” from analog to digital. Insisting on the primacy of “postdigital” as the preferred term paves the way to discussing the longer history of digitality before digital computing, such as codifying messages as “dots and dashes” in telegraphic communication.34 In this sense, the focus of the apparatus in the MAF and its attendant methods speaks to an interest in establishing new relations to knowledge about media culture. In fact, as a hybrid lab space, the MAF may even help produce a different mind-­set for humanities scholars and students.

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RESEARCH AND TEACHING COLLECTIONS AS PART OF THE MATERIAL APPARATUS OF THE HYBRID LAB Many of the places we cite and investigate are reminiscent of the genealogy of research collections, which stand as one example of the longue durée of humanities infrastructure. As David Ludwig and Cornelia Weber contend, the research and teaching collection is a residual form that has reemerged as part of humanities infrastructure over the past few decades.35 While one could certainly make a case about how early modern cabinets of curiosities are one element in how research collections relate laboratory activities via visual and spatial senses of knowledge, research and teaching collections became a central part of the creation of research universities in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.36 Indeed, they were perceived as essential to the work of research. Marta Lourenço outlines, in her comprehensive study of the history and current state of research collections, how such collections did much of what hybrid labs do as well: “Observing, touching, handling, feeling, assembling experiments, and often cutting, testing, opening to see what is inside, are more beneficial—­even essential—­to the cognitive process than looking at illustrations in a textbook.”37 In the context of hybrid labs, research collections function as part of the lab’s material apparatus, much like its collection of documents. In many cases, texts and things are assembled to establish a close connection between the two. The material connections in research collections are often reminiscent of scientific instrument collections, and in many cases they constitute a media-­archaeological treasure trove. Broadly speaking, scientific instrument collections contain two kinds of objects: instruments that have actually been used as lab apparatus, and instruments that demonstrate scientific principles but would generally not be used in experiments, such as noble gas spheres, Van de Graaff generators, Tesla coils, models, and replicas of various kinds. Many objects in media-­archaeological labs fall into the latter category or represent a synthesis of the two. Obsolete consumer electronics, such as the historical video-­game consoles at the Residual Media Depot at Concordia University in Montreal or Ernst’s flip-­flop switch at the MAF, can often be used to demonstrate particular theoretical or practical problems.

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Collections are not merely for “original” or “authentic” objects. Instead, materials, texts, and representations are part of a postdigital assemblage, where a thing and its representation coexist. In many cases, the impetus for interest in the collection in the first place is to produce representations for inclusion in a digital repository. This can include, for example, digitized copies of reel-­to-­reel tapes, photos of obscure media technologies and their attendant documentation and equipage, and so on. As a result of this transfer of images of items into the digital, the collection itself becomes a virtual lab space for the various activities that crisscross more traditional modes of research. Both historically and in current hybrid lab usage, collections of digitized and more tangible objects allow for a different set of practices to emerge as the condition for pedagogy and research. While the hands-­on principle is clearly an essential part of the lab-­research collection hybrid, it also lends itself to new ways of understanding what it means for objects of research to be in proximity with each other. Assembling objects that create the conditions for something more ephemeral to emerge into aggregates can transform those objects into an apparatus that makes them available for the support of other research projects as well. Take, for example, the ephemeral but quite real backbone of technological culture we touch on above: the signal. While the legacy of research collections means that many are focused on extending their holdings from text(books) to things, from reading and writing to the material objects of culture, current collections are also interested in that which exists outside the hard surfaces of hardware. Practices of collecting also provide a means to develop an infrastructure that ties teaching to research and publication. In Berlin, an understanding of the key features of modern mathematics and physics was already part of the curriculum of the institute (not least in Kittler’s seminars). And it is important to realize that the practice of the seminar has itself interesting roots in the period of emergence of modern research universities in the nineteenth century. With originality as part of the construction of the Romantic ethos, the seminar was the center of humanities learning.38 As William Clark argues, even during its earlier history, the seminar was a form that mixed state bureaucracy and charismatic leadership.39 From its relative beginnings, then, the seminar was also a site of practice:

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In the seminar, students read only works of ancient Greek or Latin authors, or secondary works on classical philology. Methodological training, practice in grammatical analysis, textual interpretation, and critique proceeded not as abstract theory, but rather from the study of the sources themselves. Most directors no longer sought to provide a survey of the accumulated contents of philology, much less of the humanities in general. . . . In [the] seminar, one learnt now to be a philologist, a researcher.40

The seminar’s meticulous attention to philological details had wider repercussions in the methodological story about the humanities of books and writing, but it is just as interesting to consider its role in the story of labs and their apparatus. As Jonathan Sterne puts it in his contribution to Between Humanities and the Digital, “the problem of canons in the humanities has always been a media problem, and specifically a media resources problem.”41 As we discuss throughout this book, in the case of labs it is productive to think of the humanities in terms of an apparatus and infrastructure problem. How are the routines of humanities research and teaching organized by the spaces in which they occur and the devices that can be found in them? In this light, Kittler’s seminars are one part of the ongoing cultural history of the seminar as a form that prepares certain themes that have been rebranded as proper to the digital humanities, from the close focus on texts to the ability to read and investigate the object-­worlds of technology.42 Another way to put it would be to say that the humanities-­based tradition of close reading can be rearticulated in relation to research collections of technological artifacts, including signal worlds and circuit boards. Texts and techniques of reading and interpretation were part of the process that formed the apparatus of the seminar, but in many ways they were also integral to the formation of labs and have continued to be part of it in different ways. This is both methodological and historical. For example, in representations of early modern labs in the seventeenth century, reading was already visible. As Henning Schmidgen writes: “A new synthesis of manual and textual knowledge was represented visually, defining the laboratory not only as a place of manual work, but also as a space of reading and writing.”43 And in both science labs and hybrid labs, we continuously and persistently read peer-­reviewed research, newsletters and blogs,

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trade publications, lab log books, email, memos, and other forms of gray literature media theory, among other things. No wonder Latour and Woolgar place so much emphasis on inscription and reading in labs.44 Hybrid labs perform their epistemological work in a manner similar to the way that the science lab already performed its own practices of knowledge, such that the epistemic object (as science studies coined it after Georges Canguilhem and Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger) is also treated as a media object, but not necessarily a tangible one, even if it also has a material reality.45 This sort of approach to hybrid lab apparatus sometimes occurs through mathematics and information theory, as well as engineering, and it complicates what might otherwise be hastily dismissed as either a hardware-­reductionist account or, conversely, the fallacy of the digital immaterial. Instead, we think that it’s useful to consider such hands-­on material analysis, potentially combined with mathematics, as key components of media analysis and pedagogy. Again, the continuity from Kittler’s seminars, from the moment he began to look at approaches other than the close reading of texts, is worth noting. Kittler was the “first renegade Germanist to teach computer programming.” The media studies program connected to the MAF and the Signal Lab is one of the very few places which has offered undergraduate courses with titles like “Mathematics for Media Studies” and “Logic for Media Scholars” where arithmetic as well as signal processing appear as part of the humanities curriculum.46 Moving now to non-­academic hybrid labs, even though much of the shine has gone off the notion of “the sharing economy” over the past few years, resource sharing and other communal practices have long been key elements of such spaces. Less tied to discourses of digital innovation than to practices of community and grassroots learning, British media labs in the 1990s were emblematic of this spirit, which built up a different way of understanding the possibilities of their respective apparatuses. A relevant example that emerged from this scene was and is the Access Space, which is still operational in Sheffield, UK. At the Access Space, the focus from its relative beginnings has been on the repair of old, discarded computer networking technologies. In this case, the technologies are not present primarily as epistemic objects in the STS sense. What

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is at the center of all the activity there is learning and the passing on of learning. The Access Space apparatus becomes a recursive and recycling form of community building; if you learn something, you must pass it on. Charlotte Frost describes the communities the space reaches for learning as follows: “As evidence of the success of this system Access Space boasts impressive outreach capacity: more than a thousand regular visitors, of which only about thirty-­ five percent are university educated, and over half are unemployed, and they habitually work with people experiencing disabilities, learning disorders, poor health, homelessness or other measures of exclusion.”47 The result is a very different emphasis than one would find in a space like the MIT Media Lab. Indeed, as a sort of a rejoinder to the One Laptop per Child project (see chapter 4 for our critique of it), Access Space and Furtherfield’s joint project Zero Dollar Laptop worked with homeless people and developed an education program that combined the activities of repairing and maintaining with pedagogical principles developed from free and open-­source software. While there are clearly community-­oriented spaces on university campuses that open spaces of higher education to a wider range of participants—­for example, as we discuss in greater depth below, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at the University of Colorado Boulder hosts tours and workshops for visitors from the general public—­the primary function of many university-­based hybrid labs is different. Even if such labs emerge from a proximity to technology that is less “bells and whistles” and more about demystifying “all manner of computer-­based skills” like many of the community and activist labs like Access Space, the institutional articulations of the lab produce a different set of priorities, for better and worse.48 We can see how the emergence of such hybrid spaces responds to the discourse of interdisciplinarity not by new sorts of networking but by building from (and sometimes against) the grain of university infrastructure. Instead of using their collections to instrumentally teach technological skills and humanities methods, the disciplinary rethinking starts from the ground up—­or from the underground up—­focusing on the production of inter-­, or better, transdisciplinary spaces.

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CASE STUDY: THE MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY LAB (UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER) The Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is dedicated to the development of teaching that is tied to its own particular space, collection, and ongoing experiments, which produce a mix of research, teaching, and artistic activity. Like many of the other archaeological media labs, the MAL has also had to articulate its relation to preservation. Some of the donations to the lab have meant that lab director Lori Emerson has had to argue for the importance of the philosophy behind the lab, its activities, and its use of the space. In many ways, the MAL parallels the Trope Tank at MIT, or the Residual Media Depot at Concordia, which underline that the space is for experimental practice. Still, the apparatus that structures the lab’s activity is, at base, a collection, providing access to both written materials (manuals and books) and still-­functioning computing and gaming systems, controllers, and peripherals. All these spaces are different responses to the tie between a hands-­on lab and a collection that could easily be mistaken as a site focused on archives and preservation. While the MAL collection spans the late nineteenth century through the twenty-­first century, its strength is in the early era of personal computing from the mid-­1970s through the 1980s.49 Its holdings also include other hardware, such as game consoles, and peripherals such as disk drives, input devices and joysticks, software, and printed matter. Some of the apparatuses also have specific value, such as the machines that ran The Thing BBS. The MAL also has a collection of rare digital literature and art from the 1980s. The holdings are mostly displayed on desks lining the walls; each machine has its own desk and its own chair. The benefit of such an arrangement is that it facilitates immediate and extended access. Visitors often feel comfortable sitting down immediately, turning on the machines, and inserting a nearby floppy disk or a cartridge. However, because of space restrictions, not all of the machines can be displayed in a way that facilitates this hands-­on tinkering. Despite the lab’s best intentions, there remains a sort of an aura of spectacle because of the museum-­like showcasing of its collection. If the machines are not turned on when visitors arrive, or if

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there are no lab personnel on hand to continually remind visitors to play, tinker, and hack, it’s easy to fall into the pernicious assumption that the MAL is a museum and that one may only view the media on display as if they’re valuable works of art. One walks into the MAL in order to encounter digital culture in the form of its early history, but the lab has become a spatialized resource for teachers, artists, and researchers. The obvious research and teaching function of the apparatus is to cater to university students, extending the understanding of what can be engaged in new sorts of spatial practices at an English department. Similarly, one can also think of the MAL in ways that emphasize it not only as a closed space within a university but as a reconfigurable apparatus in itself. In this way, the space is the apparatus, made operational through monthly events for entrepreneurs, hackers, activists, academics, artists, and designers. Different events also change the space at times to a hackerspace, a makerspace, or a more straightforward venue space, expressing MAL’s flexibility as an infrastructure of learning in and out of the curriculum.50 The benefit of flexibility manifests in many ways. Because there is no clearly established set of best practices, MAL participants must continually educate themselves not only about obsolete programming languages, software, hardware, peripherals, and so on but also about best practices for archiving, cataloging, metadata, preservation, and documentation. The tasks related to preservation become integrated as part of the focus on making and building in the digital humanities sense. On a broader level, they bring to mind earlier community-­oriented media labs such the Access Space (discussed above). Knowledge becomes a matter of co-­creation with the imperative to pass it on—­a particular pedagogical feature that emphasizes the collective nature of hybrid lab work. Together, these aspects of the lab’s apparatus constitute a particular framing of media archaeology. Through such questions about what Pickering calls “the mangle of practice,” the pedagogical apparatus and the philosophical underpinnings of collections as part of academic activities, we constantly return to a broader question. Hybrid labs—­including media labs and media archaeology labs—­deal with technologies and competency, but in ways that become a platform for a further iterative

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set of operations, like the construction of scholarly arguments, or community-­building. Artifacts are collected, repaired, made, debated, unpicked and opened, reconnected, and sometimes even built from scratch when the emphasis on making and designing is central. Some scholars, like Ian Bogost, opt to use the term “carpentry” to describe the practice-­based methods of constructing nontextual arguments. It is interesting that Bogost refers to “philosophical lab equipment” as part of his rhetoric and raises the connection between both software and hardware in relation to philosophical arguments.51 Opening up old cathode-­ray tube screens to investigate their worlds of electrons and phosphorescence is not merely the (potentially dangerous) activity of a specialist engineer; it also has a link to what Bogost underlines: the only way to access the object is conceptual. Instead of this approach, which arguably steers in a different direction from the material and historical worlds of apparatuses, techniques, and practices, we can pick up on the situated nature of labs as apparatuses: collections of things that fabricate particular methodologies and collective, social habits.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has articulated some aspects of the pedagogies, research purposes, and activities of hybrid labs as they relate to the focus on apparatus, both as dynamic part of practice and as part of collections. We pay particular attention to media archaeology labs that have broadened the spectrum of digital humanities to include “old” media collections and related forms of early digital or predigital culture. This focus on labs that arguably find the old in the new speaks not only to Sterne’s notion of the “analog humanities” but also to the term “postdigital,” which reminds us of the persistent necessity to historicize the often too glibly used term “digital.” The apparatus becomes not just the item, device, or object that provides an occasion for study, but also the substance of the lab itself as an assemblage of items, catalogs, collections, methods, activities, and subjectivities of scholarship. Across a wide range of lab types, the discourse, practices of technologies, and apparatus bear a family resemblance on the level of thin description, a form of interdisciplinary engagement that “makes it possible for the experimentalist and the

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theorist to communicate, albeit in a register that by no means captures the full world of either, let alone both.”52 The long-­running, multiyear “Day in the Lab” section of ACM Interactions (a journal dedicated to research on human-­computer interaction) has featured a variety of international examples of centers and labs over the past decade.53 Many have focused on design and game labs, including the forming of their situated practices—­that is, the examples articulated not only by how they are constituted by people and their relations but also by the technologies that form the apparatus of knowledge in that space. Besides asking about unique features, some questions included, “What is one feature your lab would not do without?” Answers ranged from “big sheets of brown paper” to “pin-­up boards, each approximately 25 feet long and seven feet high” for facilitating sharing in the space.54 Interestingly, the questions also included the prompt to respond to what was missing: “What is one feature of your lab that you want and don’t have?” Responses to that question ranged again from “nothing” to “a laser cutter and other physical prototyping tools” or “A Shop Bot and a 3-­D printer” telling the story of fab labs and maker labs of the 2010s.55 There is more to these narratives than technological apparatus (or the lack thereof ). The various anecdotes, wish lists, and device collections reveal a pragmatic consideration about the conditions and affordances that allow us to pursue our research in critical and creative spaces of making and thinking. If you ask a typical humanities student or scholar a similar question, quite often the response would probably be “time.” Sometimes, we extend that to include items like budgets for travel or funds to hire staff, but increasingly there is a need for infrastructure that would better support the core sites of hybrid activity (see chapter 3). Requests for apparatus familiar from the contexts of engineering, mathematics, and design practice have also become part of humanities equipment wish lists. This sort of an apparatus of knowledge is both material and conceptual in terms of how it is involved in the practices of knowledge production. The lab spaces we address in this book are mangles, intra-­actions of practice that imbricate humans with technology that conditions the sorts of things we are able to do as academics and designers.56 In some cases that might mean practicing philosophy with artifacts,

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but it is also just taking apart and constructing artifacts and, in some cases, sharing spaces with artifacts that open up a different sort of agenda for communication studies, media studies, and the humanities in general. A lab where you engage in historical sources about the video gaming of the 1980s or philosophical principles of digital memory will transform into a different assemblage of knowledge if you have also access to old game consoles or pedagogical instruments like a flip-­flop demonstration device. A discussion of computational culture transforms its nature if you do it with a punch card in your hands—­or even better, if you are able to visit the art school’s textile design studio where they house a Jacquard loom (e.g. at the Winchester School of Art or the Milieux Institute at Concordia). Knowledge is spatialized, becomes embodied, relates to institutional research and teaching collections as well as to the expertise of the technical staff, and extends into much beyond the spoken or written word without forgetting the importance of bespoke lab libraries. These sorts of examples should not be unfamiliar to anyone involved in humanities pedagogy. And yet they become new ways to historicize the focus on emerging technologies of the labs and to refer to the apparatuses that formed the scientific laboratories. As one particular example of current hybrid labs, media archaeology labs place older technologies into our pedagogies, research, and curricula as antidotes to any narrow understanding of the digital humanities. Reminding scholars of the historicity of labs themselves becomes a way to look at the development of the lab apparatus—­an active form around which many imaginaries and practices coalesce. This synthesis of multiple functions, objects, devices, and, indeed, apparatuses in which the lab becomes an active participant in the formation of the humanities matters, in the most literal sense.

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3 LAB INFRASTRUCTURE

L

abs support the production of research, but what supports the production of labs? The answer is infrastructure, combined with the policy that brings that infrastructure into being and maintains it. For many scholars of media and communications, the near synonymy of culture and infrastructure in the twenty-­first century makes the study of infrastructure and policy imperative for anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to the critical tradition. While science and R&D labs seem to be ideal cases for the study of the sort of standardized, regulated, and structured spaces that enable further standardized and regulated things to emerge, the hybrid labs that we investigate are also founded on various levels of infrastructure, from material technologies to gray literature (that mass of mission statements, grant applications, annual reports, and other documents that drives the creation and long-­term support of labs) to a multitude of protocols. This chapter discusses labs from the point of view of infrastructure and policy. It highlights the role of gray literature in how labs produce and circulate knowledge, as well as the thick policy layer underlying lab infrastructure, with case studies concerning early home economics labs in the Canadian prairies and the Tuskegee Institute’s Jesup Wagon. These are followed by a discussion of two policy documents describing very different approaches to knowledge production, university lab policy, and infrastructure in the new millennium. The first, Michael Century’s report for the Rockefeller

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Foundation’s arts and humanities division, hews closely to the thread we have been pursuing throughout this book on the importance of hybrid studio-­labs. The second is Michael Crow and Barry Bozeman’s book Limited by Design, a study of the role of R&D lab research in the origins of contemporary policy interventions such as the Arizona Model for the reorganization of university strategy. The Arizona Model uses a particular series of linkages between policy, university infrastructure, and the national economy to bring about a radical transformation of the university in order to align it with neoliberal political aims. As a concrete and contemporary example of the complexities surrounding something so foundational and subtle as infrastructure, on March 25, 2019, the U.S.-­based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a seemingly innocuous news brief in which the organization stated that it was updating “astronaut assignments” for the remaining two spacewalks of 2019. Christina Koch had been scheduled to conduct a spacewalk on March 29 with fellow astronaut Anne McClain in, according to NASA officials, “what would have been the first all-­female spacewalk” (perhaps a gesture to Women’s History Month in the United States). However, after McClain learned in an earlier space walk on March 22 that a medium-­sized spacesuit torso fits best, the organization found itself in the embarrassing position of only having one spacesuit that fit both women, and thus McClain was replaced with Nick Hague.1 The invisible, rarely mentioned infrastructure behind NASA consists of the many labs (as well as research and flight centers) across the world that attend to an astonishingly complex array of operations relating to aeronautics and space travel. Yet, despite its twenty-­billion-­dollar annual budget, the agency was unable to take into account the baseline needs of its female astronauts. Despite the “PR nightmare” that ensued, this should not be surprising considering that, as recently as 2017, according to Science magazine, “women make up just 15% of NASA’s planetary mission science teams.”2 It is not simply a matter of how the organization needs to have equal representation among its employees. It concerns how the very notions of what counts as expertise and who counts as an expert are intrinsically tied to the infrastructure and administration of that crucial engine of knowledge production: the lab.

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Infrastructure is a broad concept because what it describes is messy, complex, and difficult to discern. In her foundational essay “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” Susan Leigh Star writes that the common conception of infrastructure as “a system of substrates” that is “by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work [and] ready-­to-­hand” works well for most purposes.3 As the embodiment of standards and protocols themselves, infrastructure is hard to observe because it extends into and depends on other structures, technologies, and social arrangements to which it connects in a standardized way. Because it does not have to be reassembled or reinvented every time a task is performed, it really only becomes visible at moments of breakdown, lag, and other types of failure. As Gregory Crane, Brent Seales, and Melissa Terras write, in the context of research, infrastructure does have a materiality that we can describe, however complex it might be: Infrastructure includes intellectual categories (e.g., literary genres, linguistic phenomena, and even the canonical book/chapter/verse/line citation schemes whereby we cite chunks of text), material artifacts such as books, maps, and photographs, buildings such as libraries and book stores, organizations such as universities and journals, business models such as subscriptions, memberships, and fee simple purchases, and social practices such as publication and peer review. Our infrastructure constrains the questions that we ask and our sense of the possible.4

In other words, infrastructure isn’t just about stuff. It is distinct from lab apparatus (see chapter 2), not simply as a question of what is “inside” and “outside” a given lab but because of its variable scale. Infrastructure is often larger and more nebulous than apparatus, but it is no less determinative of what goes on inside labs—­sometimes even more so. “Infrastructure does not simply affect the countless cost/benefit decisions we make every day—­it defines the universe of what cost/benefit decisions we can imagine.”5 As Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski have emphasized, though, infrastructure also operates simultaneously at the microscale of bits and bytes. When thinking about infrastructure, we need to take a large range into account when describing the intricacies of the material and cultural relations it brings into being.6 Asking questions about infrastructure is part of the inquiry into how we relate to what’s inside a given lab

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and how it structures our relations with each other and, increasingly, with everything else. As Alan Liu points out, our current experience of infrastructure is practically synonymous with the idea of culture itself, because the substance of most of our lives, both inside and outside of work, is structured by how various kinds of institutions organize it.7 In its recursive mode, infrastructure gives shape to specific communities of practice that modify the shape of that infrastructure in turn. Often, the only way to learn its intricacies is through membership in those communities (where, in tandem with space and people, as we discuss in chapters 1 and 4, it often also performs a gatekeeping function, indicating who does or does not have membership and therefore access). In other words, to study infrastructure is to study the organization of social practices and relations as well as networks of things.8 Complicating things even further, infrastructure is time-­critical in that it always involves practices taking place in a particular setting at a particular historical moment. Sheila Anderson, in her conclusion to “What Are Research Infrastructures?,” picks up on this notion, observing that infrastructure is always about when as well as what: Infrastructure becomes research infrastructure as part of a process of change, collaboration, and engagement. In these infrastructures, collection-­holding institutions act as creators, curators, and bearers of knowledge about their holdings; technical development seeks not only to capture and represent digital information and content but also the processes by which that knowledge is created and continues to be created as it is analysed and used; researchers act not just as users but also as “readers,” of both the collection holding institutions and of the holdings, possessing both archival and artifactual intelligence, and weaving narratives based on interpretive and analytical research methods and processes.9

As Anna Foka and her coauthors contend, considering the temporal aspect of infrastructure allows us to consider how labs and the organizations that contain and fund them change over time.10 Studying the infrastructure of hybrid labs also requires us to think about the intertwined systems of substrates that structure the social and technical relations in, around, and through them that enable the production and circulation of knowledge at a particular time and place. As Foka et al. point out, though, this will require humanities

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scholars in particular “to review the categories that have so far helped us make sense of the sociotechnical reality we study. As technology progresses, we need to invent new concepts, relationships, and vocabularies to understand its impact. The concept of digital research infrastructure is, in this regard, especially challenging, as it cuts across and integrates concerns at multiple levels and across multiple temporal scales.”11 This review process is already under way. To assist in its study, Star, along with Karen Ruhleder, developed a list of properties to assist scholars thinking about infrastructure: it is embedded into various technologies and cultural assemblages; it is transparent and redundant because it does not have to be built from scratch every time it is needed; it extends beyond unique locales and events; it is inseparable from communities of practice that shape it and are shaped by it; it uses standards and protocols to connect to other infrastructures; it is built on an installed base; it becomes most visible during breakdown; and it becomes fixed incrementally rather than in a totalizing manner because, although things like international standards bodies exist, “nobody is really in charge of infrastructure.”12 The perception that no one is in charge of it is precisely why studying infrastructure requires a critical perspective. As Liu has observed, digital humanities in particular tends to be “lightly antifoundationalist,” in that its scholars recognize that although organizations and their attendant infrastructures might present themselves as orderly and rational, they are just as messy as any other aspect of culture. However, Liu argues that these scholars are “less interested in exposing the ungrounded nature of organizational institutions and infrastructures (as if it were possible to avoid or get outside them) than in illuminating, and pragmatically guiding, the agencies and factors involved in their making and remaking.”13 He argues that a lightly antifoundationalist approach is of limited use—­and we concur—­because it ultimately supports the status quo. Academic infrastructure has always been connected to other societal institutions, but these connections have become increasingly bushy and dendritic, complicating critical judgment. We contend that hybrid labs are a product of the desire to use infrastructural affordances tactically, often for ethical reasons (Stone’s codeswitching umbrella, discussed in chapter 4, is a prime example). The fact that labs are products of a desire for tactical intervention

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of a sort also implies that critique of their infrastructure needs to be complemented by other forms of practice that produce alternatives in the course of lab work. There is, then, an opportunity to see labs as supported by and creative of novel sorts of infrastructures for academic practices that are relevant to a wider set of social contexts. Working in and around hybrid labs can and should lead to new ways of being a scholar, of training new scholars, and of connecting what happens in the academy to the larger world with all of its ambivalences, including the private sector.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS DOCUMENT: GRAY LITERATURE Because of its omnipresence and complexity, infrastructure can be difficult to pin down. But traces of it often manifest “as lists of numbers and technical specifications, or as hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists.”14 The material form that those lists of numbers and technical specifications often take is called “gray literature.” Gray literature, like infrastructure itself, is a congeries. This mass of bland and generally unobtrusive writing occupies a fuzzy middle zone on the spectrum between literary writing and scientific writing. Gray literature itself breaks down into what John Guillory has called “information genres” which we pretend have been flensed of all rhetorical value in order to better convey that peculiar modern invention called “information.”15 Examples include instruction manuals, documentation, reports, specifications, dissertations, conference proceedings, white papers, bibliographies, and so on.16 Gray literature is particularly constituent of labs in universities and in other institutions that house them. It is the stuff of mission statements, grant applications, annual reports, and web pages, all of which (must) make claims to cultural, governmental, and grant-­ providing institutions for how labs produce and circulate knowledge and how they expect legitimization and funding in return. This constitutive relationship between labs and gray literature is most visible in the case of hybrid labs housed inside universities (which actually run on gray literature, despite the loathing of faculty to produce or read it), but it is never entirely absent, even in the most iconoclastic of hybrid labs.

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Journal articles, book chapters, newspapers, and other kinds of popular journalism describe what labs have accomplished, but gray literature makes labs into labs in the first place. Gray literature organizes the jumble of objects, practices, techniques, discourses, and subjects into institutionally recognizable forms. None of this organization requires that the people filling out the grant applications, requests for proposals, expense reports, and other documents believe what they are writing; passion, conviction, and good intent have nothing to do with it (which is partly why this stuff is called “gray” in the first place). All that matters is that the forms and reports have been completed, accepted, filed, and processed and that they continue to appear according to the institutional timetable in question. The job of gray literature is to fade into the background. It is a conduit that powers the claims of the laboratory and its denizens with the silent assent of the accrediting institution. So how do we begin to discuss lab infrastructure when its precise job is to blend in, passing itself off as something too mundane to worry about? We are now quite familiar with methods for thinking about other aspects of the extended lab assemblage—­subjects, discourses, material objects, and cultural techniques. What remains is to consider the role that infrastructure and policy plays in the production of labs as labs and in their articulation to larger cultures. Making visible this see-­saw relationship between production and articulation is what Bowker and Star refer to as “infrastructural inversion”—­learning to look at technological assemblages in such a manner that it becomes difficult for them to disappear from view.17 Gray literature is a ubiquitous component of infrastructure, and therefore, like other manifestations of ubiquity and interdependency, is a good starting point.18 It provides a set of articulations that make the productive work of the lab possible, yet infamously, it is seldom read after its creation.19 Our job is to adequately describe both the work of production and the work of articulation in this scene. In this instance, Bowker and Star are more helpful than, say, McLuhan’s notion of the figure/ground inversion, because they provide both an account of the properties of infrastructure and a set of methods for beginning to discern it. Given that it’s possible to find the gray literature around both contemporary and historical media labs in the backs of long-­forgotten filing cabinets, used bookstores, and,

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increasingly, in the hastily digitized and unsorted stacks of digital repositories such as archive.org (all of this is part of what Bowker and Star refer to as the “materiality and texture” of infrastructure and its classification systems), gray literature provides a significant opportunity for beginning to think about the larger assemblage of lab infrastructure. An analysis of gray literature should also involve a hunt for the work it makes invisible and for the workers whose labor is discounted or not formally recognized. For Bowker and Star, recovering the indeterminate multiple “voices and silences” that classification systems have elided in their drive to standardize is an important task.20 Who types up the reports and makes the phone calls bothering principal investigators until they finally fill in the forms, and where and how are those reports filed? Who requests price quotes for the purchase lists of tech, who organizes timetables and schedules for work, and what productivity software do they use? Who cleans the lab? Who patches the software and runs the cables, and where do the cables come from? Who watches the kids during crunch time? The production of gray literature, it seems, involves considerable amounts of affective and “immaterial” labor,21 which, at least, we now have a critical language to describe. But there is also a “practical politics” of design at play; someone made the decisions to create standards that include some people and things but exclude others. Behind the creation of those standards is power, as always, but how does it exert itself on anyone in any particular instance? Who wields it, and how long do the decisions they make last?22 Working through the gray literature that is part of the assemblage around any technology, labs included, is vital because it provides clues about how political decisions become embedded in infrastructure and then disappear from view, where they can do their work of classification and inclusion with relatively little oversight. As Bowker and Star point out, infrastructure’s tendency to fade into the background allows tyrannies of various sorts (large and small, intentional and unintentional) to take hold.23 If we’re going to take labs of any sort as an object of study—­never mind contesting or reforming such processes of erasure—­we need a better sense of the factors that guide our relationship to institutional infrastructure. One of those factors is policy.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND LAB POLICY “Policy” is a catch-­all term for the set of rules, laws, and tools that a government or institution uses to manage activity in a particular cultural sphere. As Michel Foucault explains in Security, Territory, Population, “one of the most fundamental and typical elements” informing contemporary ideas about policy is police, which in turn points to the fact that policy manages the relationship of the individual to the state and to other individuals.24 One way it accomplishes this task is by producing, regulating, and maintaining particular kinds of infrastructures. Policy has an obligate relationship with infrastructure; it can lay out the conditions necessary to produce new infrastructures, and it can modify or manage existing infrastructures that have emerged piecemeal, but it is also developed according to infrastructural needs and requires a functioning infrastructure of its own in order to come into being at all and operate consistently and effectively. Lab infrastructure has a thick policy layer that is particularly visible in tightly regulated government, institutional, and university labs. Hybrid labs such as media labs, art labs, and hacklabs may well express an oppositional stance, but the operations of many are subvented by operating funds from universities and by grants from arts organizations. Even the refusal to take any funding whatsoever, as in the case of a squatter hacklab, requires some sort of relationship to policy, insofar as such sites are nested in the implied governance infrastructures of urban planning, citizenship, and so on. Still, under such conditions, many hybrid labs have made significant progressive contributions both to their own fields and to transdisciplinary policy discourse. An increasingly important example for us while writing this book has been the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist and anticolonialist marine science laboratory at Memorial University of Newfoundland that specializes in the community-­based and citizen-­science monitoring of plastic pollution, with particular attention to the appearance of plastics in food webs.25 CLEAR’s policies and protocols for knowledge production are the opposite of gray literature in that they are designed for maximum visibility and circulation. Not only are their basic principles stated up front on their web page, along with sources of funding,

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current personnel rosters, and land acknowledgments, but CLEAR has developed a Lab Book that explains everything on the same level, from their protocols for the visual processing of cod and other fish guts to look for tiny plastic traces without the aid of chemical analysis to how to run a weekly feminist science lab meeting.26 As a process document, the Lab Book bears the traces of its own history. Deprecated protocols such as the “Protocol Using Premade 10% KOH to Dissolve Fish Guts,” which the lab no longer employs because it creates toxic substances, remain in the document as a trace of the parallel development of policy and practice. The lab’s director, Dr. Max Liboiron, is both a research scientist and associate (indigenous research) at Memorial University—­a division of labor which makes it more likely that progressive grassroots policy developed in such labs might be formalized into official university protocols. Hybrid labs introduce new challenges and may still have unforeseen limitations. A prudent response to this situation would be solid, progressive policy formation as an aspect of infrastructural work. The reality, however, is that policy formation is always playing catch-­up to what is occurring in society. Labs of all sorts frequently play a role in that process, as the historical example of home economics labs in western Canada shows in the following case study.

CASE STUDY: HOME ECONOMICS LABS AND EXTENSION ON THE CANADIAN PRAIRIES (MANITOBA, CANADA) We began this book with the conviction that labs are more than a tangle of spaces and apparatus and people. Labs are sites for situated practice—­geographically and historically specific chains of operations and techniques that produce not only knowledge but also specific kinds of subjects. Describing that specificity means also paying attention to the factors that inform any particular lab: cultural policy and its attendant infrastructure, but also the lab imaginary, that is, the fantasies, beliefs, and ideologies that provide the lab with its consistency, and the discourses in which that imaginary circulates. “The extended laboratory” is a useful name for this assemblage, rooted in a hugely significant but underexamined history. As with the famed “circuit of culture” in British cultural studies, scholars can begin anywhere in our extended lab assemblage as long as their analysis

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visits all of the other aspects of it along the way.27 Here, we’re going to begin with the lab site and work outward, but there are other ways to tell this story. For reasons of space, we have limited the scope to roughly the first half of the twentieth century. The idea of “the extended laboratory” laid out in the Introduction to this book has a specific historical origin. The idea of extension evokes the early-­twentieth-­century policy project in western Canada called “agricultural extension”—­the umbrella term under which the discipline that was variously called domestic science, household science, home economics, and finally human ecology, came into being. This policy project emerged directly out of home economics laboratories at various universities, notably at the University of Manitoba, by way of the discourse of modernity and scientificity that those labs developed and by way of the kinds of subjects they produced. By virtue of various infrastructures at the university and provincial levels (railways, roads, the electrical and gas grids, the telephone exchange, the newspapers, radio stations, and eventually TV channels), in combination with a series of innovative policy instruments and tools, trained and accredited researchers from home economics labs flowed out of the university and into the larger publics of city, town, and farm. Some of them went directly to work for the provincial government, consolidating links between these infrastructures, working to improve the circulation of new subjects into the university for training and to improve the process of knowledge dissemination back out again. The relative beginnings of domestic science in colonial North America are with Ursuline nuns in Quebec, as early as the seventeenth century. But over the nineteenth century in Great Britain and the United States it was the imaginary of modernity that set the stage for industrialization, the rise of scientific objectivity, women’s suffrage, the sovereignty of the individual, and changes in pedagogical philosophy.28 Even the earliest public-­facing documents of prairie home economics define its imaginary in terms of scientific method. A 1902 circular from the Winnipeg School of Household Science is worth quoting at length: Household Science may be defined as the application of scientific principles and systematic methods of work to the mechanical problems of homemaking. It also embraces instruction in the science of all the

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processes carried on in the home, as well as the practical application of these scientific principles to the daily operations of housekeeping.29

Visual records from the period illustrate how this ideology was put into practice in concrete ways. These images have survived in university archives because of the kind of subject that the discipline of home economics produced via its lab spaces: it’s part of the ethos of home economics to keep meticulous records of everything, so the University of Manitoba’s fonds is a particularly rich site for researchers. Two other major resources include Johanna Gudrun Wilson’s comprehensive but unpublished 1966 master’s thesis for the University of Manitoba Faculty of Education, “A History of Home Economics Education in Manitoba 1826–­1966,” and A Time in Our Lives: A History of Manitoba Home Economists in Extension, a privately published collective autoethnography written by midcentury alumni of the University of Manitoba Home Economics.30 The materials in these sources identify not only what is inside various domestic science and home economics labs but what it cost, where it was sourced, and where it went after new equipment was purchased. Figures 25, 26, and 27 depict the University of Manitoba Home Economics Food Lab around 1914. The first image, shot from a different angle and probably with a different lens or different camera,

Figure 25. Young women in the University of Manitoba Home Economics Food Lab, ca. 1914. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

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Figure 26. Young women in the University of Manitoba Home Economics Food Lab, ca. 1914. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

Figure 27. Young women in the University of Manitoba Home Economics Food Lab in the upper floor of the Administration Building, ca. 1914. Photograph from Florence MacWilliam. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

seems to have been flipped horizontally for aesthetic reasons, creating a sense of spaciousness absent from the other two images. These images date from the year that the Household Science diploma program at the Fort Garry campus that would become the University of Manitoba (which began in 1910 at the old Manitoba Agricultural College in a different part of the city) became a degree.31

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As Wilson notes in her thesis, because of the financial stresses created by World War I the construction of the promised home economics building was delayed, and it did not open until 1950.32 As a result, the Department of Household Science (later the Department of Home Economics) occupied the basement, second, and third floors of the Administration Building (60). The spatial arrangement of the lab follows the “open square” model, which had already been employed by 1909 in household science labs in Winnipeg high schools, like the Alexandra School in Winnipeg School Division no. 1 and the Brandon Central School’s domestic science department in 1911 (154). It includes stationary tables on three sides of the room with gas jets for each student along a metal strip at the back of the table; the teacher’s desk on the open end; a table for supplies in the middle; and storage space built into the benches (112–­13). This setup was a substantial improvement over the Department of Household Science’s original food laboratory apparatus at the old Manitoba Agricultural College. The earliest food laboratory equipment there (around 1909–­10) included wood, coal, and gas ranges plus the then-­common “fireless cooker,” or haybox (40). (A 1902 circular from the Winnipeg School of Household Science describes an even earlier food lab as being equipped with twelve desks and Bunsen burners [218].) Home economics pedagogy always explicitly included the selection and care of equipment, and, as we point out above, home economists tracked everything, so we know that, in 1919, the equipment from Alexandra School was transferred to the Cecil Rhodes, Gordon Bell, and Hugh John McDonald Schools and that its estimated worth was still $2,800 (129, 115). Home economics was no different from any other science in terms of its participation in the long and honorable tradition of scrounging for lab equipment. The uniforms in the images are also an explicit part of the lab apparatus. In 1909 the program required its students to manufacture specific aprons for the food laboratory, sewing, and housekeeping (37, 39). In the 1950s, students wore an entirely white uniform for the food lab, and some home economists continued to wear these after graduation while working in the field to project an aura of scientific efficiency.33 There were also other home economics lab spaces at the University of Manitoba, including the practice apartments and practice houses. A practice housekeeping apartment in the Administration

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Building served as the lab space for courses in materials and household efficiency, which were regularized as a course in household management in 1927. Mrs. L. C. Duncan, who taught this course for years, “urged the Board to provide proper laboratory facilities,” so in 1929 the university rented the Sprague House on the northern edge of the university campus for that purpose. Wilson notes that in 1931 the department took over a second house, the Farm Cottage, which it used until 1939 (54). The Farm Cottage was small and poorly heated, so Ralph Ham designed the Practice House, a new redbrick Georgian residence, specifically for the Department of Home Economics.34 Wilson goes on to write that in 1957–­58 the department opened four new home management apartments (64). Wilson also tells of how two children, “wards of the Child Welfare Department,” also lived in the Sprague House “to give students experience in understanding and caring for young children” (54). Between 1929 and 1953, thirty-­three children—­mostly infants—­lived in the Sprague House under the care of Miss Florence Mclauchlin (later Mrs. T. R. Brownridge).35 For a period it was mandatory for all third-­year students to briefly spend time in the house as “child director” (54–­55). After 1950 the new home economics building still

Figure 28. Infant care as infrastructure: woman (unidentified) feeding the practice baby (unidentified) with a bottle in the Practice House, 1960s. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

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Figure 29. Nada Maric, laboratory technician, and an automatic amino acid analyzer, 1970s. Text on the back of the photograph reads: “The amino acid composition of rapeseed protein are being analyzed in this automatic amino acid analyzer in the nutrition laboratory of the Faculty of Home Economics at the University of Manitoba. Technician Nada Maric studies the tracings of a test.” University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

had a “nursery school laboratory” (62). Just because we might find it difficult to imagine how a laboratory practice involving the rearing of children inside the lab would pass a university ethics committee today doesn’t mean that the Practice House was out of step with the university research culture of the time. The Practice House was every inch a hybrid laboratory, in keeping with a long tradition of display as part of animal behaviorist studies at the university’s Department of Psychology that persisted well into the 1980s, when ducklings inside a vitrine in one of the university tunnels were a popular sight. By 1950, when the Department of Home Economics finally received its own building, it contained a range of laboratories (62). The food lab was renovated to include a section equipped for taste testing, and the new demonstration room, like an operating theater, included a large adjustable plate glass mirror over the main table (62–­63). In 1961 a new textile lab and conditioning room opened, and a second, smaller textile lab for honors and graduate students opened in 1964 (63). By the 1970s the apparatus of the various home economics labs had become highly sophisticated, including equipment like gas chromatographs, amino acid analyzers, textureometers, weatherometers,

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Allo-­Kramer shears, and Magnehelics. Many of these devices were part of the textile lab and were used to artificially stress or age fabric samples and then provide precise measurement of the changes they had undergone.36 Wilson writes that, from the time of the second household science year in 1911, “enough science was taught to give the student an intelligent understanding of the natural processes which she would encounter in her daily life and a scientific basis for practical studies” (41–­42). Once the school relocated to the Fort Garry campus, students took courses in chemistry and bacteriology (44). In 1929, Miss Louise Pettingell became the first Manitoba home economics graduate to teach on the Winnipeg School Board staff (117). By the mid-­1930s, high school home economics students were producing laboratory reports on the experiments they conducted (118). Meanwhile, by 1930 there was a thriving home economics research culture at the university, producing and disseminating original research: “Problems of an experimental lecture were carried on at the request of other departments or as part of nutrition studies. Between 1928 and 1934 experimental work on animals was undertaken to demonstrate, for example, the effect of proper food on growth” (51). Around 1940, the University Research Council approved the purchase of

Figure 30. Back of a postcard of young women in the Home Economics Food Lab on the upper floor of the Administration Building, ca. 1914. The other side of the postcard is Figure 27. From Florence MacWilliam. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Human Ecology fonds.

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Figure 31. The Manitoba Agricultural College Special train and a stock judging lecture held adjacent to it, no date. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Faculty of Agriculture fonds.

equipment for the establishment of a textile research laboratory (52). There’s one more unusual home economics hybrid lab space that demands some attention, in part because it circulates; this space also briefly returns us to the materiality and function of the images with which this case study opens. The three images of the 1914 food lab aren’t just photographs: they’re postcards. The university wanted these images to circulate, and literally wanted people to comment on them. Production doesn’t mean much without circulation. This other lab space—­or rather, these spaces—­were the Better Farming trains, and they were crucial to the early history of Manitoba (and Saskatchewan) home economics. These trains took the labs directly to the people, presenting “new research” as well as improved techniques for a range of applications on the farm and in the farmhouse.37 There were two such trains, provided free, with crew, by each of the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways. Faculty from the Agricultural College, including home economics faculty, traveled throughout the province over the summer. Wilson writes that, in 1911, as a North American first, a dedicated home economics car was added to the trains (43). According to the Manitoba Agricultural College calendar for 1912–­13, in 1912 alone the trains staged 150 meetings, with over thirty-­five thousand people attending.38 We have found newspaper reports of such trains running as late as 1927. They were very effective tools and bear a strong family resemblance to the agit-­trains that the Bolsheviks began using to promote the art and culture of the Revolution after 1918.

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The circulation of both postcards and trains leads directly to our notion of the extended lab, one that only makes sense in the context of a discussion of cultural policy and the kinds of subjects it desired to produce. The trains, for example, were authorized by the Provincial Department of Agriculture and supported by the Dominion Government as part of an extremely long-­lived and successful policy program known as Agricultural Extension.39 At root, extension was a policy initiative to bring modernity to the prairies through the creation of a scientifically informed population in order to better stimulate agricultural industry. It has its relative beginnings in a series of acts passed by the government of Manitoba over the turn of the century, beginning with an 1872 act to establish agricultural societies, which was expanded the following year to include fairs and agricultural exhibitions.40 The concern of cultural policy is the relationship of the individual to the state. Rather than brutalize people into obeying, modern democratic policy uses a variety of training regimes to organize and produce, by and large, willingly productive citizen-­subjects. In 1902 the Agricultural Society Act stipulated that an agricultural society could be established anywhere in the province, as long as there were fifty members.41 A 1906 act established the degree-­granting Agricultural College for men; W. J. Black, the first president of the college, was responsible not only for home economics and agriculture at the college but also for provincewide extension work.42 In 1910 an act provided for the creation and organization of home economics societies (which became Women’s Institutes in 1919). In the same year, the Agricultural College established a diploma course for women, which became the Bachelor of Home Economics degree in 1916.43 From 1914 to 1923 the Manitoba Department of Agriculture supplied a grant under the Dominion Agricultural Instruction Act to finance a Home Economics Extension program; the grant was withdrawn in 1923, which nearly killed the program. The program was kept alive almost single-­handedly by Esther Mackay (née Thompson), one of the first graduates of the program and subsequently director of the home economics program.44 This series of resolutions created the conditions for citizens to emerge who were not only subject to cultural policy but also active contributors to it and producers of it. In 1911 the Household Science Association in Morris, Manitoba (the first of its kind in

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Manitoba, founded the previous year), made its first resolution, requesting support from Premier Rodmond Roblin.45 After this first resolution, Women’s Institute members regularly took positions on cultural issues and made significant contributions to provincial cultural policy.46 By the 1930s, home economists were working in many Manitoba government departments, including Relief in Public Works, Child and Family Welfare, the Prairie Housing Committee, and the Flood Restoration Committee.47 Many home economists applied their technological skills by working directly for corporations that maintained provincial infrastructure. For example, widespread electrification didn’t take place in Manitoba until after World War II. Winnipeg City Hydro and Manitoba Hydro, the two utilities providers, directly employed home economists to aid with this process. Extension graduates were involved in the redesign of farm homes to accommodate electricity—­ remodeling kitchens for new appliances as well as helping to design and add bathrooms, mudrooms. and farm offices.48 They also demonstrated the new electrical and gas appliances for shoppers on-site and in the Hydro store and the department stores that sold them. Home economists employed by the utilities also served as a predigital information network; in addition to authoring publications such as cookbooks, writing regular newspaper columns, and appearing on radio and TV, they were available for free public consultation over the phone about any and all domestic questions related to the new technologies. Perhaps the best known of the many policy instruments that Home Economics Extension put in place is the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs, later known as the 4-­H Clubs. In 1913, eight Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs were formed in rural Manitoba towns; by 1915 there were twenty-­eight such clubs, and the 1916 report stated that they were the most effective way of teaching home economics. Designed for rural youth aged ten to twenty-­one, the clubs’ stated “primary purpose” was to convey improvements in agricultural and home economics methods. Their mandate was to develop the “citizenship potential of these children by participating in a voluntary activity and to become aware of improved agricultural and home economics technology.”49 The program’s success meant that it soon required other staff, and it exists to the time of this writing.

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There is far more to say about the extended home economics lab than we can cover in the space of a brief case study. What we want to emphasize is that the lab space, apparatus, and people in the home economics labs—­and any labs, really—­do not make sense unless we also take into account the larger cultural policies, infrastructural support, and the various imaginary regimes that position and produce the labs. Lab assemblages are flat, and the whole mess emerges by fits and starts in unpredictable ways. The politics of Home Economics Extension are what historian Veronica Strong-­Boag dubs “working feminism.”50 It made women and their difficult work a subject for serious study, and it employed the scientific method to produce not only primary research but new techniques for developing modern, productive subjects versed in everything from the scientific method to parliamentary procedure.51 For Strong-­Boag, early-­twentieth-­century home economics had “some of the same consciousness raising and research goals” as “modern” (ca. 1986) women’s studies programs.52 In the autoethnographies of twentieth-­century prairie home economists, the varieties of feminist politics range from the radical to the conservative. But over the course of the century, what began as an effort to ameliorate the work of women in the private sphere passed through the home economics laboratories to become a collective cultural policy agenda. When the University of Manitoba closed the Faculty of Human Ecology on July 1, 2015, transitioning remaining units to other faculties, a significant, century-­long part of the project of modernizing the Canadian prairies came to an end.53 Revisiting it by way of the laboratory is only one piece of an ongoing assessment of its complex legacy.

CASE STUDY: BLACK LABORATORIES AND AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION Shamefully, for much of the modern history of laboratories, Black people and Black bodies were, and in some cases continue to be, reduced to objects of experimentation. The most infamous example from the modern era is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In Macon County, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service staged a study of 399 Black men with syphilis and 201 control subjects.54 The first published research from

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the study appeared in 1936, and further publications followed every four to six years thereafter. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) finally halted the study in 1972 when journalists began to report that, though penicillin had been easily available to the general public since the 1950s, the syphilitic men in the study had not been treated with it. By that point, over a hundred men in the study group had died from advanced syphilitic lesions. In the wake of halting the study, HEW declared in a 1973 report that the study was “ethically unjustified.”55 On May 16, 1997, a quarter century after the study ended, President Bill Clinton formally apologized to all participants in the study on national television, with a direct satellite connection to the community in Tuskegee, which included six of the remaining survivors and their families.56 But the matter is far from resolved; noting a revisionist trend in early-­twenty-­century historical articles on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Susan M. Reverby stresses the ongoing need for not only facts and historicization but an awareness of “the politics of memory” and the necessity of incessantly linking race, class, and gender to medical and scientific decision making: “The collective memories of events tell us much about historical moments and must be analyzed along with the ‘facts’ that get emphasized or chosen. Re-­analyzing the past and searching for new meanings and new facts will be a continual process.”57 In that spirit, it is worth noting that there is an intriguing body of research on laboratories run by Black scientists and researchers

Figure 32. The original 1906 Jesup Wagon (right) and 1931 Booker T. Washington School on Wheels (left) at the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Tuskegee Institute. From Thomas Monroe Campbell’s The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer. Hathi Trust Digital Library.

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as part of agricultural extension projects in the same region of the southern United States, at Tuskegee University, at the beginning of the twentieth century. These labs also played a significant role in the development of agricultural policy in the southern United States. In many important respects, the articulation of this project is very different from agricultural extension in western Canada during the same period, but the combination of agricultural policy and laboratory work suggests that there might be grounds for both a renewal of archival research on these labs and a fruitful comparison to Canadian agricultural extension projects. In 1896, at the invitation of Tuskegee University founder and president Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver became the director of the institution’s Agriculture Department. As a firm believer in the principle that scientific research was of direct benefit to practical agriculture, Carver saw the value of establishing a laboratory with that as its mission. In the same year that Carver was hired, Washington convinced the Alabama legislature to establish the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station. Laboratory work at the station consisted largely of soil analysis and the concomitant testing of seeds and fertilizers in order to optimize crop yield.58 From the time of his arrival at Tuskegee, though, Carver had also been experimenting with what would eventually become “a marvelous roving laboratory that exposed rural communities to the latest in farm machinery and equipment.”59 He had adopted a practice of Washington’s and begun to visit local farms with a buggy full of exhibits and tools to stage demonstrations based on seasonal needs.60 But Washington had more ambitious plans; he envisioned a rural educational network he called “The Movable School of Agriculture” and commissioned Carver to draw up plans for a demonstration wagon that would bring it into existence. When it first came into operation in June 1906, this vehicle was dubbed “The Jesup Wagon,” after Washington’s friend in New York, Morris K. Jesup, who made the donation that purchased and equipped it. The authoritative primary source for an account of its operation is The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer, a book by Thomas Monroe Campbell—­a graduate of Tuskegee and, as of November 12, 1906, operator of the wagon, the first Black agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),61 and later a supervisor.62 Campbell notes that the wagon was fitted with two mules, a harness,

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a cream separator, two crates, a churn, and a cultivator, for a total cost of $674.50 (about $19,479.41 in 2020). His annual salary of $840.00 ($24,259.01 in 2020) was paid by the Tuskegee Institute and General Board, with an additional yearly allowance of ten dollars from the federal government.63 The institute also loaned additional equipment for use on the cart, including a milk tester, a revolving hand churn, a two-­horse steel-­beam plow, a one-­horse steel-­beam plow, a diverse cultivator, a spike-­toothed harrow, a middle burster, and a set of garden tools. On his initial trip with the Jesup Wagon, Campbell came to the realization that “some of its equipment was greatly out of proportion to the agricultural status of the people,” so he removed the milking equipment and retrofitted the cart with a large crate to accommodate either a cow or a pig and a razorback hog with cards displaying information about their respective ages and weights so that farmers could learn how to improve their herds.64 The equipment on the cart was rotated seasonally; in spring, for example, it was fitted with “a portable garden with vegetables growing thereon.” In all cases the idea was to provide as many concrete demonstrations of how to do the work as possible, such as using the team from the wagon to cultivate fields with modern plows (95). The science practiced with the Jesup Wagon was imbricated into the whole life of the people in the communities it visited, including caring for their spiritual and physical well-­being. Campbell mentions that “I was not only able to use the Jesup Wagon in the week days for carrying on farm and home demonstrations, but found that it came in handy in transporting speakers from Tuskegee Institute to near-­by churches on Sundays. And here, I should like to make this observation, that no worker among rural people can reach the fullest degree of his usefulness who does not spend a great deal of time with the rural people in their churches on Sundays” (96). After 1918, Campbell sought the appointment of a registered nurse as part of the Jesup Wagon staff. In 1920, despite resistance from physicians and nurses to the plan, Miss Uva M. Hester, a Tuskegee graduate, was appointed as the first rural nurse to work on the project, with her salary paid jointly by the Tuskegee Institute and the Alabama State Health Department (111–­13). This is yet another example of why the extended laboratory model employed in this book is helpful when reexamining the historical record around any lab; these

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aspects of the Jesup Wagon’s work receive only cursory mentions in the existing scholarly literature. Campbell and company initially relied on rail to extend the network by transporting the wagon to distant parts of the state. However, the logistics of moving lantern slides, charts, and illustrated lecture and physical exhibits, combined with the need to secure transportation on the other end, proved unwieldy (10). In 1918 they successfully lobbied state director Dr. J. F. Duggar for money to purchase a truck to replace the wagon. They named it the Knapp Agricultural Truck after Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, who initiated farm demonstration work in the United States. It was during this period that the USDA made Helping Negroes to Become Better Farmers and Homemakers (1921), a two-­reel half-­hour documentary that became part of the truck’s regular equipment inventory (109). The inclusion of the documentary as part of the Knapp Agricultural Truck’s equipment inventory requires comment, because at that point the mobile lab becomes more than a conveyor of scientific innovation, health-­care information, and church-­centered conviviality; it becomes a vector of government propaganda65 and institutionalized racism. In Documenting Racism: African Americans in U.S. Department of Agriculture Documentaries, 1921–­42, J. Emmett Winn pays particularly close attention to Helping Negroes to Become Better Farmers and Homemakers, because it was the first movie produced by the USDA to focus on Black Americans.66 Winn demonstrates how, in addition to depicting Black farmers through the racist stereotypes typical of the period in the interest of supporting the practice and doctrine of racial separation (14), the film systematically downplays the role of Black agricultural extension workers, assigning the credit to white USDA officials: The film chooses to end the Movable School sequence with a visit from two white USDA representatives and again suggests that white USDA agents or supervisors were a key feature of black extension work. However, historical evidence does not support this position. In fact, county agent scholar Gladys Baker asserts that “the Negro county agent is not generally considered to be administratively responsible to the white country agent,” and Campbell’s recollections do not suggest even a moderate level of involvement by white agents in the Movable School project. Thus, the film is misleading in its recurring references to the

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importance of white USDA personnel to the development and work of black demonstration work. When the messages of the film are compared with the historical records, it is clear that those messages are inaccurate. Thus, the film’s form and content function rhetorically to argue that white agents were the source and focus of black agricultural outreach in Alabama despite the fact that Tuskegee personnel were both the impetus and the facilitators of black extension work. In other words, despite understanding that the black agents worked independently of white agents to enact positive change in the community of African American farmers via the long-­ standing projects started and maintained at Tuskegee, the filmmakers cinematically locate the power, authority, and knowledge within the white authority figures. (22)

The USDA’s agenda was very different than that of Campbell, Carver, Washington, and the other Black scholars and citizens involved directly in the Tuskegee agricultural extension program. Winn notes that though the events of the movie are staged, “it is reasonable to assume that the people represented in the film are actual farmers, county agents, and administrators” (13). However, the larger cultural context suggests that “the idea of making farm life more attractive to black Americans is better understood in terms of the migration of blacks from the rural South to the industrialized North” during a period when white tenant landlords were becoming frustrated that Black Americans were abandoning the exploitative sharecropping system for a factory wage in cities like Detroit or Chicago. To white audiences, then, “at least part of the point of the [USDA] extension work and the circular [produced at the same time as the film] was to demonstrate how the USDA was helping to address the problem of blacks leaving the farm for the city” (15) and thus maintaining both the separation of Blacks and whites and the ongoing viability of the political order of tenant farming, which “inherently favored the white landlord and abused the black tenant” (28). Winn concludes that despite effectively showcasing the work of the extension service and explicitly demonstrating that the USDA was trying to improve the lives of southern Black families, the film also supported racial segregation and the maintenance of “separate but equal” cultural policy (34). There were also other mobile labs after the Jesup Wagon and Knapp Truck involved in the ongoing operation of the Movable

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School. After five years the Knapp Truck finally broke down, and it was replaced when thirty thousand Black Alabama farmers pooled five thousand dollars of their own money to purchase a new truck, “The Booker T. Washington Agricultural School on Wheels,” and equipment including spraying outfits, farm levels, carpenter’s tools, a milk tester, an inoculating set, a farm lighting plant, a motion picture projector, Kodak cameras, a sewing machine, an electric iron, a baby’s bathtub, a set of baby clothes, a medicine cabinet, kitchen utensils, and playground apparatus. This larger truck carried a staff of three, plus the county farm and home demonstration agents.67 Regardless of the ambivalences of the USDA’s publications, returning to primary source materials makes it clear that Black agricultural extension work, designed and executed out of the Tuskegee Institute via mobile laboratories like the Jesup Wagon and its successors, was the forerunner of broader U.S. government extension programs and cultural policy rather than their product.68 Making sense of the scientific and cultural contributions of hybrid labs like the Jesup Wagon and its successors, though, requires a willingness to engage not just with hardware and apparatus but with all of the aspects of the extended laboratory model, especially policy, infrastructure and people.

HYBRID LABS AND POLICY The Home Economics Extension project and the Movable School are important examples of hybrid lab practice for many reasons. One reason for paying close attention to these two cases is that, just as arguments about lab infrastructure require attention to the variability of scale, they also need to be provincialized, as Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford point out: Infrastructures have always mattered, albeit to different groups in differing ways and to varying extents. If they were ever concealed or backgrounded, it was to or by those in hegemonic social positions. By contrast, they have always been foregrounded in the lives of more precarious social groups—­i.e. those with reduced access or without access or who have been disconnected, as a result either of socio-­spatial differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse—­constantly working and reworking the material constructions of the very existence of these groups. A focus on “provincialized” political infrastructures thus

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inherently links notions of governance and citizenship, demonstrating both that policies, powers and subjective experiences of the urban fabric are intertwined and mutually constitutive, and that it is the multitude of ways in which this intertwining takes shape which helps to explain the persistent . . . diversity (and inequalities) at play within and across scales and times.69

Another is that they demonstrate the cyclical relationship of situated lab work and policy formation (whether vicious or virtuous) made possible by the infrastructural connections between them. Gaining a better understanding of this process can be of great assistance in our efforts to understand hybrid labs in other contexts. One of the issues we have spent a lot of time considering while working on this book is whether the spread of hybrid labs was merely a form of “science envy”—­a tactic for the humanities to legitimize itself in the face of a wave of early-­twenty-­first-­century neoliberal attacks about their relevancy and legitimacy. But it is not as simple as “the studio is like a lab,” or “the lab is like a studio.” In the twentieth century there was a third term to which both referred, an expanded circuit relating to production, productivity, economy, and metaphorics. Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones argue that in the decades following World War II, labs and studios were part of the same cultural order and that the larger model for both was factory production.70 Further, despite this common relation, neither lab nor studio starts to become “like” a factory: We do not see the decentering of the laboratory or the dispersal of the studio as merely “mirroring” some independent, underlying change in the economy. Instead, we find large consortia of laboratories participating in the same dynamical process of coordination that one finds among consortia of companies; equally, we see the production of artistic meaning since the 1970s as honing the very discursive systems that enable a service-­and-­consumer economy to flourish. . . . Positing an industrial “base” that either is autonomous, or univalently determinative, of the cultural sphere of scientific-­artistic work fails to capture these worlds’ fluidity, permeability, and coextensiveness.71

In other words, both lab and studio function according to the factory model, but in turn they contribute to its development; that is, factories begin to adopt some of the characteristics of the science lab and the art studio. But “large consortia of laboratories” and “processes of

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coordination” are the stuff of infrastructure and policy, not discourse alone. Arguments like the one Galison and Jones make here suggest there is more to consider in terms of the longer history of other kinds of institutions in relation to laboratories and lab discourse. For example, powerful art institutions have a much longer relationship to lab discourse than one might expect. This is different from artists talking about their studios as labs. When an institution takes the studio-­as-­lab metaphor and mobilizes it as policy, the metaphor begins to accrete authority, and culture likewise shifts on national and international levels as infrastructure support begins to appear. Consider also the longer institutional history of a major moment in hybrid lab discourse. In 1939 the Museum of Modern Art staged the landmark Art in Our Time exhibition to mark its tenth anniversary. In the exhibition catalog, Alfred H. Barr Jr., who had been appointed director in 1929, wrote the following: “The Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory. In its experiments the public is invited to participate.”72 Such a statement about the role and function of an institution like the Museum of Modern Art was possible because of a history of institutional policy pronouncements dating from the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the 1920s the Fogg Museum at Harvard had already been referring to itself as a laboratory.73 On the opening of the new Fogg, Paul J. Sachs described it as “a laboratory of the fine arts”; Sybil Gordon Kantor, arguing that the arts should be treated on an equal footing with the laboratory sciences, notes that “the notion of a laboratory was consistent with the authority of science found in the critical writings of the period.”74 Kantor explains that the infrastructural support for Barr’s statement came even earlier, when he was teaching what may have been the first course in the United States on modern art at Wellesley College in 1927. Alice Van Vechten Brown, director of Wellesley’s Farnsworth Museum, had initiated “The Wellesley Method” for the study of art history in 1897, with the proviso that technical training in the form of “laboratory work” would occur alongside a conventional art history survey.75 Laboratory work at Wellesley took the form of experimenting with materials and techniques. Students conducted exercises dealing with materials associated with the specific historical production of art in different times and places, such as gesso, egg tempera, and gilding.76 The process is clear: individual practical operations concatenate into

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techniques and methods, which then become part of an institutional discourse that is formalized as policy (as such, there is a deep relationship here among lab work, policy, and cultural techniques, one that we touch on in chapter 6). The policy allows for the creation of infrastructure to support similar activity at that institution. If the policy successfully produces new infrastructures, other institutions take notice while administrators (who circulate from one institution to another) take scraps of successful policy with them and build on it for their new employer. We would be remiss, though, in suggesting that arts institutions in the twentieth century were simply capitalizing on the value of lab discourse. The historical exchanges between labs, studios, factories, and discourses of knowledge, creativity, and work has only become more complex. This chapter concludes with two sections that present significantly different policy and infrastructural approaches to the role of labs in late-­twentieth-­ and early-­twenty-­first-­century universities. As academics, this is a subject that we approach out of necessity, with a mixture of hope and trepidation. We see enormous potential in hybrid labs to change our institutional cultures for the better. Many hybrid labs are developing their own protocols and policy documents for how to conduct academic research differently. The Collaboration and Publication protocol at Monash University’s Emerging Technologies Research Lab is one good example.77 Another is the work out of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) at Memorial University on the ethical aspects of research circulation.78 The patient production and circulation of documents by labs such as these exert a small but persistent pressure on policy makers to change processes and infrastructures to increase accessibility and equity. But there is also an enormous amount of pressure on universities to instrumentalize education to ever greater degrees, usually operating under the rubrics of creativity and disruption and using labs as its vehicle.

HYBRID LAB POLICY FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM Michael Century’s Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture is a report written for the Rockefeller Foundation’s arts and humanities division in 1999.79 The report foregrounds the role of the “studio-­ laboratory” in networked digital culture as the privileged site for

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the production of innovation at the end of the millennium (6). It also brings to the fore how labs are at the center of an emerging debate about media arts as a point on a continuum between critical practice and creative industries. From the outset of his report, Century recognizes the complexity of the studio-­lab as an ongoing emergent phenomenon: The studio-­laboratory as a class is by no means homogenous. Some are privately funded by corporations, seeking to understand the properties of radically new media technologies via aesthetic R&D programs; others are public funded and linked to traditional museological mandates for public education; others are industrially sponsored precompetitive laboratories based in universities; still other models are network-­based and more or less explicitly tied to long-­term state or regional industrial development objectives. The studio-­laboratory can be understood as providing a site for an ongoing and progressive series of negotiations between artist-­users and technology designers, which simultaneously shaped the technology, its use, and users. (14)

Like us, Century identifies these studio-­labs as hybrid institutions because of the types of activities that occur within them (3). Importantly, he resists the temptation to locate the relative beginnings of the studio-­lab at any particular point in modernity, instead correlating its peaks of activity to Joseph Schumpeter’s “waves” of modern technological innovation that occur at approximately fifty-­year intervals, beginning in the late eighteenth century (13, 52). The report claims that studio-­lab activity becomes more pronounced around 1960 in the wake of both the avant-­gardes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a shift in the industrial, military, and scientific modes of post–­World War II knowledge production (9, 4).80 There was another intense wave of studio-­lab activity in the 1990s, which was the impetus for the document’s production: “This pace has now reached a point where it is no longer conceivable to keep accurate track, particularly with the proliferation of all manner of ‘new media centres’ at various degrees of sophistication and scope on university and college campuses, within corporations, as regional industrial development efforts, and as catalysts for public access and digital literacy efforts” (11). Part of the reason it’s becoming harder to track the proliferation of hybrid labs is that specialized equipment is becoming less important to their functioning. What matters,

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increasingly, is the type of collaborative dynamics they can foster. As a result, such labs pop up in a wide range of environments, including the home (44). Instead of attempting to produce a comprehensive list of studio-­labs, Century focuses on the various approaches to innovation that such labs take—­what we call “situated practices” in this book. For Century, the point of the term “studio-­lab” is to correlate basic but underexamined shifts in culture and avant-­garde aesthetics to the more instrumental knowledge production modes that business, industry, and government take as their priority (8). This correlation is also why Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture was created as a policy instrument rather than as an academic essay. Century contends that the growing number of studio-­labs and other kinds of hybrid labs is an index of how cultural producers are busily networking with science and industry. In turn, this emerging network of new kinds of productive relationships requires bureaucrats and administrators to rethink cultural policy as well as innovation and research policy in order to better support these new types of activities (3). From Century’s perspective, the major issue for North American independent media labs is sustainability (or whether, for that matter, lab projects should have a built-­in expiry date). The traditional homes for such hybrid labs are on a campus, whether that campus belongs to a university or a large corporation. But the report notes that there is another, underutilized option, namely, the infrastructure of other kinds of cultural institutions, such as theaters, museums, or public libraries (45). A more contentious question is how to allocate public funding and other resources. Should they flow equally to all applicants, or only to a select few, and if so, who will establish the criteria? The answer, as the report notes, is geographically and culturally specific and often requires integrating digital media with older, residual forms that are still in use in various locations (45). Other than the issue of sustainability and geographic specificity, the report raises a number of pertinent questions about the role of hybrid labs around the globe. What kind of infrastructure encourages a higher degree of networking between such labs in more and less economically developed countries? Is it possible to make corporations see the value of “an engaged type of cultural support” that promotes innovation without duplicating the shortcomings of traditional models of patronage? And is it possible for a network

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of hybrid labs to bridge the gaps between the art world, research culture, and civil society? The report imagines some sort of “cultural informatics” that might yoke the progressive agenda of social and cultural theory to techniques from computer science and engineering (46). The emergent field of cultural analytics might be part of such a project, but it hasn’t yet come close to realizing the ambitious mandate that Century’s report establishes. For that mandate we have to look elsewhere. But the reality of the sort of transformation in knowledge production that we have been describing here has a much more ambiguous politics than Century might have anticipated.

LAB INFRASTRUCTURE, LAB POLICY, AND THE NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY The university is still the major institutional container for labs outside of industry, and it is being rocked by challenges from all sides, especially from growing pressure to monetize all aspects of its activities. Many universities need new sources of revenue to continue to perform their traditional missions, let alone expand them, especially those without endowments from wealthy alumni. Their revenue has to come from tuition, from government funding drawn from taxation, from some sort of relationship with industry, or from a combination of these. Without a dramatic shift to the left in societal values, North American governments are unlikely to increase how they fund universities in a substantial way, and we are arguably far past the limit to the money that can come from tuition. That leaves relationships with the private sector, which underlines the importance of monetized transdisciplinarity, with all of its attendant benefits and perils. For most academics, having co-­creators from the private sector is appealing until you have to deal with the full implications of the notion—­for example, the growing link between entrepreneurialism and precarious labor. Hybrid labs are a major flashpoint in this change, because they are some of the key spaces in and around which these arguments are being staged. In Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Gerald Raunig argues that both inside and outside of universities a mode of “radically dispersed” knowledge production is emerging.81 For Raunig,

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something in the economy of knowledge production shifted around the turn of the millennium (100, 111). After the triumph of factory discourse in the arts and humanities that Galison and Jones describe in their work, Raunig sees a shift away from the factory model to “temporary, ephemeral, project based” clusters of micro-­enterprises and pseudo-­institutions, populated by “entrepreneurial” workers (101). Whereas the logic of the factory and related large institutions functioned by the discovery and managing (if not resolving) of contradictions, the new mode promotes “precarization and insecurity” (101). As for Galison and Jones, for Raunig the arts and humanities are not a passive object shaped by the discourse of big science; they have played and continue to play an active role in producing the current milieu.82 Even though the characteristic quality of this emerging economy is its diffuseness, the processes and techniques that made the factory so successful as a paradigm continue to function. Likewise, industry does not disappear; rather, it populates all areas of lived experience at a micro-­scale (95–­96). Like many others, Raunig gives these assemblages the collective name “creative industries,” and we’d be well justified to count hybrid labs in general and media labs in particular as part of this economy. The term “industry” represents at once the problem and the possible latent form of its own solution. Following on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Raunig sees “the culture industry” as a mode of subjectivization in which “desire and enslavement coincide” (117). The culture industry exhorts us to be creative in a way that is not optional: “Everyone is an artist, so he or she should also work and live in a way that is accordingly flexible, spontaneous, and mobile, or self-­exploiting, without security and forced into mobility” (191). In other words, the gig economy is the truth of the life of the artist: spontaneity and mobility come at considerable personal risk. Simultaneously, Raunig sees potential escape routes from these same conditions. Examining the French term industrie, he identifies factors in industry that exceed “the economic circles of time efficiency” because industry also always contains the possibility of “doing things differently” (121): not business, but the busyness (122) of “disobedient industries” (153), “little monsters that thwart the structures and institutional antagonisms through their obstinacy” (27). Raunig’s work provides the larger context for how we see contemporary hybrid labs as a problem containing the emergent possibilities

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of a solution. Hybrid labs are both a product and a symptom of the creative industries and what Raunig calls “the global landscape of universities, which cannot be simply classified in identifiable categories such as neoliberal or reactionary” (25). Raunig begins with the premise that this landscape is complex and geopolitically differentiated, but he insists that “authoritarian hierarchies can certainly go hand in hand with soft forms of conduct, budgets cuts can coexist with particular rewards, stabilizing procedures can be implemented alongside practices of existential and social destabilizing” (26). Moreover, the real and imagined threats and the authorities that govern them are not external to the university and its faculty; they also emerge from faculty and students themselves (26). But it is always possible to imagine reinventing knowledge production within this system, producing what Raunig calls “the contemporary, modulating university” (24). As we examine below in our discussion of deep organizational changes that have taken place at Arizona State University, the lab is one of the chief sites in which that reimagining is occurring. Despite this tectonic shift in the organization of work in general and universities in particular, many scholars still feel, as Robert Frodeman does, that a traditional liberal education is the primary mission of the university in the twenty-­first century: “University life cannot be mapped onto the producer-­consumer relation, if for no other reason that one engages in research or attends college in order to educate and thus change one’s soul, proclivities, and desires. This is the difference between a liberal and a technical education. Thus what is called for is an artful balancing of attention to the needs of the larger community with the scholar’s loving care.”83 However, nothing says this situation can’t change, or that it hasn’t already done so in many universities. One institution that many scholars are watching carefully with the possibility of change in mind is Arizona State University. Work on transdisciplinarity by scholars like Frodeman and Peter Weingart provides a major touchstone for Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars’s Designing the New American University.84 Crow has been president of Arizona State University (ASU) since 2002. For an academic book, Designing the New American University has received a remarkable amount of attention from outside the university and bears signs of its bipartisan influence in its blurbs,

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the first two of which are from former U.S. Democratic president Bill Clinton and former Republican governor of Florida and 2015 U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Crow seizes on the concept of transdisciplinarity and its implications for the contemporary university, but, along the way, he erases the ambiguities in the work of scholars like Frodeman and Weingart, mobilizing their arguments while downplaying their careful qualifications and ambivalences.85 For example, Crow and Dabars write that “Peter Weingart makes the corollary point that . . . the university has lost its monopoly on the institution of knowledge production,” erasing Weingart’s observation that this supposed loss is anecdotal and unsubstantiated and taking it instead as a fait accompli (204–­5). In his position as university president and continental thought leader, however, Crow is in a position to turn this observation into practice through policy formation. Crow’s work at ASU has produced an institutional blueprint that he calls the New American University, but it is commonly referred to as the Arizona Model. This blueprint has two laudable goals: first, to situate the university’s mission of knowledge production within the insistence that the institution should be representative of the full demographic and economic diversity of the region in which it is situated; and second, that the knowledge it produces should be relevant to that population. Crow and Dabars write that as a design process, it “constitutes an institutional experiment at scale in real time” (240). Also like the living labs, the Arizona Model is both network and platform. Outside ASU itself, this resulted in the creation of an eleven-­institution University Innovation Alliance that shares the same goals.86 The Arizona Model values interdisciplinarity because it sees it as a way of developing competitive research capacity. Since 2009, ASU’s traditional department-­ based organization has passed through a series of changes in which departments have closed or have merged into other departments. At the same time, there has been an increase in interdepartmental structures like labs and research centers. In The New American University, Crow and Dabars tout recommendations for new organizational models from National Academies Press’s book-­length report Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, based on matrices—­“structures long evident in industry and government laboratories” that use centers, labs, courses, and offices between departments to encourage the free movement of

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students, faculty, and staff (187). Following on that report, Crow and Dabars emphasize repeatedly that “interdisciplinary research in industrial and government laboratories should serve as a model for academia” because laboratories organize themselves flexibly and temporarily according to the problem that they wish to solve (187–­ 88). In the Arizona Model, labs are pivotal to the transformation of the university as an institution. This thinking emerges out of Crow and Barry Bozeman’s earlier book, Limited by Design: R&D Laboratories in the U.S. National Innovation System. Though it is not nearly as widely read as Designing the New American University, this book is the largest-­scale laboratory survey that we know of, so it is worth discussing in detail, especially in light of the obvious influence it is now having on university policy formation and infrastructure redesign. Crow was heavily involved in the National Comparative Research and Development Project (NCRDP) from 1984 to 1998. During that time, over forty researchers interviewed thousands of scientists as well as administrators and bureaucrats in the field in order to produce the first comprehensive study of R&D labs in the United States.87 Using NCRDP data, Crow and Bozeman estimated in 1998 that there were more than sixteen thousand R&D labs in the United States, and probably fewer than seventeen thousand. By their definition, an R&D lab focuses on engineering and science research and employs at least twenty-­five people full-­time (7). In the face of this staggering number, Crow and Bozeman candidly admit that “knowledge of R&D laboratories as a whole is virtually impossible” (11): “R&D laboratories are among the most diverse sets of organizations one will ever find. Labs have unique and deeply entrenched cultures. Labs differ in technical capabilities, organizational structure, resources, market interaction, political and bureaucratic environment, and adaptability” (5). Not surprisingly, then, Crow and Bozeman describe some of the more intriguing individual labs they encountered as “hybrids” (in one of their studies, focusing on energy-­related R&D labs in Canada and the United States, a full one-­third of the labs in question were hybrids [14]), but their use of the term differs from ours in that for them, hybridity describes a mix of public and private ownership (xix–­xx). So how to proceed when “there is no obvious point of analytical departure” (7) and “knowledge of R&D laboratories as a whole is virtually impossible, except at the most superficial level” (11)?

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Crow and Bozeman’s interest in R&D labs is systemic and strategic. They see their methodological perspective, which they dub “institutional design” (27), as the most important part of their research (xxi). They are interested in the particular role that R&D labs play in the national innovation system, “the complex network of agents, policies, and institutions supporting the process of technical advance in an economy” (42), because they want to ensure that policy makers have a better sense of what, exactly, they are funding and defunding (xxi). In fact, they go so far as to point out that “the policy frameworks that dominate R&D policy work against system-­level knowledge” (9). As a result, they place their emphasis on government R&D labs, which hold the potential to contribute to innovation on a national level because “those are the ones that policy makers can quickly and directly change” (249). Of the remaining “Mysterious 16,000,” as they call them, about 65 percent are “small, engineering job shops” created to do work specific to the interests of the firm that houses them (5). They estimate that there are “no more than 1,000 laboratories of sufficient size and resources to make significant contributions, on an ongoing basis, to public domain science and technology,” and of those there are only “500 or so high-­capacity laboratories responsible for most sweeping science and technology change” (229). In Crow and Bozeman’s argot, these “superlabs,” which make up less than 0.5 percent of the labs in their sample group, are the “players” (77), and what they dub “the player principle” dictates that these few labs are the proper target for government R&D policy that would strive to improve national levels of innovation (72). And it has been this way for a long time: “The superlabs are familiar. They have dominated American science and technology for more than 100 years” (75). The rest of the sixteen thousand must fare as best they can in the open market (35). Although Crow and Bozeman are emphatic that small labs make a meaningful contribution to the national economy by increasing the productivity of the firms that house them, “their activities are best viewed as only marginally related to government policy because the knowledge externalities from these activities are usually quite modest” (97). Early in the book, when Crow and Bozeman describe a “cookie-­cutter scientist” (3) interested in publications and scientific prestige, the scorn is palpable because this person is not a player in the game of high-­stakes lab funding. On the face

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of it, this laissez-­faire attitude seems cold, but Crow and Bozeman are, at least, non-­interventionist: “Merely muddling the missions of public laboratories with commercialization missions while failing to understand the diversity of science and technology investigations underpinning industrial success will contribute little” (71). In essence, in The Lab Book we are trying to develop a model to talk about the missing matter of the Crow and Bozeman study. The labs we care about are not just those with fewer than twenty-­five full-­time people employed but also those that fall entirely outside of the science and engineering fields (Crow and Bozeman also excluded labs “chiefly concerned with conducting research in the social sciences” [74]). Perhaps the only thing that hybrid labs have in common is a kind of family resemblance. The extended laboratory model is a framework that will allow people to think usefully about such labs, because it’s not enough to say that they exist and then ignore them. We also recognize that in some cases the examples we discuss do not fit easily only as humanities labs or social science labs, but span a changing landscape of academic work. In this respect, our aim is similar to various aspects of the media-­ archaeological program, especially Siegfried Zielinski’s “variantology”: “I advocate a philology as exact as possible of nonperfect precise things, which will be devised and developed to support communications with others, to facilitate them, to make them a sensational, even perhaps scandalous happening.”88 If there is a better description of hybrid labs than a “nonperfect precise thing” that is “devised and developed to support communication,” it is difficult to imagine. As Crow and Bozeman write, “Knowledge of R&D labs comes in clusters and clumps or, more often, in singletons” (9). Given this reality, neither the aggregate approach nor the detailed individual case study does exactly what we want. Like the hybrid labs that constitute our object of study, ours is a hybrid approach based on the operational function of spaces that someone has decided to call a lab. That last factor, the naming of the lab as such, is also crucially important. A study like Crow and Bozeman’s, impressive as it is in terms of scale, begins from the assumption that what is reported in a questionnaire is not necessarily factually true but that the vast size of the sample will itself correct for exaggerations and prevarications (“Often the dominance of ideology in science and technology debates is less due to hard and fast positions of disputants than to lack of

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evidence” [33]). However, even this assertion could be made much more easily in the relatively sunny days of the Clinton administration, before the current post-­truth era of U.S. government. We are not suggesting that scientists, scholars, and bureaucrats deliberately lie in such documents, but rather that there are always rules in place that determine what can be said or not said about a given lab in advance. As a result, we need concepts like the ACTLab codeswitching umbrella (which we discuss in a case study in chapter 4) that enable various hybrid modes to function in a conflictual, even hostile environment. One of the goals we hope to meet by providing a framework rather than a focused study is to allow hybrid labs to better talk about themselves. Even Crow and Bozeman are careful to hedge their bets, noting that their institutional design model “is not a theory of policy making or even a set of interrelated assumptions yielding specific prescriptions” (248). Like them, we are interested in creating an interpretive framework, but our object and audience differ from theirs. If most hybrid labs engage in some form of basic (as opposed to applied) research, then they need to be better at describing their various specializations and competences. This means not just talking about individual research properties, or even the mission of the lab, but also how this mission is articulated to the priorities of the institution that houses them. Especially in the academy, this is both complex and crucial, because “university labs are increasingly set within larger structures that have diverse missions, in some cases missions that are not strictly academic” (18). Crow and Bozeman’s research indicates that “most scientists know a great deal about their own research and very little about the lab, its missions, its connections to the outside world, its funding, budgeting and planning processes. Researchers know much more about other researchers who work on similar problems but on the other side of the world than they know about research in unrelated fields in the next building. Most scientists, except for their involvement in writing grant proposals, seem to assume mystical research funding processes” (9). Moreover, we need to be able to talk about how labs connect to each other. What kinds of ad hoc and formal relationships appear? How long do they last? What do they accomplish? To what extent do these relationships become part of a long-­term strategy? These are issues that are usually distasteful to

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artists and scholars because of the residual hangover of romanticism and the sense of the sovereignty of the individual creator, but labs are collective enterprises by nature, and we have spent far too little time thinking about infrastructure in the arts and humanities.89 Even if our own labs are too small to be funded, or “mediocre” in Crow and Bozeman’s sense, every lab is still affected by how public-­policy decisions are implemented (227). “The gentle nudge that policy makers give industrial labs by altering the tax treatment of R&D or by providing subsidies,” write Crow and Bozeman, “does not compare to the ability to create (or terminate) labs and missions” (38). In order to change lab culture at the institutional level, one needs to be holding the reins of the institution. Indeed, at ASU, new institutes replete with research centers and labs have appeared, and other labs have been closed abruptly. Hundreds of jobs have been eliminated as multiple units have been combined into one interdisciplinary unit with fewer staff.90 Not everyone is happy, as with new structures come new forms of social distinction and new pecking orders. Several prominent researchers have launched lawsuits against Crow and ASU, with the university making counterclaims about misconduct and safety violations on the part of the scientists.91 Because of the prominence of science in the Arizona Model, it’s not surprising that lab space and infrastructure are a huge part of these battles. University laboratories are every bit as heterogeneous as the rest of the non-­player sixteen thousand: “There is no template for university R&D laboratories.”92 The one thing that they have in common is that they are almost all dependent on the government for financing, except for “relatively uncommon university-­based industrial service laboratories and the many mediocre university labs that do not compete well for government funding.”93 It seems that this latter sentiment is still at play in Crow’s organizational efforts at ASU. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2006 that “every laboratory bench in the 138,000 square feet of lab space is on wheels in wide-­open rooms. If a researcher’s grant money evaporates, or another gets a funding windfall, the institute can shrink or expand any of the labs quickly. The overall benchmark for holding onto space is $225 per square foot, per year, in outside funding.”94 In a lawsuit filed against ASU in 2016, Dr. Dierdre Meldrum alleges in a seventy-­four-­ page whistleblower letter that “her lab was entered—­apparently on a

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weekend night—­by an employee who removed research equipment and supplies. . . . University officials answered in emails that the Monterey Bay institute had requested the change of project leadership, and off-­hours removal of research gear was just a misunderstanding. Some items were returned.”95 Despite these legal difficulties, the Arizona Model remains highly influential. Crow and Dabars assert that their model is not a one-­ size-­fits-­all solution and that the traditional academic value of self-­ determination remains primary (“Self-­determination is the crux of the distinction between the bureaucratic mindset of an agency and the boundary spanning dynamism of an academic enterprise”).96 Like the living labs model (see chapter 6), it may be possible to build a new American university with an eye toward the advancement of social justice and democracy. Furthermore, we acknowledge that the U.S. context does not hold for all cases; redesigning the policy and infrastructure of a university outside the United States along these lines might well play out very differently. Hybrid labs are proliferating as the result of a massive shift in how knowledge in general is produced and how universities and other institutions around the globe work. There are many versions of this shift, but a substantial number of them have to do with finding ways to extract profit from the production of knowledge. Everywhere, the focus has shifted from the production and circulation of research in the public interest to entrepreneurship, and to the near future rather than the long continuity of historical knowledge. So, the question might be, what if we proceeded otherwise? What would a system of knowledge production look like that focused on the missing sixteen thousand?

CONCLUSIONS Despite the importance of policy and infrastructure, Foka et al. remark in their 2018 article “Beyond Humanities qua Digital” that “despite the growing number of research laboratories, the actual processes whereby digital technology is appropriated for use in the arts and humanities remain poorly understood.”97 They present a case study of HumlabX, the humanities laboratory at the Arts Campus of Umeå University, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of “organizational vulnerability”—­a kind of institutional rigidity that

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makes it difficult to adapt to changes in funding structures, research support programs, and other infrastructural issues. Cultural policy in the form of grants programs and other government initiatives brings into being the possibility of funding for new kinds of research spaces, but, for better or worse, it also holds scholars accountable to new assessment criteria. Foka et al.’s ultimate argument is that scholars working with digital media need to move beyond the partisan debates that characterize any new field and “engage in the development of digital research infrastructure policies” because it’s the only way to ensure that labs will be sustainable and capable of further development.98 The high overhead of running many types of hybrid labs means that scholars ignore infrastructural and policy issues at their peril. Lab discourse might sometimes sound like it’s issuing from rugged individuals on the vanguard of cultural production, but it always requires support from institutional policy decisions. Such decisions are based on what is occurring elsewhere in culture, as new practices, courses, and funding patterns begin to appear. Labs emerge out of a set of overlapping and sometimes competing and contradictory systems of production, circulation, and consumption, each of which will have some degree of a regulatory system, and those systems will succeed or fail to varying degrees. Considering a range of hybrid lab types in terms of longer cycles is helpful because it allows us to see both the historical development of their form and what might happen in the future.

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4 LAB PEOPLE

L

abs produce and assign value to people, both internally and for the outside world. That is, labs are about social production and the production of social relations inside and outside the lab, as idealized humanism in some cases and as critical reflective practice in others. This chapter pays particular attention to the management techniques of people in labs, beginning with Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory and continuing with the evolution of these techniques in the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s, which paves the way for the mainstream North American corporate innovation lab model that continues today. In combination with contemporary lab discourse, such techniques create the conditions for the high visibility and empowerment of some while simultaneously rendering others invisible and disempowered. Our aim with these case studies and examples is to consider how people are constantly produced in—­as well as effaced or removed from—­lab projects and discourses. Although this chapter outlines how the focus on directors emerges from existing lab cultures over the twentieth century and especially during the 1970s’ turn to managerialism, we are also interested in the impact of this tendency toward singular, “great man” narratives on the wider social context of the knowledge worker in the lab, with repercussions for questions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, including practices of racialization. Our analysis of hybrid labs is very much informed by our current political moment, including our awareness of the intensive forms of

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direct and indirect violence toward particularly vulnerable groups of people of color, immigrants, and other targeted minorities, not least in the United States—­all of which has been radically accelerated and exaggerated by the COVID-19 pandemic (a topic we return to in the book’s Conclusion). Another trend of the current political moment includes a strategic focus on manipulating, even falsifying, scientific statements. We do not write the foregoing sentences lightly, but scientific discourse itself, not just lab discourse, is under direct attack from the highest, most powerful offices in the land. Even the conservative RAND Corporation argues that we are suffering from “truth decay”—­“the diminishing role of facts and analysis” in public life.1 Under such conditions, it is difficult to be frank about the shortcomings of laboratories themselves when we so heavily rely on them to be major sources of facts and analyses. This is not to say, though, that lab discourse itself has never employed hyperbole as a way to produce value in the public imagination—­far from it. The long line of swindlers, hucksters, and snake oil salespeople extending back to ancient times includes plenty of lab denizens and lab directors. However, an odd thing happened over the course of the twentieth century in North America. The mutual desire of advertising for the legitimacy of the sciences and of the sciences for the persuasive power of advertising has resulted in our current situation, where it can be difficult to distinguish one from the other. In Fables of Abundance, Jackson Lears documents the history of the advertising industry in the twentieth century, locating the carnivalesque huckster at one end of its spectrum of possibilities, with P. T. Barnum as its epitome, and empirical market researchers like N. W. Ayer and the J. Walter Thompson company on the other. But in Lears’s account at least, advertising never quite escapes the snake oil because it is fundamentally engaged in the opposite of the production of facts: Despite their drive toward professionalism, advertising executives could never cast aside their Barnumesque inheritance, could never make common cause with the clinicians of society whose ideology they emulated. Part of the problem was the limited nature of their authority: unlike doctors and lawyers, they claimed professional expertise but always bowed to the opinions of the client, however inexpert he might be. Yet a deeper difficulty was embedded in the very nature of the advertising business:

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it had always involved the clever orchestration of surface effects, in a fashion that undermined all pretensions to sincerity and claims to objective truth. Straining to stabilize meanings with resort to a managerial idiom of expertise, advertisers remained surrounded by the ambiguities of their trade.2

What Lears didn’t imagine was that parts of laboratory research—­ especially those parts that had to do with the development of modern media technologies—­would be quite eager to meet advertising in the murky middle ground. One of the places where early-­ twentieth-­ century industrial manufacturers, R&D labs, and media labs found common ground with advertising was in the notion of planned obsolescence. Many accounts attribute the relative beginnings of planned obsolescence to the bicycle industry in the last years of the nineteenth century, which began producing annual models that were aesthetically (if not mechanically) different than their predecessors and then depreciated those models at year-­end sales.3 In 1924, the chairman of General Motors, Alfred Sloan, and his styling chief, Harley Earl, formulated the technique as “dynamic obsolescence” by pairing the annual model change with aggressive advertising that emphasized novelty and the GMAC Bank, which offered loans that allowed potential customers to buy cars on credit.4 However, on December 23, 1924, in a different industry altogether, representatives from the world’s major lightbulb manufacturers (including General Electric, Philips, Osram, and Compagnie des Lampes), representing hundreds of factories, met in Switzerland to form the Phoebus cartel, “a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas.” More importantly, the cartel specified a shorter life span for the incandescent bulb, mandating that its members scale back from the fifteen hundred to two thousand hours common at the time to one thousand hours by 1925.5 This was a carefully produced engineering difference rather than a stylistic one. In his archival research on the subject, Markus Krajewski “found meticulous correspondence between the cartel’s factories and laboratories, which were researching how to modify the filament and other measures to shorten the life span of their bulbs.”6 By the 1930s, U.S. advertising and industry alike had

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embraced the notion that innovation was wedded to disposability. As the example of the Phoebus cartel demonstrates, part of the job of R&D laboratories became not only developing new products but also ensuring their disposability. Both parties had become eloquent and vocal enough about the idea that high consumption of novelty was the engine of U.S. prosperity that it became something like national ideology.7 This method of producing value by way of tying persistent, overblown discourse about the lab’s wonders to actual production has much to do with why labs such as the MIT Media Lab are synonymous, in the popular imagination, with innovation, entrepreneurialism, and profitability, regardless of whether or not their products are successfully monetized. Regrettably, one of the outputs of modern and contemporary labs is hyperbolic discourse. When paired with particular management techniques and policy decisions, hyperbole has real effects and can make a lab powerful and seemingly successful. It is also part of the assemblage that drives the creation, construction, and manipulation of facts which are, in turn, part of the structure upon which “history” and “the future” are built. This line of thinking comes close to the work of Bruno Latour, whose influence weaves its way through the entirety of this book. As he put it in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” his earlier work—­including his sociological account with Steve Woolgar in Laboratory Life of how science labs produce facts—­ was dedicated not to undermining the existence of facts altogether but to renewing empiricism. Latour hoped to spare “the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts” by revealing the inner workings of labs, including how they produce facts for public consumption.8 Instead, he writes, “a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target. The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them.”9 “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” is important because it conveys Latour’s horror at the recognition that arguing about the social construction of facts was co-­opted as a technique by the political right and that it was time to correct course. It remains as important as ever to scrutinize the role that many kinds of labs continue to play in the creation of facts and, therefore, in the battle over who owns the past, present, and future of media technologies.

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Because of its prominence in the hybrid lab landscape and its apparent dominance in shaping ownership of the past, present, and future, we are particularly interested in the MIT Media Lab.10 Major accounts of the MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte tie him firmly not only to innovative engineering and technical knowledge but also to the carnivalesque end of the advertising and sales spectrum. In Stewart Brand’s reverential The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), IBM senior scientist Nat Rochester describes Negroponte as one who “combines very great technical knowledge and creativity with . . . really world-­class salesmanship.”11 Thomas A. Bass elaborated on this description of Negroponte in his 1995 Wired magazine profile: “His MIT colleagues sometimes dismiss him as the P. T. Barnum of science, someone who puts on a flashy show without much substance. ‘This is the red-­light district of academia,’ jokes a young scientist at the lab. But 10 years after Negroponte began selling multimedia as rich terrain for scientific prospecting, he has been proved right. The human-­computer interface that began as Negroponte’s promotional pitch is now the linchpin of an industry whose sales are pushing a trillion dollars a year.”12 The projects Negroponte developed while he was director of the Architecture Machine Group (AMG; founded in 1967) and the Media Lab (founded in 1985) demonstrate he could be the very embodiment of the Barnumesque promotional wizard, playing to popular fantasies about the emancipatory powers of technology. In Negroponte’s strain of lab discourse, this fantasy is particularly effective when deployed in conjunction with the figure of the child in the developing world who lacks access to digital technologies. But of course, the resounding failure of Negroponte’s early 2000s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project demonstrates the particular bankruptcy of the hyperbolic promotional culture of certain strands of innovation lab discourses. In this case, as we describe below, overblown, inaccurate statements about “reality” help to support the ever-­widening gap between the powerful and the powerless as well as the ever-­widening gap between the material, embodied, lived realities of particular technologies and people and popular and academic discourse about those realities. After we discuss the production of value by the MIT Media Lab we delve into the particularities of management techniques at work in Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, and and then proceed with a

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discussion of their use at several of MIT’s best-­known and influential labs, particularly the Radiation Lab, the AMG, and the Media Lab. We then look at the history of the OLPC project as an example of liberal humanism in the corporate lab. In contrast, and in light of the recent intensive discussion about corporate sponsorship models and the MIT Media Lab’s affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, we end this chapter by discussing a key example from the other legacy of critical media labs from the 1990s onward: the ACTLab. Founded in 1993 by media theorist and performance artist Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, the ACTLab established a very different sense of people and discursive space of projects than liberal humanist ones. It was also one of the first hybrid labs specifically dedicated to questions of radical politics of identity in contexts of technology, and to this day it offers a compelling way to describe radical lab work taking place inside a more conservative institution as “codeswitching.”

PRODUCING VALUE IN A LAB: BLURRED BOUNDARIES BETWEEN HIGHER EDUCATION AND INDUSTRY Most American universities founded in the mid-­to late nineteenth century were created in the spirit of entrepreneurialism. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles, Peter Drucker (who enshrined in mainstream consciousness ideas such as the centrality of marketing, the knowledge worker, and the emergence of the information society) points out that “no better text for a History of Entrepreneurship could be found than the creation and development of the modern university, especially the modern American university.”13 And in fact, MIT’s 1861 founding charter states that the fledgling polytechnic institute is being created “for the purpose of instituting and maintaining a society of arts, a museum of arts, and a school of industrial science, and aiding generally in . . . the advancement, development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures and commerce.”14 In a related document from the same year, the founders elaborate on how the need to keep pace with (if not outdo) the European economy hinges on a tight connection between “intelligent culture” and “industrial pursuits.”15 In today’s parlance, they were aiming for a more even balance between theory and practice, embodied by what

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would become the school’s official motto: Mens et Manus (mind and hand).16 Three years later, a committee provided a more detailed account of the “Scope and Plan” of one MIT school in particular: the School of Industrial Science. Amid the forty mentions of “practice” and “practical” peppered throughout this twenty-­eight-­page document are detailed instructions for the creation of four laboratories to bring together theory and practice via student training and “the prosecution of experiments and investigations . . . including the examination and testing of new machines and processes, and the conducting of original researches in the different departments of applied science.”17 The way early MIT labs emphasized experimental, mechanical research and strove to avoid the appearance of pure intellectuality anticipated the ethos of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, which opened in 1876. As we describe in chapter 1, Menlo Park was based on the importance of research, but only to the extent that it was “practical.” In contrast to “theoretical” science, which Edison believed was “pointless and slow,” he was adamant about always producing working prototypes.18 Because the lab was funded almost entirely by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists eager to see a return on their dollar, one of Edison’s most famous aphorisms was “You got to make the damn thing work.”19 Drucker argues that Edison was the first to understand “knowledge-­based innovation” and the way it leads to control of the future. Crucially, innovation has little to do with novelty; instead, it capitalizes on iterating and improving ideas that are already in circulation: “Every other electrical inventor of the time began to work around 1860 or 1865 on what eventually became the light bulb. Edison waited ten years until the knowledge becomes available.”20 We know from numerous scholarly accounts that at Menlo Park Edison set the stage for the knowledge-­based innovation that becomes a hallmark of the modern American university with a style of management that was, at the time, cutting-edge in its strategic blending of craft-­based and industrial-­based management. According to Michael J. Gall: Edison created a pre-­industrial atmosphere at the lab facility, such as apprenticeships and education, irregular work hours and wages, breaks,

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bonds of mutuality, and limited autonomy, which was instrumental to an efficient process of invention. Invention entailed conception creation, planning and drafting, parts and tools fabrication, experimentation, development, testing, refinement, patent model manufacture, and patent application. Such a process required a malleable, skilled, and competent workforce capable of conducting a variety of tasks under Edison’s leadership and guidance. . . . This . . . culture was an essential part of the fabric of Edison’s management strategy and the success of his invention operation.21

However, between 1878 and 1880, as the lab expanded its workforce and the number of ongoing projects, Edison began to rely more heavily on conventional industrial management tactics, including “the creation of a worker hierarchy as well as moderate task subdivision and specialization.”22 Menlo Park is the most influential early instance of modern lab management practice. As the twentieth century progressed, its pairing of seemingly contradictory techniques became enshrined as common practice for media labs. At the same time as they were part of a more horizontal structure consisting of semi-­autonomous clusters (e.g., experimental assistants; machine workers, mechanics, and apprentices; office workers, accountants, and bookkeepers), workers were also part of a hierarchical reporting structure that led directly to Edison himself. Further, workers had flexible and fluctuating work hours while still being accountable to Edison’s production schedule. Collaboration and camaraderie were encouraged, but the discourse of singular, individual achievement—­usually, Edison’s achievement—­dominated. As David Noble notes in America by Design, once the industrial research laboratories based on Edison’s original design began to multiply and expand, “the role of the scientists within them came more and more to resemble that of the workmen on the production line and science became essentially a management problem.”23 Noble goes on to distinguish broadly between scientists in universities, who were “relatively free to chart [their] own paths and define [their] own problems,” and industrial researchers, who were “more commonly [soldiers] under management command, participating with others in a collective attack on scientific truth.”24 However, labs at MIT like the Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry (founded in 1908), the Servomechanisms Laboratory (founded in 1940), and

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the Radiation Lab (also founded in 1940) are either a mixture of both or are aligned more with the latter than the former. The Radiation Lab (Rad Lab), created during the late years of World War II to improve radar technology, was the first “largescale interdisciplinary and multifunction R&D organization set up at a university.”25 Given the way Edison managed Menlo Park, the Rad Lab was unusual but not unprecedented in the way it pulled together the research, development, and production of radar technologies into a single organization. Quoting an unpublished manuscript by Leroy Foster on “Sponsored Research at MIT,” Henry Etzkowitz paints a picture of a culture of rapid prototyping and production at the Rad Lab that later became a key hybrid lab technique: “‘Most of the knowledge was gained by building something as quickly as possible and trying it out. Theoretical knowledge generated pari passu to be plowed back into the work at a later date . . . Improvements were made, and the apparatus was tested again.”26 While Etzkowitz characterizes the organization of the Rad Lab as “highly decentralized and flexible,” Henry Guerlac points out that although the lab started out as loose and informal, the Pearl Harbor attack instigated a shift to a management structure that was both horizontal and vertical to ensure it would be suitable for many kinds of projects:27 The combination of both vertical and horizontal organization brought together the groups working on related components in basic research into larger units called divisions and brought the related systems groups under a single divisional head. Above the divisions stood the Director’s Office and Steering Committee, comprised of the Director and the Associate Director and the heads of the technical divisions.28

Departing from Menlo Park’s single-­minded focus on profit, the Rad Lab may have appeared as a business-­like entity, but it operated without a budget, as most of its expenditures simply needed to be approved by the federal government based on their perceived contribution to the war effort.29

CASE STUDY: MIT MEDIA LAB, PART 2 (MIT) The combination of flexible management structures and rapid prototyping and production techniques laid some of the groundwork for the MIT Media Lab, which opened in 1985. Without ever

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directly declaring itself the first of its kind, tech journalism quickly positioned it as occupying a “new niche in technical research, somewhere between industrial R&D . . . and the academic engineering sciences.”30 Predictably, Wired’s hyperbole is thick here. The history of higher education laboratories in the United States is defined by this precise mix of the private and public sectors. Still, it is true that the MIT Media Lab was and continues to be successful in terms of its astonishingly large $75 million annual operating budget.31 Nearly all of the MIT Media Lab’s annual budget comes from corporate sponsorship. More than eighty companies are either “consortium lab members” or “consortium research lab members”; the former provides “access to all of the research conducted at the Lab, Lab-­wide visiting privileges, invitations to semi­annual member-­only events, and full intellectual property rights,” while the latter provides “the added benefit of an employee-­in-­residence at the Lab.”32 The incentive the MIT Media Lab offers to these member companies is that students and faculty in the lab can conduct research that is “too costly or too ‘far out’ to be accommodated within a corporate environment. It is also an opportunity for corporations to bring their business challenges and concerns to the Lab to see the solutions our researchers present.”33 In return, the MIT Media Lab receives funding to pay for an astonishingly wide array of research projects, the ability to promote itself aggressively, and a clear pipeline for students that leads from the lab to industry. The issue of financing also has connections to how other power structures are reproduced in terms of work, diversity, and indeed, people. While the MIT Media Lab will never be able to completely depart from its long history of being directed, populated, and dominated by certain racial and gender demographics, it will likewise never be able to remain unaffected by funding that comes from U.S. tech companies with the same deeply ingrained racial and gender demographics, which in turn affects which projects are supported and implicitly promoted. As former MIT Media Lab faculty member and director of the Center for Civic Media Ethan Zuckerman stated to us in an interview: I think [the MIT Media Lab] can be alarmingly insular. I think we tend to feel like we look at the world in a way that’s unique, and I’m not sure that it’s as unique as we think. . . . We have great international diversity . . .

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[but] when you look at underrepresented minorities, which is how MIT measures diversity, which is basically American populations that are usually underrepresented within universities—­Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/Latinas, not Asian Americans—­how are we doing? The answer is we’re doing dismally. . . . [However,] we have made a lot of progress on gender. I think when I was here, we were at about 2:1 male to female, and I think we’re closer to 60–­40.34

We conducted this interview in early spring of 2017. In August 2019, Zuckerman declared his intentions to move his work out of the MIT Media Lab by spring 2020 in light of realizations that in 2014, former director Joi Ito had accepted over $250,000 in funding for lab projects from known sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. These realizations were followed by a press release by MIT later in August indicating that the university as a whole had accepted $800,000 in total from Epstein over a period of twenty years, all of which went either to the MIT Media Lab or to professor of mechanical engineering and physics Seth Lloyd.35 By early September, journalist Ronan Farrow revealed in the New Yorker that the lab had in fact knowingly accepted as much as eight million dollars of funding from Epstein over the years, marking his donations as if they were given anonymously and going against MIT’s decision to disqualify Epstein as a donor after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges of solicitation of minors for prostitution.36 What makes these revelations about the lab’s indiscriminate fund-­raising practices more horrifying is that even in the face of MIT president L. Rafael Reif ’s apology for their lack of judgment about what funding to accept and what to refuse, and Ito’s apology and subsequent resignation, Negroponte continued to maintain his belief that taking funding from Epstein was justified and that he would still recommend to Ito (as he did in 2014) that the lab accept Epstein’s funding. “If you wind back the clock . . . I would still say, ‘Take it,’” he reportedly stated at an all-­hands meeting at the Media Lab in September 2019.37 Angela Chen and Sarah Hao for MIT Technology Review describe what unfolded toward the end of this same meeting: Negroponte stood up, unprompted, and began to speak. He discussed . . . how he had used [his] privilege to break into the social circles of billionaires. It was these connections, he said, that had allowed the Media

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Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay people full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intellectual property. Negroponte said that he prided himself on knowing over 80% of the billionaires in the US on a first-­name basis, and that through these circles he had come to spend time with Epstein.38

However, contrary to Negroponte’s justifications for accepting funding from the most abhorrent of sources, the lab’s funding does not support anything out of the ordinary for a university lab as, first, many graduate programs in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Europe do not charge their students tuition in exchange for these students taking on research or teaching duties; and, second, as is clearly outlined in the lab’s FAQs about sponsorship, intellectual property at the MIT Media Lab is either owned in whole by sponsors or is shared among students, faculty, and lab sponsors. Furthermore, even if we were to entertain the possibility that Negroponte’s justifications for taking funding from Epstein are not entirely rhetorical flourishes, money alone does not solve deeply entrenched problems around privilege and thereby diversity. The problem is more properly about the sources of and results from indiscriminate funding practices—­who and what ends up being supported and made visible, and likewise who and what is made invisible and even dehumanized. In the face of such stunningly amoral fund-­raising practices and unabashed embrace of the wealth and power that comes along with consorting with the world’s 1 percent, it makes sense to see the MIT Media Lab as an exceptionally egregious example of contemporary universities’ neoliberal strategies since the 1980s. Indeed, the spirit of “demo or die” became one of the early mottos and techniques at the MIT Media Lab with its spirit of progress and innovation, engineering and science, at the cost of “studies, surveys, or critiques.”39 However, we argue that even knowing what we know now about the lab’s affiliation with Epstein coupled with Negroponte’s tone-­ deafness to the significance of the lab’s affiliation with a known sex trafficker and pedophile, the MIT Media Lab is just a more extreme version of a long lineage of entities dedicated to innovation and invention, driven by internal management techniques whose workings depend on collaboration between higher education and industry. But of course, now we also know the details about the girls and women

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whom Epstein preyed upon over many decades, most of whom were underage and economically disadvantaged. The likeness of the MIT Media Lab to other university-­based entities whose fund-­raising practices may not (yet) be implicated in anything of the size and scope of the Epstein scandal makes it no less implicated in perpetuating sexual violence and stark, generational economic, gendered, and racial inequities.

LAB MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES AND THE PRODUCTION OF VALUE The primacy of building markets and the discourse of innovation—­ both of which are driven by particular management techniques, and both of which also drive the Media Lab’s fund-­raising practices—­ have persisted over many decades as core themes of the lab. Ito argues that in the MIT Media Lab “there is a ‘Lab Culture’ but each research group and each unit of staff has its own culture. Each group buys into some or all of the Lab Culture and interprets this in their own way. This creates a complex but very vibrant and, in the end, self-­adapting system that allows the Lab to continue to evolve and move ‘forward’ without any one piece entirely understanding the whole of it or any one thing controlling all of it.”40 But despite this portrayal of the lab as nonhierarchical, flexible, and collaborative, in 2017 Ito responded in-­depth to a question about the lab’s organizational structure by outlining its inherent hierarchies, which culminate in Ito himself: The Media Lab has a director, Joichi Ito, me. I am in charge of the operations which include the staff functions as well as the research which includes the Media Lab consortium that funds the majority of the work at the Media Lab. The Media Lab also has a number of initiatives and centers that also report to the director. The majority of the financial resources as well as the space allocation is managed by the director. The staff functions are roughly divided up by functional units that include network and IT systems (NecSys), human resources, academic administration, finance, facilities, communications and events. Most of these units have a director that reports to the director of the lab. The lab has many research groups and each group is led by a professor or a principle [sic] research scientist. Each group admits students/RAs and also usually has staff members, post-­docs and other researchers. Groups typically supported financially by funding from the consortium

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funding managed by the director as well as funds raised directly by the group.41

As we learned on our own research trip to the MIT Media Lab, despite its claims to transparency, supposedly embodied by the abundance of glass throughout the lab complex, it is difficult to figure out the precise contours of the everyday doings in the lab (exemplified by its strict rules forbidding photography of current projects). On the level of infrastructure, it is also difficult to discover the exact nature of the funding streams leading to the lab’s projects, prototypes, and patents from sponsors such as Google and Twitter (not to mention earlier sponsors such as the U.S. Army, the FBI, and individuals such as Epstein). However, many such issues in and around the MIT Media Lab have existed for almost as long as media labs themselves have existed. Only a few decades after the heyday of Menlo Park, Thorstein Veblen became one of the first to offer what appears like a critique of American universities’ appropriation of business management techniques to handle their administration but is more properly a critique of the way knowledge is produced by way of the “businesslike organization and control of the university.” As he put it in his 1918 book The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, “In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output.”42 While Veblen does not dwell on laboratories, he keenly understands that as long as universities seek to produce knowledge as efficiently and profitably as possible—­as a factory churns out widgets as cheaply and rapidly as possible—­its employees must also “be organized into a facile and orderly working force” and that “the faculty is conceived as a body of employees, hired to render certain services and turn out certain scheduled vendible results.”43 From Veblen’s account, it’s clear that the management of university workers had already become part and parcel of university life. There have been abundant accounts of the history of neoliberalism and higher education.44 Suffice it to say that by the late 1960s and 1970s, as neoliberalism rose to its dominant position, the management of universities became a greater concern. Experts in

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business management increasingly saw universities and their role in producing education and technological innovation as one of the most important engines behind economic expansion. French journalist and center-­right politician Jean-­Jacques Servan-­Schreiber declared in his massively best-­selling 1968 book The American Challenge that “today the most important factors in economic expansion are education and technological innovation.”45 Writing during an extended stay in the United States and guided by the belief that Europe, especially France, was quickly losing an economic war to the United States, Servan-­Schreiber continues by asserting that “the technological gap is misnamed. It is not so much a technological gap as it is a managerial gap. And the brain drain [from France to the United States] occurs not merely because we have more advanced technology here in the United States but rather because we have more modern and effective management” (emphasis added).46 By the time Servan-­ Schreiber was writing, “modern and effective management” was a key element of university discourse. In his canonical 1973 work Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Drucker collapses the distinction between the public and private realms to claim that “business enterprise is only one of the institutions of modern society, and business managers are by no means our only managers. Service institutions—­government agencies; armed services; schools and universities; research laboratories  .  .  . labor unions  .  .  . are [all] equally institutions and, therefore, equally in need of management.”47 Having flatly stated that everything, including universities and labs, can and even ought to be under the purview of management, he goes on to say that “these public-­service institutions . . . are the real growth sector of a modern society” because those employed by such institutions are a new breed of “knowledge worker” whose productivity and continual achievement is the basis upon which “every developed society” also becomes productive.48 Further, if everything is now under the purview of management, then managers are now responsible not only for creating conditions for productivity and profitability but also for protecting and even guiding the social good: “The fact remains that in modern society there is no other leadership group but managers. If the managers of our major institutions . . . do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.”49 By the 1970s, education and technological innovation are tightly paired as

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the real drivers of economic expansion; management should or does reign supreme over everything, including higher education and the common good; and, finally, management is also now responsible for anticipating and molding the future, through monitoring the social impact.50 Even MIT’s administration was forced to respond to the questions raised by social movements. In the wake of 1967’s student and faculty protests against military-­related research, MIT president Howard W. Johnson delivered a commencement address in 1968 with the theme of “humane technology” in which he declared that “there is a disturbing gulf between our technological achievement and the quality of our living—­our sense of community.”51 Focusing less on MIT than on the larger Boston community, Johnson asserted that “at first glance, the city personifies all of the problems faced by individuals and institutions with whom the professional must function.” In the face of “the magnitude of its ills,” where lies the solution other than in management? “[Boston] is amorphous and unmanageable and impersonal and cold. . . . It is a large system that does not work, but must.”52 In was in this context—­of the coupling of management with “humane technology”—­that Negroponte founded the AMG and began to transform Johnson’s avowed dedication to “humane technology” into “humanism” through technology. However, the particular use of “humanism” as a justifying trope for multiple AMG and MIT Media Lab projects was actually an early version of “solutionism”—­of technological fixes for social issues—­as well as a particularly troubling form of ignorance of the social complexities of race, gender, and other issues that many other labs raised in the wake of the MIT Media Lab scandals.53 This project-­oriented technique of technological humanism is shot through with contradictions: “technology” is always a homogeneous, abstract, and neutral entity at the same time as it also (magically) shapes the present and the future. “Humans” are likewise homogeneous abstractions who are always inventive and in control of technology, and attentive to the present and the future—­even though they are not in control of either. Once this particular brand of techno-­humanism is aimed at those perceived as underprivileged, it morphs into a kind of digital colonialism.54 The next section focuses on one project started at the MIT Media Lab in the early 2000s

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as an example of the operations of technological humanism and its production of troubling assumptions about race and solutionism.

PRODUCTION OF VALUE OUTSIDE THE LAB: FROM THE AMG TO THE OLPC A lab organized to ensure profitability is also a lab that sells itself as dedicated to innovation. For decades, the popular and tech presses have positioned the MIT Media Lab as the first and the best ­known of its kind. Wired staff writer Fred Hapgood wrote in 1995 that “for a few years after it officially opened in 1985, the MIT Media Laboratory may have been the most celebrated research institute in the country, at least as measured by inches of newsprint or minutes of air time. Perhaps it still is.”55 Even in 2019, nearly twenty-­five years later, CBS still ran stories about how the lab is a “future factory” where “tomorrow’s technology is born.”56 For a quarter of a century the lab has been synonymous with inventing the future, because of the central role it has historically played in the fields of wireless networks, field sensing, web browsers, and the web, as well as the role the lab is currently playing in neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially adaptive robots, emotive computing, and many other areas. Or at least this is a role the lab asserts it has played. The MIT Media Lab has become synonymous with the future largely because of a dogged thirty-­year marketing campaign whose success we can measure by the fact that almost any discussion of the technology of tomorrow is a discussion about some project at the MIT Media Lab.57 But as Alison Hearn and Sarah Banet-­Weiser remind us, writing at the intersection of the COVID-19 crisis and the slow collapse of institutions of higher education which are performing “an idea of the future that looks just like the past,” “access to the ‘future’ is a privilege—­one that is differentially meted out to classes, races and genders of people around the globe.”58 And thus the question is, whose future is the MIT Media Lab writing, controlling, predetermining? In its future-­oriented vision of “humanism through technology,” which humans are being raised up and which are being effaced? The contradictions of a discourse that espouses humanism through technology as the primary mechanism for generating value

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outside a lab (and thus, again, controlling the future) were already evident in projects produced by AMG, founded by Negroponte in 1967. In a section of his 1970 book The Architecture Machine titled “Humanism through Intelligent Machines,” Negroponte lays out the need for “humanistic” machines that respond to users’ environments, analyze user behavior, and even anticipate possible future problems and solutions—­a machine that does not so much “problem-­solve” as it “problem-­worries.”59 Negroponte seems to be thinking not only of the potential of such a machine in the form of a computer in the home but also of one specifically aimed at children, for “the computer utility will become a consumer item, and every child should have one”—­precisely what the OLPC computer aspired to be thirty years later (6). Negroponte also seems to be responding to then–MIT president Johnson’s call for members of the university community to consider the social impact of their work to a greater degree. Negroponte asserts that the aim of such responsive architecture machines is “definitely humanization.” He continues: “It is simply untrue that ‘unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, what probably will come to be valued is that which the computer can cope with—­that is, only certain kinds of solutions to social problems.’ We will attempt to disprove the pessimism of such comments” (7). In short, computers ought to make everyone more human, whatever that meant, not less (or other), and they ought to be able to anticipate and solve any social ill. His example of what such an adaptive, responsive machine could look like as it actively attempts to “problem-­worry” comes from an experiment that undergraduate Richard Hessdorfer undertook in the lab. Writes Negroponte: “Richard Hessdorfer is . . . constructing a machine conversationalist. . . . The machine tries to build a model of the user’s English and through this model build another model, one of his needs and desires. It is a consumer item . . . that might someday be able to talk to citizens via touch-­tone picture phone, or interactive cable television.” To help build this machine conversationalist, Hessdorfer decided to bring teletype devices into a neighborhood in the south side of Boston that Negroponte calls “Boston’s ghetto area.” While the project description never mentions race, documentary photographs that appear in The Architecture Machine of residents using the machines feature a Black man (56).

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The following description implies other users might have been immigrants or simply non-­English speakers: Three inhabitants of the neighborhood were asked to converse with this machine about their local environment. Though the conversation was hampered by the necessity of typing English sentences, the chat was smooth enough to reveal two important results. First, the three residents had no qualms or suspicions about talking with a machine in English, about personal desires; they did not type uncalled-­for remarks; instead, they immediately entered a discourse about slum landlords, highways, schools, and the like. Second, the three user-­inhabitants said things to this machine they would probably not have said to another human, particularly a white planner or politician: to them the machine was not black, was not white, and surely had no prejudices. (The reader should know, as the three users did not, that this experiment was conducted over telephone lines with teletypes, with a human at the other end, not a machine.) (56–­57)

While the project was supposed to be an example of what Negroponte calls an “adaptable machine” (and thus an architecture machine), it was an elaborate sleight of hand involving fairly standard telecommunications equipment for the time (7). As Orit Halpern notes, the experiment was at best performing “a future ideal” of interactive media communication.60 The passage also demonstrates the contradictions—­and profound problems—­of a humanism via technology that grants agency to (for Negroponte, “humanizes”) certain humans over others (presumably the white, remote observers over the racialized and/or immigrant humans who the narrator assumes will behave poorly and type “uncalled-­for remarks”); and grants agency over technology by some rather than others. Moreover, under the guise of a laboratory experiment, it does so via a deception that presents the teletype machine to research subjects as somehow responsive to expressions of concern from racialized or immigrant people about living conditions.61 It also demonstrates what can happen when we believe so completely in the neutrality of the machine—­or its assumed capacity to give us pure, unmediated access to reality—­as to think it can be called on as a magical, mechanical solution to any human problem. As Halpern writes: AMG “attempted to turn the external traumas of American racism

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and economic crisis into an interactive simulation and to advance computing as a solution to these structural problems.”62 The second AMG project was just as problematic. This time the subjects in the experiment were not Black people and immigrants, but gerbils. The experiment, referred to as Seek, was part of a 1970 exhibition at the New York Jewish Museum called SOFTWARE. It consisted of a computer-­controlled environment full of small blocks and gerbils, all of which was contained by Plexiglass. The gerbils were there to change the position of the blocks, and a robotic arm was then supposed to analyze the gerbils’ actions to try to complete the rearrangement according to what the machine thought the gerbils were trying to do. The catalog for the exhibition describes Seek as follows: Seek metaphorically goes beyond the real-­world situation, where machines cannot respond to the unpredictable nature of people (gerbils). Today’s machines are poor at handling sudden changes in context in an environment. This lack of adaptability is the problem Seek confronts in diminutive. If computers are to be our friends they must understand our metaphors. If they are to be responsive to changing, unpredictable, context-­dependent human needs, they will need an artificial intelligence that can cope with complex contingencies in a sophisticated manner . . . much as Seek deals with elementary uncertainties in a simple-­minded fashion.63

Not surprisingly, with its simultaneous lack of interest in the needs and particularities of gerbils and its equation of gerbils with “people,” the experiment was a disaster. As Halpern puts it, “The exhibition’s computers rarely functioned . . . the museum almost went bankrupt; and in what might be seen as an omen, the experiment’s gerbils confused the computer, wrought havoc on the blocks, turned on each other in aggression, and wound up sick. No one thought to ask, or could ask, whether gerbils wish to live in a block built micro-­ world.”64 Such experiments included multiple implicit assumptions about “people” (and other intelligent animals) as part of technological systems, but it was also very much part of the marketing traditions of technological spectacle.65 Like Claude Shannon’s maze for Theseus the mouse, it seems to be mostly about showmanship as a way to generate notoriety, funding, and, eventually, profitability. Even Negroponte later describes these early projects by the AMG as

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stunts rather than thoughtful interventions, in that they were “using museums and exhibits as a way to do sort of the outrageous ’cause you had a pass where you could do things and you don’t necessarily have to justify them in some scientific context and we were allowed to play.”66 In the years after Seek and before the opening of the MIT Media Lab in 1985, this pattern of promoting humanism via technology continued in a series of projects by Negroponte’s colleagues and collaborators. The projects were also instrumental to building the methodologies of “demo or die,” testing, and experimenting that became integrated as key lab techniques (see also chapter 6).67 What these projects and their techniques have in common is that they treat humans and technologies as abstractions, grant agency to some humans over others, and thereby grant agency over technology to some humans rather than others. Continuing the push Negroponte described in The Architecture Machine to develop a personal computer that was appealing to children, fellow faculty member, MIT Media Lab affiliate, and eventual cofounder of the OLPC project Alan Kay launched the “interim DynaBook” in 1972. Similar to the Hessdorfer Experiment’s assumption that teletype users would simply figure out how the machine worked, without any guidance or instruction, while simultaneously disempowering these same users by subjecting them to an elaborate deception at the hands of remote (white) researchers, Kay launched his project at the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference in Boston by declaring his belief that children “learn by doing” and that, unlike “the African child,” American children lack meaningful opportunities for learning by doing: “Unlike the African child whose play with bow and arrow INVOLVES him in future adult activity, the American child can either indulge in irrelevant imitation (the child in a nurse’s uniform taking care of a doll) or is forced to participate in activities which will not bear fruit for many years and will leave him alienated.”68 With the vast variability of cultures across the continent of Africa, not to mention the vast variability in hunter-­gatherer techniques and methods of teaching children, once again lab discourse utilizes an abstraction—­“the African child”—­to promote a personal computer. Even stranger and more ironic is the fact that Kay seems to have believed he was going against the grain of MIT president Johnson’s exhortation to fix social problems with

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“humane technology” and Negroponte’s advocacy for “humanism through technology.” He writes: “For many years it has been a tradition to attempt to cure our society’s ills through technology. . . . Unfortunately, most of these ‘cures’ are no more than paint over rust; the sources of the initial problems still remain.”69 For Kay, the initial problem is the learning process that he assumes is informing most technological cures. Inspired by work by John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Seymour Papert, he asserts that more attention ought to be paid to the child as “a ‘verb’ rather than a ‘noun,’ an actor rather than an object; he is not a scaled-­up pigeon or rat” (or a gerbil).70 The DynaBook was designed, from the ground up, to allow this active, empowered child to learn “algorithmic thinking.” However, whether U.S. American or African, the figure of the child is yet another abstraction that existed outside of any specific socioeconomic context. While Kay may not have been making assertions about the neutrality of the machine as Negroponte did alongside later Media Lab directors, his reliance on the child as an abstraction points to how he cannot conceive of how bias is inevitably part of the design of any technology, including the DynaBook. In Negroponte’s second volume on the work of the AMG, Soft Architecture Machines (1974), the leveraging of abstract, decontextualized versions of nonwhite, non-­adult, and/or non-­Western communities to promote particular digital technologies continues. In this book Negroponte draws on Bernard Rudofsky’s well-­known Architecture without Architects (1964), which Rudofsky claims “attempts to break down our narrow concepts of the art of building by introducing the unfamiliar world of unpedigreed architecture” (i.e., building practices that are “vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, rural”).71 From this foundation, Negroponte extrapolates the idea of “the indigenous architect as an archetype.”72 This figure, according to Negroponte, lived in an environment that was “simple and comprehensible, punctuated with limited choices and decisions. He no more needed a professional architect than he needed a psychologist or legal counselor.”73 By contrast, he continues, “in our fast-­moving societies our personal experiences are phenomenally varied. . . . This is why we need to consider a special type of architecture machine, one I will call a design amplifier.”74 According to Negroponte, his 1973 project Urban5 was an ideal example of a design amplifier. Essentially a more sophisticated version of the Hessdorfer

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Experiment and Seek, it was a computer-­aided design program that allowed the user to manipulate virtual cubes with a light pen while engaging in dialogue with the program (which drew from a dictionary of five hundred possible options and questions) about their architectural wants and desires.75 On the surface, Urban5 sounds like a perfectly reasonable, early experiment in machine intelligence. However, once we know it is framed by the figure of “the indigenous architect”—­whose fictionality becomes apparent via assertions about how “he” lives in a simple and comprehensible world lacking complexity, not to mention that it also lacks any kind of cultural and geographical specificity—­Urban5 looks structurally identical to the Hessdorfer Experiment, Seek, and the DynaBook in creating problematic racialized figures in the context of primarily white elite corporate university practices, techniques, and experiments.76 By the late 1970s, the turn toward leveraging people of color, non-­ adults, and non-­Westerners as a way to promote particular digital technologies shifts to another complex abstraction, namely, the “third world.” Following the massive success of The American Challenge, Servan-­Schreiber went on to publish The World Challenge in 1981—­the same year he founded the Centre mondiale informatique et ressource humaine in Paris and appointed Negroponte as its founding director. This politician-­turned-­journalist-­turned-­tech-­ advocate describes a “renewed fraternal endeavor” that took place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Its participants included oil ministers from Middle Eastern countries and unnamed, unspecified “pioneers” who we can only assume are tech entrepreneurs from the West.77 The point of the meeting, called the Taif seminar and chaired by Servan-­ Schreiber, was to discuss a secret report that was supposed to be made public by Sheikh Yamani on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of OPEC, but never was.78 According to Servan-­Schreiber, this report “aims for nothing less than a new alliance between the Arabs and the peoples of the Third World against their traditional exploiters, the industrialized West. It is conceived as a warning, a challenge and finally a demand for a massive transfer of technology from the United States, Europe and Japan to the poor and needy.”79 While this sounds admirable enough, by the end of the book Servan-­ Schreiber slips into American-­biased rhetoric about the conjunction of “Third World peoples,” telecommunications, microprocessors, and the importance of individual (read “American”) learners “learning

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how to learn”—­a concept presumably gleaned from the same trio of thinkers influencing Alan Kay (Dewey, Piaget, and Papert). In short, “the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America should not have to repeat this process [of heavy industrialization]. Telecommunications, microprocessors and their tendency to converge in the new creative process should be placed freely and completely at the disposal of Third World peoples—­so that they can become creators themselves.”80 By comparison with more egregious technology projects in the name of humanism, Servan-­Schreiber’s account of the Taif seminar and of the technology transfer he believed ought to happen in the name of the “third world” is not nearly as problematic. However, it is noteworthy for its dependence once again on leveraging an abstraction, “Third World peoples,” to use rhetoric of technological innovation to, in turn, create new markets for products. It also paves the way for the OLPC project insofar as the first project Negroponte takes up in the early 1980s as founding director of the Centre mondiale informatique et ressource humaine is the design of a pilot project for “computers-­in-­education for developing countries.”81 Negroponte and Seymour Papert worked to bring this pilot project to Pakistan, Colombia, and Senegal, where they installed several hundred Apple II computers donated by Steve Jobs. As Negroponte describes it in 2005, “for a time, these school kids commanded more computing power than did the central Senegalese government.”82 While the project only lasted for a year, Negroponte continued to launch similar computer campaigns, including a nationwide program to install computers in Costa Rica’s primary and secondary schools in the mid-­1980s, and a program he launched with his son in 1999 to send fifty laptops to schools in a rural village in Cambodia.83 Negroponte’s tendency to rely on Cambodia to illustrate the power of his computer projects also involves frequent resort to the abstractive logic of humanism via technology, as his anecdotes always willfully ignore the particularities of individual cultures and communities for the sake of advocating for the mass exportation of technology projects.84 After traveling the world since at least the early 1980s to sell personal computers to developing nations, Negroponte announced in 2005 he had created a nonprofit organization, One Laptop per Child, to produce a one-­hundred-­dollar laptop “at scale.”85 In other words, the cost of the laptop could only be this low in the early 2000s

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if, according to Negroponte, they could amass orders for seven to ten million machines. Despite his oft-­repeated statement that OLPC was not a laptop project but rather an education project, its essence was the same as the Hessdorfer Experiment and Seek: Got a poverty problem? Get a computer!86 A year after the program’s launch, Negroponte continued to rely on Cambodia as an example, touting how the children there learned “Google” and “Skype” as some of their first words while their parents “love the computers because they’re the brightest light source in the house.”87 He goes on to sell the project by declaring that its rightness and goodness is so unquestionable that “this laptop project is not something you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over. When people say well we’d like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works, screw you, go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out this works you can join as well.”88 By 2012, studies were clearly indicating that whether they were used in Peru, Nepal, or Australia, the laptops made no measurable difference in reading and math test scores. Given the cavernous gap that exists between the rhetoric about OLPC and the realities surrounding the project, as Rayvon Fouché compellingly puts it, “OLPC demands belief in an altruistic illusion of American technology, African technological incapability, and its value neutrality to embark on a program to create a computer to change the lives of children in the developing world.”89 The pitch-­perfect ending to this story is that in 2013, after selling millions of laptops to developing nations around the world, laptops that made no measurable improvement to anyone’s lives, Negroponte left OLPC and went on to chair the Global Literacy X Prize as part of the XPRIZE Foundation. However, the prize itself no longer seems to exist, and just a year later (2014) there was no record of his being with the organization. XPRIZE, however, does exist, and has set new records for the density of humanist sloganeering: XPRIZE is an innovation engine. A facilitator of exponential change. A catalyst for the benefit of humanity. We believe in the power of competition. That it’s part of our DNA. Of humanity itself. That tapping into that indomitable spirit of competition brings about breakthroughs and solutions that once seemed unimaginable. Impossible. We believe that you get what you incentivize. . . . Rather than throw money at a problem, we incentivize the solution and challenge the world to solve it. . . . We

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believe that solutions can come from anyone, anywhere and that some of the greatest minds of our time remain untapped, ready to be engaged by a world that is in desperate need of help. Solutions. Change. And radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. Call us crazy, but we believe.90

The board of XPRIZE includes every major corporate executive one can think of, and it appears they are not even aiming to produce things anymore, just “incentives.” In many respects it’s the logical conclusion of the trajectory toward abstraction we have outlined. At the time of this writing, even in the wake of abundant revelations about how the OLPC was a resounding failure (most recently written about by Morgan G. Ames, who offers a deep look at the project’s “charismatic roots” along with a careful critique of charisma itself ), and even in the wake of the Epstein scandal, the MIT Media Lab still exists.91 In spite of the lab’s tarnished image as a result of its affiliation with Epstein, it is busy churning out demos and products for consumers, corporations, and the military. It is also full of people—­students, faculty, administrative staff, lab techs, and others—­who were not privy to the benefits of its entrepreneurial showmanship, nor desired to be. Ito’s notes about MIT Media Lab’s lab culture as a complex, self-­adapting system is an interesting way to point to how this self-­description tries to account for the existence of multiple projects and their very different stakes, ethics, and methods. But the situation at the lab still brings to the fore the internal contradictions in many large-­scale hybrid labs that have to be acknowledged in order to understand how the practices, discourses, infrastructures, and policy contexts of labs are more complex than mission statements and manifestos lead one to believe. While a “follow-­the-­money” methodology might be useful in bringing out some of the most problematic sides of the current neoliberal university system, we also need to understand that hybrid labs are not reducible to stories about their (often white male) directors, and the narrative of their histories has to account for the complexities and alternative examples in these same labs. The complexity of hybrid labs is also why we want to turn to a different kind of media lab that emerges in the wake of the MIT Media Lab, one that engages with an alternative formulation of articulating people, institutions, and lab culture.

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CASE STUDY: ACTLAB (UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AUSTIN) In addition to the consolidation of corporate university structures around the enthusiasm for innovation, the 1980s and 1990s were also about the birth of experimental media arts practices, groups, institutions, and exhibitions. Of course, these two trajectories were not entirely disconnected insofar as some larger institutions and the art-­science focus was tied to the idea of artistic prototyping. However, a plethora of experimental practices came from a different place and used the term “media lab” in alternative ways than the corporate focus at the MIT Media Lab. For example, in Britain some of the early 1990s examples of media labs were grassroots emergent communities closer to an art and hacker ethos than to entrepreneurship.92 Some of the European net art scene, including the Nettime list community, was also wedded to the idea that the emerging network practices are situated in ways that demand physical interaction. Media labs were thought of as open sites and community spaces. As Josephine Bosma puts it: “The labs became concentrated exchange groups, in which artists, activists, and others learned not only about technology of the computer and the Internet, but also about the new social and cultural networks that were developing online. The media labs were a place of learning, inspiration and creation.”93 As Bosma emphasizes, these were also something different from the “high-­tech media labs of media art institutions like the glossy spaces at ZKM in Karlsruhe or Ars Electronic in Linz.”94 The focus was less on products and marketing of new digital gadgets and more on “participatory culture” that put the emphasis on people in new ways.95 In Austin, Texas, the ACTLab was founded in 1993 by media theorist and performance artist Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, who directed it up until 2010. The ACTLab was one of the first labs of its kind that (in the context of art, community, and experimental labs) also set out to establish an interesting cross-­disciplinary practice inside the university institution. It presented a case for the ethics of experimentation and served as an example of how to exist inside a larger institution, something Stone describes as codeswitching. As a way to protect the highly creative, flexible, situated, critical-­ minded experiments going on inside the ACTLab, rather than uncritically adopting management techniques that ostensibly ensure efficiency and profitability, Stone and the lab members performed

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these techniques for the world outside. Where the MIT Media Lab nested a corporate mind-­set inside a veil of creativity, the ACTLab used a corporate veneer as a shield that allowed the non-­utilitarian and the non-­profit-­minded to flourish within its spaces. Likewise, rather than producing a hyperbolic lab discourse designed to sell one particular version of the future, ACTLab produced what Stone calls “‘the Unnameable Discourse’—­which was ‘unnameable’ because the language to describe it didn’t yet exist,” where “it” is anything that is open-­ended and critical-­minded, from a flamethrower to food, games, art, essays, and computer-­mediated experiments.96 As we pointed out in the Introduction, hybrid labs and lab-­like entities matter because they construct new “forces and realities” out of their materials. Those like Stone, who are “empowered to act as their credible interpreters,” mobilize these realities and forces in social programs. Rather than abandon the moniker “lab” because it’s been evacuated of all meaning through profligate use, the ACTLab retained it as a paleonym, redeploying it in different terms. As Jacques Derrida notes, retaining old names risks falling back into the systems one is critiquing, but pretending that it’s possible to vault outside of all their assembled meanings by changing a word or two is to ignore that while a lab may appear to be solid, stable, and ordered, it “is constantly being traversed by forces, and worked by the exteriority, that it represses.”97 The “lab” in ACTLab therefore provides us with a way to think about labs which suggests that artists and humanists are in a position to defy the pressure to pursue the new and rethink what it means to do twenty-­first-­century humanities work. In short, it is a prototype of what a hybrid lab can do. Before the ACTLab, Stone worked in several contexts, including activism, technology, and science fiction. Her initial education led to work in sound engineering and collaborations with various figures of the 1960s rock scene, including Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.98 The interest in sound and performance found its way into the ACTLab, but it also nurtured a subtle understanding of space as another aspect of the lab’s theoretical activity. In the mid-­1970s, Stone went through gender reassignment, and from that point on her transgender identity has been central to her writing. In retrospect, Stone’s involvement in the 1970s with the “radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective” Olivia Records was a major

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formative part of designing supportive spaces for gender identities and learning in pressured social situations.99 Stone’s key text for transgender studies, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” came out in 1987. In part it is a response to attacks directed at Stone, mainly Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-­Male, which was part of a longer series of episodes of trans-­focused hate speech.100 However, it is important to consider “The Empire Strikes Back” as part of a discussion about the materialities of embodiment in relation to critical epistemologies that emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s in fields such as transgender studies, feminist STS, and (later) critical posthumanism. Stone was heavily influenced by the work of Donna Haraway in the 1980s, partly because Haraway became Stone’s PhD supervisor while she was writing “A Cyborg Manifesto” (a piece whose techniques of irony, the denial of closure, feminism, situatedness, and materialism Stone surely brought with her to UT Austin in 1993). Stone’s work is also influential for the establishment of the field of transgender studies, which emerges in “The Empire Strikes Back” as part of a productive opposition to forms of knowledge that demand stable positions, proposing instead a rejection of compulsory binary identities as the poles between which desire fluctuates. Gender as a product of medical, sexual, and related discourses is the obvious focus, but the book already implies that this radical trans-­position feeds into other forms of cultural inscription where the body is at stake.101 Resonating with Haraway’s “coyote” and other key conceptual figures of embodied and situated thought, Stone writes: “I am suggesting that in the transsexual’s erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender, which originates from within the gender minority itself and which can make common cause with other oppositional discourses.”102 The formal description of the ACTLab places the same emphasis on combining multiple stakeholders and traditions: The UT ACTLab was a radical new kind of experimental program based on interactive, collaborative, student-­centered learning created by a unique international and transdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, teachers, techies, and hackers. Founded in 1993 by Allucquere [sic]

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Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, our special qualities derived from courses and activities based on the ACTLab’s unique pedagogy; our custom multimodal studio specifically designed for ACTLab work; the enthusiasm and dedication of our community; the guiding vision of our directors, visiting artists and lecturers; and our students’ broad spectrum of interests.103

Stone often explains the ACTLab as an entity that translates radical pedagogical ideas into institutionally accepted forms. With a critical awareness of anti-­hierarchical institutions, such as Black Mountain College as well as contemporary media labs, ACTLab bundled technology, educational forms, embodiment, and sexuality in ways that produced something much more radical than a normalized “interdisciplinarity.” As Brian Holmes has argued, the discourse of interdisciplinarity has itself become one particular marker of the industry of cognitive capitalism in academic work. Instead, we might consider ACTLab activities in terms of how they work inside institutional walls and yet speak to wider culture in useful ways. They connect to the legacies of modern avant-­garde arts experimentation but also keep tabs on the particular ways that aesthetic play can easily be normalized as part of industry-­oriented lab discourse in the university “production machine.”104 Stone did not consider academia to be the most creative of environments, but she was still aware that “the structure incumbent upon the academic project was important for developing critical thinking.”105 ACTLab became a way to work with the tradition of critical theory that intersects with institutions while also attempting to transform them. In her talk “On Being Trans, and under the Radar,” Stone explains being trans as an experiential state that is connected to radical epistemologies in such a way that evades certain forms of living. For example, she refers to Gloria Anzaldúa’s term “mestiza consciousness” as a “state of belonging fully to none of the possible categories.”106 Stone guides the reader swiftly through implications of the postcolonial connotations of such positions, then moves to a discussion of the ACTLab as a space of learning, theory, and experiments. There is no one answer as to why the ACTLab is a lab, but this talk clarifies the matter by describing its role as a facilitator of particular sorts of educational and research ideas. Because of the predominance of lab discourse that champions the primacy of innovation, this is often the context in which ACTLab is

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described: “From its early 1990’s virtual world research into the creation of collaborative spaces (both text-­based and three-­dimensional worlds) and behavioral research of the inhabitants to the early 2000’s exploration and development of peer-­to-­peer video streaming systems, and its most recent work with BarCamps and social-­media based interaction phenomena, the ACTLab has long existed at the cutting edge of New Media.”107 Without ignoring this side of the lab, from our perspective it is interesting to consider ACTLab as a technology lab for humanities theory and cultural studies. While engaging with new technologies, ACTLab places the emphasis on the production of new forms of knowledge creation. In this way, the lab is a spatial and organizational contribution to the poststructuralist legacy that emerged in relation to what Rosi Braidotti has called “radical epistemologies,” and to transgender studies in general.108 Such radical epistemologies establish a different sense of the subject than implied in the corporate lab types, especially when it comes to their narratives of technological humanism and the racial politics that are implied, as we analyzed above. A significant difference between the characteristic discourse of many studio-­laboratories and media labs after the 1980s and the discourse around ACTLab is that the latter’s courses and philosophy are concept-­driven. From Stone’s perspective, concepts are just one form of material to work with; ACTLab often contextualizes them in terms of making: “The basis for our class structure is that deep learning engages all the senses. We believe that theory flows from the act of making. We consider hermeneutics to be the basis of ACTLab philosophy: active, playful engagement, informed by individual effort and open to surprise.”109 While “making” has gradually come to refer to a wide range of academic and non-­academic contexts in critical design and beyond, it’s important not to strip it of its more radical implications in theoretical and political discourses. The tactile, sensorial nature of conceptual and critical work is one part of what the studio environment in the lab is able to support. Such lab practices and discourses acknowledge that people, subjects, are embodied. At the same time as we remember the etymological relation of “laboratory” and “labor,” it is also useful to consider how the particular strain of cognitive and aesthetic knowledge-­work at ACTLab engages with the embodied aspects of using digital technologies. The use of “transdisciplinarity”

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and words like “surprise” are not merely off-­the-­cuff remarks, but central to the way in which technology functions as part of the lab’s concept-­driven pedagogy: “Our focus is primarily on creativity and secondarily on technology, on circuit bending rather than using prepackaged devices, on ripping up technology, reassembling it in unfamiliar forms, and making it do unexpected things.”110 Concepts entangle with social, cultural, aesthetic, and political contexts, and making stuff becomes a generative methodology for engaging with concepts and using critical thinking to produce unexpected directions. Stone also articulates a useful way to visualize, design, and conceptualize the work of the ACTLab as part of an institution. She expresses this nested existence through the figure of the codeswitching umbrella. We see it as key to the particular actions and processes of hybrid labs in universities and beyond. Under the codeswitching umbrella, three principles inform all activities in the lab: a refusal of closure; insistence on situation; and seeking multiplicity. But since

Figure 33. The ACTLab’s “codeswitching umbrella.” Courtesy of Sandy Stone.

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institutionality itself forbids anything that resembles any of these three principles, the lab and its activities must exist under protective cover. The umbrella is opaque, hiding what’s beneath from what’s above and vice versa. The umbrella is porous to concepts, but it changes them as they pass through; thus “When’s lunch?” below the umbrella becomes “Lunch is at noon sharp” above the umbrella. In this conceptual model the lowest subbasement level you can descend to, epistemically speaking, is the ACTLab, and the highest level you can ascend to, epistemically speaking, is Texas. Your mileage (and geography) may vary.  .  .  . The codeswitching umbrella translates experimental, Trans-­ish language into blackboxed, institutional language. Thus when people below the umbrella engage in deliberately nonteleological activities, what people above the umbrella see is organized, ordered work. When people below the umbrella produce messy, inarticulate emergent work, people above the umbrella see tame, recognizable, salable projects. When people below the umbrella experience passion, people above the umbrella see structure.111

The umbrella works as a sort of a transformer as well as an enabling device. Specifying it as a “codeswitching” umbrella alludes to the necessary fluidity inherent to trans-­subjectivity: to be able to—­and sometimes to be forced to—­switch among roles, languages, positions, and performances. To paraphrase Stone, ACTLab epitomizes the messy reality of the sort of informal, experimental, open-­ended work which increasingly needs to be blackboxed so that university accreditation and management systems recognize it.112 In sum, the lab is less a stable space and more a codeswitching mechanism. Such self-­reflective ideas emphasize that a lab is a place of situated practices that acknowledge the particularity of local knowledge. This emphasis also helps us to ask questions about where, with whom, and under what limits we engage with embodied experience in academic and para-­academic culture.113 Rather than thinking of fixed places and reassuringly solid objects, we should be thinking of movements, transformational experiences, affects, and activities that (code)switch people and things. ACTLab was an institution within an institution; nested but partly autonomous; constantly learning and adapting survival techniques; and perpetually working through issues around how to shelter the lab from the various storms

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of university culture, while constantly switching the work they are engaged with on a local level to particular units of administrative addressability. However, some have raised critical observations about whether a shielded lab existence might lead to separatism. Patrik Svensson, former director of the Humlab at Umeå University in Sweden, discusses the ACTLab in the context of digital humanities infrastructures and in the context of his own site visit to the lab. Svensson frames the umbrella as an “oppositional stance” which might be so opaque to outsiders that it could hinder institutional collaboration. Svensson writes that “it would seem that an inside position—­under the umbrella—­is not easily compatible with changing or subverting what is outside (e.g. the rest of the university)—­above the umbrella. This is a deliberate and justifiable strategy, of course, but nevertheless an important question is whether there could be mutual gains from a more permeable umbrella?”114 If one assumes labs are places of connectivism or trading zones, Svensson’s critique is understandable. But trade does not necessarily happen on equal terms, and the value of labs establishing ties across disciplinary boundaries and existing departmental categories needs to be weighed against other meaningful contexts. Consider the issue from the perspective of feminist hackerspaces and other hybrid labs established by traditionally marginalized groups (including people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ communities). As Sophie Toupin argues, withdrawal, boundary making, and separation can be deployed in tactical ways to build an institutionally shielded existence. Quoting Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble, Toupin reminds us there is “a distinct difference between using exclusion as a means to maintain structures of domination, and using it as a means to undermine them,” echoing bell hooks’s point that one may choose “marginalization as a space of radical openness.”115 The lessons of such asymmetrical institutional situations also need to be approached on their own terms. We need particularly sensitive cartographies of labs that do not merely function to connect, network, and produce profitability. Seeing the ACTLab in the context of generative tactical closure frames it in terms of survival in an intellectually difficult environment, one that at times questioned the principles of the lab and its director’s engagement with identity politics and theory. The umbrella, therefore, does not

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signal a hindering closure but rather a device that is able to sustain multiple realities in a para-­institutional coexistence. What if hybrid labs are indeed partly defensive structures, shelters, and membranes that can thrive in institutional settings? What if they are interfaces that open up to multiple worlds and harbor particular techniques of academic practice? Consider how labs allow double personalities, multiple fronts, and interfaces to exist as part of institutional infrastructures. Worlds of making and activity should include the sort of intellectual work that goes into thinking about how the particular form of the lab can both shelter and transform institutional structures, including how people are supported, connected, and recognized. While it is hard to deny that in many instances labs are places driven by metrics and in close connection to a wider set of economic policies, we must be aware of the diversity of discourses and practices and be able to support these alternative voices. Besides interventions into disciplinary discussions, hybrid labs can be places where the gray work of institutional mediation means that funding can support research and activities that intentionally push against traditional boundaries.

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5 LAB IMAGINARIES

T

he lab has always had a significant cultural history as an imaginary site of scientific research as well as a physical one. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the lab imaginary has escaped from the confines of any “real history” of laboratories, becoming much larger than the actual practices of experimentation and scientific knowledge production in the process. Lists of favorite fictional laboratories from television, film, and literature abound on the internet, and essayists in the New York Times have argued for the existence of “lab lit” as its own subgenre.1 We all think we know what a lab is long before we ever set foot in one, and it’s been that way for over a century. In this chapter we underline the importance of the lab imaginary as a cultural technique that is a crucial component of the extended laboratory model. “Imaginary” refers to the different sets of connotations, fantasies, and beliefs that have characterized laboratories over the years, but it also is an element of what labs produce: projects, prototypes, and idealizations of creative activity. We find it useful to discuss imaginaries in terms of technique because they are devices for the production and maintenance of reality. Michel Foucault argues that the imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality, as its denial or compensation. Rather, it is born and takes shape in the interstices of repetitions and commentaries, in relation not only to institutions and discourse but also to material apparatus of various sorts.2 As a result, the imaginary of any given period is historically, geographically, and culturally specific, and it changes according to particular material and institutional situations as it is rehearsed and practiced across all manner of cultural sites. For example, in his discussion of Gustave Flaubert, Foucault places the imaginary in relation to a specific media technique of fabulation

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by way of written words and connects it to institutions of reading and writing such as libraries. The notion of the imaginary has also inspired a whole range of media-­archaeological and media-­historical work that focuses on such techniques in the social context of institutions and discourses.3 For example, in his research on the Chinese typewriter, Thomas Mullaney presents a formulation of the imaginary that is helpful when trying to think productively about labs. He describes the “technolinguistic imagination” as “a rich ecology of both machines and ways of thinking about machines,” where the imaginary portion of the assemblage functions as a kind of “conceptual algorithm” that shapes how its thinker considers a given cultural object, often to the exclusion of other possibilities.4 Mullaney’s technolinguistic imaginary bears a family resemblance to psychoanalytic Marxist arguments about the relationship of the imaginary to ideology. But in its continual insistence that the imaginary is a crucial component of the material infrastructure that allows cultural objects to function in the first place, and on the strange continuity of the networks of prototypes, parallels, clones, and failures that surround and inform all technological objects, it’s closer to a Kittlerian discourse network on the media-­archaeological formulation of imaginary media.5 Because of the technocultural imaginary that’s part of their infrastructure, institutions like libraries, museums, studios, and labs shift the time, space, and shape of what’s possible within them.6 This shift corresponds to the media-­theoretical narrative of the emergence of technical media: “Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts, become technically reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination. Our realm of the dead has withdrawn from the books in which it resided for so long.”7 Like Kittler and other media scholars who owe a debt to Foucault, Mullaney proposes an agonistic stance in which the goal is not to produce a totalizing explanation but to embrace the differences, inconsistencies, and impossibilities that actively produce history “and to eschew all expectations that the act of critical reflexivity has the power to liberate us” from our assumptions about technolinguistic modernity.8 Independent of his impressive work on the Chinese typewriter itself, Mullaney’s approach provides several major insights about the technolinguistic imaginary. One is that the imaginary has enormous circulatory power; it crosses vast temporal and spatial gulfs that

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would not be possible for the physical apparatuses themselves to manage.9 Another is that the technolinguistic imagination does as much to delimit our notion of the possible as it does to encourage it, casting alternative and aberrant technologies into disrepute. In extreme cases, like the Chinese typewriter itself, the result is a hegemonic “technolinguistic monoculture” where anything except new versions of the same become unthinkable.10 So how does this play out in contemporary hybrid lab spaces? This chapter tackles the lab imaginary by situating labs as speculative spaces that are not just places of knowledge production but also places of recreation, imagination, and activism. We then discuss the ambivalence of lab imaginaries. Among other pressing issues, we attend to the ways in which the lab imaginary’s temporality is unevenly distributed, with some parts of it lagging behind the times and others oriented toward distant possible futures. In order to assess the impact of entrepreneurial media lab discourse on the contemporary lab imaginary, we examine its articulation to the Californian Ideology. We conclude, in a similar vein, with a discussion of how the role of university labs has changed after the discourse of entrepreneurship. Now that many universities have shifted from imagining themselves as custodians of historical knowledge to being incubators for start-­ups and fashioners of the entrepreneurs that fill them, what are the implications for academic researchers as well as for the public audience for their research?

SPECULATIVE SPACES As long as there have been modern laboratories, there have been lab imaginaries—­the visions that lab denizens have of how they would like their spaces and practices to be perceived by those outside their communities, and of how they would like to believe their own spaces and practices function. This process of envisioning, sometimes presented quite literally as a “vision” or “mission statement,” is an unavoidable element of all lab spaces, from early science labs to contemporary hybrid labs. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, one of the works that define the field of science and technology studies, goes into significant detail about the importance of the imaginary to the emergence of the first modern experimental laboratories in the mid-­seventeenth century; it also

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provides a solid set of ideas for how to discuss the imaginaries of more recent labs. Experimental space was itself an imaginary solution to a range of social issues. Early experimentalists spent an enormous amount of time and energy publicizing “experimental spaces as useful: to identify problems in Restoration society to which the work of the experimental philosopher could provide the solutions.”11 More specifically, seventeenth-­century experimentalists imagined themselves as the solution to the general problem of civil unrest: “They presented their own community as an ideal society where dispute could occur safely and where subversive errors were quickly corrected. Their ideal society was distinguished by the source of authority the experimenters recommended. . . . No isolated powerful individual authority should impose belief. The potency of knowledge came from nature, not from privileged persons” (298). These experimental spaces and their scientists also employed a variety of techniques, many of which were literary in nature. Early writing about laboratories occurred in great volume and in a number of formats, from books, broadsides, pamphlets, and lectures to personal correspondence. The idea of the witnessing of experiments, and subsequent testimony from witnesses as to their merits, was central to the process by which a laboratory produced new knowledge in the form of “matters of fact” (39). While witnesses had to be fellow experimentalists of a certain moral standing, they did not actually need to be physically present if experimentalists could produce descriptive literature that would theoretically allow readers to reproduce the experiment, or even imagine reproducing it. In other words, the regulation of experience, conduct, and practice was and has always been part and parcel of the moral economy of labs and other spaces of knowledge production.12 One early key element of the lab imaginary is what Shapin and Schaffer call “virtual witnessing,” which is a technique that consists of “production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication” (60). In effect, the reader realizes the experiment in “the laboratory of the mind” (60). Because the audience for virtual witnessing is theoretically unlimited, it was, in the eyes of the experimentalists, “the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact” (60). In order to create a degree of trust and assurance that

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would guarantee to the reader’s satisfaction that the experiment took place in the way it was described, Boyle and his colleagues would, for example, deliberately develop a verbose, ornate prose style “with appositive clauses piled on top of each other” as a way to provide context through a surfeit of information (63). As in later realist fiction, the extra details created a sense of verisimilitude in the reader. Another technique they employed was the use of highly detailed engravings rather than simple line diagrams to illustrate accounts of their experiments. These engravings provided a naturalistic representation of the objects in an experiment which in turn acted as reinforcement for “the imaginative witness provided by the words in the text” (61–­62). Relaying the details of failed experiments as well as successful ones was also part of virtual witnessing as a technique. It “allayed anxieties” in aspiring experimentalists and reassured them that everyone makes mistakes; it also anticipated criticism from those who would argue that experimentalists cherry-­picked their own results (64). The net result of these techniques was a powerful lab imaginary that allowed experimental natural philosophy to prevail during a historically precarious moment. Such an account is compelling for many reasons, but for this chapter it is especially relevant in that it describes how the lab imaginary emerges from cultural techniques that ground imaginaries in material practices. In recent decades, increasing numbers of humanities and media institutions have pitched themselves as “labs” in a wide range of fields that do not traditionally utilize lab structures or methods, including (but far from limited to) fields such as design, fine arts, the digital humanities, and a media-­archaeological reverse-­ engineering of technologies and cultural narratives about technology. The Paris-­based artists Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt, who form the duo Bureau d’études, speak of a “laboratory planet,” which, besides designating the twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century science-­military-­entertainment-­university complex as the defining planetary situation that installs infrastructures of power and technology, also refers to the laboratorization of knowledge in general.13 As we pointed out in our Introduction, we now imagine the world as a lab, and that imaginary is a huge part of the discourse we use to justify smart cities, contemporary university institutions like incubators, and hacklabs.14 Such processes often rely on a technique that Michał Krzyżanowski dubs the “prelegitimation of practice,”

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which we can adapt to describe the process by which institutions and people justify their actions by presenting their visions of what they might do with a lab, given the resources they are requesting. Even in a historical moment when we are so saturated with labs that it’s tempting to not use the term as a form of distinction at all, having a lab (or even wanting one) nevertheless lends an aura of legitimacy to a research agenda. Prelegitimation techniques can be difficult to spot precisely because they are drawn from “experience-­like aspects” of social discourse about a given subject—­and once again, lab discourse is all around us. Such prelegitimation practices can also be problematic because they play a significant role in creating a sense that the person employing these strategies is an expert.15 An alternative strategy to building a sense of expertise and prestige is through what Thomas F. Gieryn calls “boundary work” in an article titled “Boundary-­Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-­science.” For Gieryn, boundary work consists of “ideological efforts by scientists to distinguish their work and its products from non-­intellectual scientific activities.”16 Boundary work is often subtle, because it doesn’t operate in a directly accusatory fashion. Instead, it involves attributing certain characteristics to science as an institution in order to identify other activities as nonscientific (782). What’s particularly intriguing about Gieryn’s argument is that the characteristics that boundary work attributes to science are not always consistent; they vary according to the perceived threat, and can even contradict each other (786). For example, in a discussion of the writings of the Victorian scientist John Tyndall, superintendent at the Royal Institution in London, Gieryn notes that Tyndall struggled to differentiate science from its foes in both religion and engineering in order to garner more public support: The characteristics [Tyndall] attributed to science were different for each boundary: scientific knowledge is empirical when contrasted with the metaphysical knowledge of religion, but theoretical when contrasted with the common-­sense, hands-­on observations of mechanicians; science is justified by its practical utility when compared to the merely poetic contributions of religion, but science is justified by its nobler uses as a means of “pure” culture and discipline when compared to engineering. (787)

We have already noted the ambivalence of lab discourse in our chapters on lab space and lab people. Gieryn insists that this deep

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ambivalence is constitutive not only of labs but of science more generally: “Scientific knowledge is at once theoretical and empirical, pure and applied, objective and subjective, exact and estimative, democratic (open for all to confirm) and elitist (experts alone confirm), limitless and limited (to certain domains of knowledge)” (792). Scientists engaging in boundary work are therefore not being cynical, but they are employing an inherent structural feature of science to advance their interests. The question that arises is, how do we engage in good-­faith discussion about technological and research practice in media and design labs while acknowledging, on the one hand, that these are not just places of knowledge production but also places of recreation, imagination, and activism, and also, on the other hand, that science labs are not inherently any different?17 Such a question cannot be fully resolved in a single chapter, as it touches on the assumed tensions between regularity and unexpected outcomes, experimentation and standardization, creativity and routine, and other sorts of binaries that inform the techniques that culture uses to maintain the barrier between scientific and artistic activity. In order to avoid making assumptions about the legitimacy of various kinds of knowledge-­ producing activities (including creative ones), we need critical maps of laboratory practices that recognize the complexity of the issue.

AMBIVALENT LAB IMAGINARIES Over the course of the twentieth century, laboratories became a core feature of engineering, chemical, and physical science activity, but also of business. As we have touched on throughout this book, Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was a hub of creative engineering and business ventures, but it was also the much-­discussed and -­debated source of a particular lab imaginary (while the laboratory of Nikola Tesla became a parallel sort of mythological space, where a lone male “wizard” created technological marvels).18 The place of invention was a site of imagination whose connotations resonated with those of the studio (creativity) and the library (the history of knowledge production), but it also carried a distinct experimental heritage and a set of emergent business practices with it. Edison was a symptomatic figure, managing to be both an idealized lone genius and the busy manager of a collective of experts and facilities. Even

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before Menlo Park, Edison was acutely aware that this early version of a media lab would need sufficient infrastructure, calling for “every conceivable variety of Electric Apparatus, and any quantity of Chemicals for experimentation.”19 Quite aptly, like a commentary track to Edison, in fictional accounts such as Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), the emerging “lab imaginary” was also defined by the interplay between the obsessed genius of the inventor and the lab crammed full of apparatus, linking to our discussion in chapter 2: “Here and there about the room one might glimpse, atop the cluttered tables, various precision instruments, intricate and obscure gear-­boxes, electrical apparatus, telescopes, mirrors, enormous magnets, retorts amid a tangle of tubes, flasks full of mysterious fluids, and slates scrawled over with equations.”20 It was not only the technical apparatus—­ imaginary and material—­that defined the emerging tech lab. New forms of management techniques (see our discussion of management techniques in relation to the MIT Media Lab in chapter 4) and infrastructure also defined the emerging methods of twentieth-­century science/ engineering/media.21 Most people are familiar with Edison’s sobriquet “The Wizard of Menlo Park”; that aspect of his contribution to the lab imaginary—­the inventor as possessor of near-­magical powers—­is clearly visible today in all forms of popular media. André Millard has written extensively on the techniques and practices that sustain the myth of Edison’s laboratory wizardry which may not be quite as exciting, but are at least as important. Millard argues that Edison invented both industrial research and the method for managing a diversified business based on that research.22 What Millard means by “industrial research” is nearly identical to the process that would dominate work at Bell Labs and other industrial labs in the mid-­twentieth century. Edison did not merely invent things and patent them; he labored to develop them into a “factory-­ready prototype” and then manufacture them until he could sell the entire package to an interested business. His “invention factory” at Menlo Park produced a steady stream of prototypes, but it also innovated on his existing products in order to drive production costs down. This technique has had an enduring legacy. Mervin Kelly of Bell Labs would later aphorize the goal of continuous innovation in the lab as products that were “better, or cheaper, or both.”23 Later, Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo’s famed head of research and development,

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referred to this practice as “lateral thinking for withered technology,” a technique that allowed the company to produce startling degrees of commercial success, earning a reputation for innovation at the same time it was using cheap stock or obsolete components in its products.24 Before long, Edison was not just making consumer products but vertically integrating the entire manufacturing process, from extracting and refining raw materials to dedicating whole factories to the production of each new product.25 He was not so much inventing individual devices as he was inventing entire processes for producing them. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it early in the twentieth century, isolated technologies like the steam engine define the special advanced nature of modernity, but they also define the method itself: “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”26 In order to manage all this commercial activity, Edison formed TAE Inc. in 1910. TAE policy laid out a decentralized, multidivisional structure. It was intended to move decision making closer to the customer by giving middle managers the opportunity to exercise their special technical or marketing skills. As Millard notes in “Thomas Edison and the Theory and Practice of Innovation,” it created channels for their input within the organization, providing the timely information with which to better apply the engineering and manufacturing resources of TAE Inc. to a changing market situation (196). Once a general policy was in place, division managers had “as wide latitude as possible.” Though it’s not usually described in business literature, Millard notes that “Edison’s policy of diversification came two decades before those of Du Pont or General Motors,” and “his move to a divisional structure [March 15, 1915] precedes theirs by several years” (197). The divisional structure of TAE was visionary, but that didn’t mean Edison ran it well. He is notorious “as the architect of some of America’s greatest business failures,” chiefly because he didn’t let the diversified structure do its work (191). As a result of frequently overruling the very manager he had hired to be independent, making decisions not to move into radio and electronic recording, and relying on his own decidedly conservative tastes in terms of media content, his organization backslid from “twentieth century enlightened management to nineteenth century capitalism” (197).

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It’s intriguing that Edison managed to turn even his shortcomings as a businessman into an enduring part of the lab imaginary. After noting that Edison “attempted to downplay his role as a businessman by stressing the fact that he was an inventor who preferred to stay in his laboratory,” and that “he was forced into financing inventions and building factories because entrepreneurs were too timid to do the job,” Millard flatly states that “this story, like many others concocted by Edison, was simply untrue.” Rather, “it was part of his successful creation of an Edison myth and a ploy to keep him out of the litigation that invariably accompanied his business activities” (192). In other words, the fantasy of the scientist who is hopeless with practical matters like administrative tasks is not only part of the larger lab assemblage; it also sustains that assemblage in important ways, allowing it to avoid certain kinds of oversight. Though this strategy succeeded for a time, Millard notes that by the late 1920s there was a widening “gulf ” between Edison’s wizardly image and the reality of his failing businesses (197). What remained in the lab imaginary for most of the twentieth century, and is arguably still present, was not the importance of a solid set of organizational principles but a certain kind of license that shields those engaged in pure research from the drudgery of practical concerns. Because of Edison and Tesla, the lab imaginary thickened and spread. Lab discourse became an inextricable add-­on to the experimental product itself. The institutionalization of labs across the twentieth century (from Bell Labs to Silicon Valley design labs, from PARC to various forms of MIT institutions, to the hacklab and creative lab scenes in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s) became crucial for the understanding of media innovation. The massive financial investment in many forms of labs, especially in the United States, ran parallel to the massive, hyperbolic rhetoric that many of the places gained with their products. Latour describes the power of the laboratory in terms of its scale-­ shifting abilities. The lab gathers its special powers from its ability to scale the connections from its experiments to the outside world. Latour discusses the particular ability of labs to take advantage of scale in terms of Louis Pasteur’s nineteenth-­century microbe farming and its massive social consequences. Developing techniques to manipulate temporality and recursion is key. The powers of the lab reside “in the special construction of laboratories in a manner which

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reverses the scale of phenomena so as to make things readable, and then accelerates the frequency of trials, allowing many mistakes to be made and registered.”27 Latour’s discussion attends specifically to the particular situations of that scientific practice and its relevance for issues of health, farms, animals, and more—­a whole bundle of material and narrative factors emerge from his work. As he elaborates, the laboratory’s apparent containment by way of a notion of inside/outside is relevant because “the laboratory positions itself precisely so as to reproduce inside its walls an event that seems to be happening only outside.”28 Both the material experiments and the imaginary of the late-­ nineteenth-­and early-­ twentieth-­ century labs already involved massive back-­and-­forth scalar operations. These shifts in scale included bridging the assumed separation between science and the social world, as Latour acknowledges, but also other sorts of complex shifts. Consider, for example, how the scientific authority of representation and practice was entangled with parapsychological practices, and vice versa. As Eric Kluitenberg observes in his work on Edison and Tesla and their respective interests in the occult, “the dividing line between inventiveness and the imaginary is ambiguous and often porous.”29 Kluitenberg admits that it’s entirely possible that the two “wizards” were engaged in an arms race of occult discourse, exploiting the general fuzzy understanding of the difference between science and magic by making “bogus claims that spurred the public imagination, referencing the supernatural with their costly technical ventures.”30 But with Edison in particular, Kluitenberg ends on an almost tragic note, seeing Edison’s “appropriation of the language of scientific rationality” for mediumistic purposes as part of an understandable desire to avoid the finality of death.31 This, too, is a kind of imaginary boundary work. However, the attempt to apply lab discourse to an irrational object does not necessarily make the object more rational; lab discourse can even cause further occult discourse to proliferate. In other words, the wider cultural context of inventing invention was full of both real and imaginary machines, from occult labs to the wildly imaginative ones such as Edison’s and Tesla’s. As Ghislain Thibault argues, it is necessary to understand that from the parascientific to the other spectrum of invention, visual inscription techniques and similar forms of technical demonstration were there to provide public scientific legitimacy.32

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In many cases, the authority of lab discourse has been deployed to legitimize or prelegitimize the practices of parapsychology. As in the case of Albert von Schrenck-­Notzing’s parapsychological laboratory, these sites were also self-­nominated labs. In many ways, the discourse around such spaces reveals key traits of what the lab was imagined—­and thus constructed—­to be around 1900: it needed apparatuses that register facts beyond the fallible human observer; it trained the experimental subject according to right protocols; it established a discourse about objects of experimental knowledge that can then circulate; and it attempted to stabilize the disciplines through such infrastructural arrangements of technologies and people.33 This does not mean von Schrenck-­Notzing was successful, but the way that the parapsychological lab performed its own view of scientific space and discourse is worth considering in some detail.

CASE STUDY: HYBRID SPACES OF EXPERIMENTATION AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY Hybrid spaces of experimentation and parapsychology offer another entry point into twentieth-­and early-­twenty-­first-­century lab imaginaries. In 1942, almost a century after the Fox sisters kicked off the first wave of modern spiritualism with their knockings and rappings, and some fifty years after the “Ghost Baron” von Schrenck-­Notzing’s lab, the life’s work of Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, a prominent scientific and public figure in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was published in a book with the ponderous title Intention and Survival: Psychical Research Studies and the Bearing of Intentional Actions by Trance Personalities on the Problem of Human Survival.34 Hamilton was a member of the surgical staff at Winnipeg General Hospital, a faculty member at the University of Manitoba, president of the Manitoba Medical Association, and a member of the Manitoba Legislative Association from 1915 to 1920—­the epitome of good citizenship and scientific rationality. From 1918 to his death in 1935, Hamilton’s chief interest was spiritualism. An entire hauntological book could be written about Hamilton, as he generated an extraordinary amount of documentation—­more than thirteen hundred notes and seven hundred images—­now gathered in the Hamilton Family fonds at the University of Manitoba.35 In Intention and Survival, lab discourse shapes the reader’s sense

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of the proceedings throughout: séances are “experiments” (2–­11 passim) and participants are “experimenters” (14–­215 passim); supernatural entities are “communicators” (1–­5 passim). When the various mediums begin to exude viscous substances in much the way a camera exudes developed film, it’s overwhelmingly described as “teleplasm” rather than “ectoplasm,” with the prefix “tele-­” emphasizing its role as a literal medium for communication over a distance, likely to include “simulacra” (embedded photographic images) (5–­53 passim). Teleplasm is an impossible hybrid object, a physical manifestation of the medium but also something unearthly, intended to be seen rather than touched.36 Handling it, the Hamiltons suggest, might cause the medium who exudes it to suffer “nervous shock,” which places an “ethical responsibility” on the “sincere investigator.” The potential of such a nervous shock produces a significant gap in the empiricism that guided these experimenters, where superstition

Figure 34. “Imitative Teleplasm, Miniature Face.” Annotated photograph from the séance of September 22, 1929. A likeness of W. E. Gladstone is apparent in the ectoplasmic apparition. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Hamilton Family fonds.

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trumps scientific method, because the interdiction in Intention and Survival is absolute: “It marks one of the boundaries of his experimental technique” (9). The only person other than Hamilton who was present throughout all of the experiments was Lillian Hamilton, his wife, who “took notes occasionally and did much of the secretarial work involved in the maintenance and analysis of records” (25). In addition to Lillian Hamilton’s notes (handwritten and in subsequent typewritten transcripts), “From time to time special scrutineers and observers submitted signed reports and on several occasions each individual present made a witnessed statement which covered all the pertinent facts of the occasion” (38)—­a process reminiscent of Shapin and Schaffer’s real and virtual witnessing. Other “non-­psychic participants” lent their scientific, technical, and academic authority to the group: Mr. H. A. Reed, “a telephonic engineer holding a very responsible position with the provincial telephone system”; Dr. J. A. Hamilton, T. G. Hamilton’s brother; and “Miss Ada Turner, M.A., head of the English Department of one of the larger secondary schools of the city” (25). The mediums require special mention because they are hybrids, somewhere in between being a participant and being part of the lab apparatus. Intention and Survival claims that the four mediums who worked with the group over the years—­Mary M. (or Mrs. Marshall); Mercedes (Mrs. Samuel Marshall, Mary M.’s sister-­in-­law); Ewan (“whose name we have been requested to withhold for personal reasons, is a man of university training in one of the professions”); and Elizabeth M. (Mrs. Poole)—­“did not hold any specific conscious intention towards the production of teleplasm” (26, 30, 31, 92, 26). The ambivalence of the mediums is reflected in the convention of them all having two names (a mundane name and a medium name), but Ewan was also explicitly skeptical of this own abilities: “He very consciously and actively maintained a hypercritical attitude towards his own and other trance products, professing doubt in their intrinsic value and heaping ironic derision upon many of the more bizarre effects” (30). The group refers to the entities that manifest themselves through the mediums as “controls,” imposing scientific legitimacy over cultural squeamishness.37 Likewise, the nonpsychic experimenters “controlled” the medium by inspecting their upper body, then holding their hands “in order to satisfy themselves that no

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substance was on or near these parts at that time and that, further, by the fact of the vigilant control which they exercised, no substance could have been placed on or near those parts by normal physical means” (37). A specially prepared hybrid laboratory/séance room on the second floor of Hamilton’s home produced hundreds of photographs to accompany Lillian Hamilton’s notes.38 The cultural techniques the researchers employed fall somewhere between spiritualism and science: Intention and Survival notes that “singing during séances was regularly practiced. Apart from an imagined loss of dignity in scientific investigation this technique is perfectly admissible” (24). The séance room/lab’s windows were boarded over, and the room was locked between experiments and barred from the inside during séances (34). The furniture was simple, but the lab apparatus was not. It’s instructive to compare the three different extant records of

Figure 35. A page from an annotated photo album featuring a listing and identification of camera equipment utilized during séances at the Hamilton home. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Hamilton Family fonds.

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this space, because the print description and the architectural “view and plan” of the séance room each leave very different impressions than the photograph of it. The print descriptions of the setup that appear in various places, like much lab discourse, describes the equipment in passive voice to remove any sense of subjective agency—­“ The battery of cameras

Figure 36. A diagram of the room in the Hamilton home where séances were conducted. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Hamilton Family fonds.

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included a number using 5 x 7-­inch plates; two stereoscopic cameras; one camera fitted with a wide-­angle lens and another equipped with a quartz lens” (34). In the fonds there are multiple typed, numbered lists specifying camera makes, models, and capabilities. Likewise, the two-­dimensional plan provides names and locations of participants (who are also part of the lab apparatus) as well as locations and descriptions of the photographic apparatus, the phonograph, the three flash devices and their trigger, ventilation, and so on (35). The plate showing “Arrangement of cameras,” on the other hand, presents a haphazard arrangement of a motley assortment of photographic devices that raises more questions than it answers (36). The statement that “development of the plates was ordinarily done by Dr. Hamilton” raises eyebrows, as does Intention and Survival’s rhetorical question about how the participants knew where to focus the various cameras: “How did we know where to focus the cameras, and in the second place, when to release the flashlight? Astonishing as it may seem, days, weeks, and sometimes months in advance we were informed by the leading trance entity at what point the coming phenomena would in all likelihood appear” (34, 23).

Figure 37. A photograph of the cameras and equipment used to take photographs of séances held at the Hamilton home. University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections—­Hamilton Family fonds.

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The lab discourse of Intention and Survival presents all of the preceding as incontrovertible evidence that Hamilton’s production of matters of fact adhered to the most scrupulous scientific criteria. The text would have it that the sum total of research material that Hamilton and his associates produced is nothing more or less than thick description: The internal evidence borne by the teleplasms themselves, the complexity of the group mediumship, the nature and reactions of the trance states all indicate that we are here dealing with a mass of facts so inextricably interlocked and so impossible to simulate, that to suggest fraud as an explanation is simply to show a bias against the theoretically unacceptable instead of a favor for the descriptive, empirical truth. (33)

However, Hamilton’s practice was already an atavism. As Daniel Wojcik points out, most scholarly accounts of this form of spirit photography see it as having drawn to a close by the 1930s “because of the exposés of fraudulent photographers, the overall demise in Spiritualism and materialization phenomena, an increase in photographic literacy, and the seeming banality of such images.”39 From a twenty-­first-­century perspective, the question is not whether the images that Hamilton and his fellow experimenters produced look quaint when compared to AI-­generated deep fakes, but about how this hybrid lab generated materials and discourse that perpetuated a long-­standing aspect of the lab imaginary. The assemblage of lab imaginary, space, apparatus, people, technique, and discourse at work in this case was potent enough that even long after the heyday of spirit photography, it was able to produce things that looked much like matters of fact to many of Hamilton’s contemporaries.40

CASE STUDY: BELL LABS, A FACTORY FOR IDEAS The lab imaginary, then, has always been unevenly distributed, with some parts of it lagging behind the times and others oriented toward distant futures. In terms of the latter, consider a very different sort of a lab that was operating during the same period that Hamilton was photographing teleplasms. It’s impossible to think about mid-­ twentieth-­century North American labs and the lab imaginary without mentioning Bell Labs, which institutionalized the media lab form at a national level and set a standard for “big media science”

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for decades. As Jon Gertner details in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, traces of its vast and impressive infrastructural legacy are still omnipresent in the United States (339). Its influence on the imaginary of today’s hybrid labs also remains strong. It’s easy to understand on a commonsense level that Bell Labs played a significant role in the development of the imaginary of networked computing. What’s eye-­opening is the way the discourse of creativity was cemented into the lab imaginary at the point of its commercialization. At Bell Labs, Gertner writes, “the men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what [lab president Mervin] Kelly once called ‘an institute of creative technology.’ . . . They were paid for their imaginative abilities” (3). In line with Peter Galison and Caroline Jones’s thesis about both modern laboratory and studio taking the factory as their common model, Gertner takes science fiction writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that while Bell’s main laboratory looked like a factory, it was “a factory for ideas,” as the title for his book indicates.41 Within the walls of Bell’s various buildings, creativity took the form of “basic research.” Much university lab research is “basic” in the sense that it is not instrumental in nature, but that surprises no one. At Bell Labs, basic research was suddenly, startlingly visible against the backdrop of applied research, “which was defined as the kind of investigation done with a specific product or goal in mind” (28–­29). Successful applied research led to the development, manufacture, and widespread implementation of new products, which was the mission for the lab. In the sense that Kelly and his successors at Bell defined the term, though, “basic research” was more than research without any immediate application. It was also a set of specific policy decisions and techniques that were as romantic as they were effective because they permitted a kind of work that was, on paper, totally outside the organization’s mandate (28–­29). Gertner situates Kelly’s use of the term “basic research” in reference to lab policies that he formulated around the work behaviors of Kelly’s colleague Clinton J. Davisson (28–­29). Gertner writes that Davisson “was allowed” to eschew any sort of service commitment in the form of management work or teamwork. Either on his own or as part of a small informal team, at an “unhurried” pace, he pursued “only projects that aroused his interest” with apparently little

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regard for the larger mission of the lab to serve the business interests of the phone company (30). Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this basic research policy was Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory. Gertner notes that, even long after the publication of Shannon’s field-­defining work, “he was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist” (145). Not only was Shannon allowed the rare privilege of working with his office door closed, but after 1955 he spent much of his time building toys and games and pursuing hobbies like juggling and unicycle riding (132, 319–­25). In interviews, Shannon gave Bell Labs as an institution a significant amount of credit for the formation of his most famous work, but as Gertner notes, in this environment he had almost no incentive to publish in his later years (153, 321). It’s no coincidence that Shannon’s eccentric period occurs during what we now think of as the “Mad Men” moment in U.S. popular culture. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank quotes the following excerpt from one of the various pamphlets and chapbooks by advertising executive Bill Bernbach, the “ideologue of disorder” who was one of the inspirations for Don Draper and company: “Even among the scientists, men who are regarded as worshippers of facts, the real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”42 This idea of the formerly sober businessman or scientist as a rebellious romantic poet was eminently salable. It’s not that Bell Labs was unable to capitalize on Shannon’s later, quirkier activities. Objects like his toy mouse, Theseus, and the accompanying labyrinth that it navigated paid off in huge amounts of positive press for the lab in a way that information theory itself never produced. Even today, it continues to circulate as an object of public interest, at exhibitions like the Lab Cult show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Too often, intellectual history has been structured around the figure of the quirky male inventor, without either accounting for his privilege or allowing for the space to discuss the broader constitution of people and labs.43 Beyond the pressing questions of race, gender, sex, and class, lab denizens in general have retained the reputation for eccentricity that characterizes stories about the Bell Labs pure research employees, and the activities of many hybrid labs (particularly those that don’t make effective use of the codeswitching umbrella we touch on in the

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Figure 38. Claude Shannon’s toy mouse, Theseus, in its labyrinth. Photograph by Darren Wershler, taken at Lab Cult, Centre for Canadian Architecture, September 1, 2018.

Introduction and in chapter 4) may remain bemusing to outsiders. But, returning to Gertner’s book, other, more salutary aspects of the Bell Labs imaginary have persisted in how we think about labs today. One such idea is the belief that interdisciplinary teams create better conditions for research than individuals or small specialized teams (33, 79). Another has to do with the questions of when and where we expect laboratory research to pay off—­as well as for whom and on what scale. The Bell Labs imaginary had a distinct temporality to it, oriented “not only for the near term but for a future far, far away” (19). Of course, the spirit of “inventing the future” becomes the central line in the MIT Media Lab brand. At a moment when research results and “impact” are gaining greater currency by the day as a measure of intellectual efficacy, it’s good to remember that the interests of the market (even the scholarly market) in immediately tangible results don’t necessarily align with the public interest. From the time of Theodore Vail, its first president (1907), Bell Labs not only imagined its research questions in decades instead of years

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but merged “the idea of technological leadership with a broad civic vision” (20). Perhaps the emerging world of hybrid labs will help to restore our sense of the public good in research culture.

LAB DISCOURSE AND THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY As we have argued so far, the output of labs is a thick network of objects, practices, people, discourses, and fantasies that has material impact across the cultural field. Imaginaries persist on multiple levels, and one of them is how they entangle with material infrastructures. In other words, imaginaries manifest as collective representations or values, but they also affect how the world takes shape. At the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first, the lab imaginary continues to shift, morphing from enclosed idea factories into entire geographies of ideas, like Silicon Valley and Richard Florida’s “creative cities,” and into even larger and more dispersed networks of ideas.44 These institutions and assemblages continue to articulate versions of the technocultural imaginary that structure our everyday habits of thought and discourse. The language of networking and connectivity is everywhere in contemporary culture, from philosophy to business manuals, and has been for some time. It’s worth considering what happened to the lab imaginary in particular when it was hybridized by an entrepreneurial media lab discourse that emphasizes networks as a structuring principle. Though this process occurred in many places more or less during the same era, California played a special role. As a result, even in the 1960s, popular discourse positioned the state itself as a kind of laboratory. For example, one of the most famous and often-­repeated lines from photographer Dennis Stock’s recently republished 1968 photo book California Trip is “Our future is being determined in the lab out West.”45 Almost thirty years later, in 1995, in a prescient article titled “The Californian Ideology,” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron delineated the current dominant version of the lab imaginary at the moment of its emergence. For Barbrook and Cameron, the Californian Ideology is the “hybrid faith” of the digital era, a potent mix of “the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” soldered together by a shared “profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”46

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It was written in an attempt to understand the “lived experience” of the fixed-­term contract workers who have always comprised the tech sector’s labor pool.47 Briefly, the Californian Ideology promises that digital tech will simultaneously give everyone a shot at becoming a successful entrepreneur and dissolve the checks and balances of the state, replacing the latter with “unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software” in a barely regulated market.48 As such, even though it evokes hippie ideals of emancipation, there is a marked “rightwards drift” in the Californian Ideology, away from the ideal of the public good toward radical individualism.49 The Californian Ideology argument is sympathetic with Evgeny Morozov’s discussions about solutionism (see chapter 4) as well as David Golumbia’s argument about how “computationalism” and the core belief that “computers empower users” is enormously useful to governments, corporations, schools, and other institutions that wield power and shape individuals.50 Labs (especially media labs) play a significant role in the development and propagation of the Californian Ideology. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism provides the best account of this process. Turner argues that hippies and other members of the 1960s counterculture “imagined themselves as part of a massive, geographically distributed, generational experiment. The world was their laboratory.” With the drugs, computers, stereos, and the other new technologies and gadgets available to consumer society, the counterculture of this era believed they could act as both researchers and their own objects of study, usurping the world-­ saving project that the military-­industrial complex had begun long before.51 Turner further argues that since the 1960s “the knowledge-­ based principles of production, the organizational styles, and the information technologies of the military research laboratory have in fact proliferated” precisely because of the counterculture, which stripped them of their ominous ambience and re-­presented them as something like a force of nature.52 Turner’s entire book is deeply relevant to our interests here, but we want to draw particular attention to his work on the role of the MIT Radiation Laboratory because of its importance for the aspects of the lab imaginary that inspired the 1960s counterculture and fed directly into the Californian Ideology. The Rad Lab was founded in

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1940 as part of the U.S. war effort, not as a single space but as “a collection of interlinked research projects housed together at MIT.” Its many engineers, mathematicians, scientists, designers, and government planners worked together on radar, navigation, and antiaircraft gun-­aiming technologies. Like the basic research sections of Bell Labs, “the Rad Lab was a site of flexible, collaborative work and a distinctly nonhierarchical management style,” even though it was housed within and supported by several large bureaucracies. Turner notes that “entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged”; specialists became competent generalists, capable of designing and building as well as theorizing. Unlike the privileged basic researchers at Bell, though, Rad Lab denizens did their share of administrative and infrastructural work: even the scientists “had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through.”53 Because of the power and success of this type of lab discourse, by the early twenty-­first century people in many university labs had come to speak of themselves as entrepreneurs.

THE UNIVERSITY LAB AFTER ENTREPRENEURSHIP As the lab imaginary began to absorb the Californian Ideology and related ideas, university discourse as a whole also changed. Many universities have shifted from imagining themselves as custodians of historical knowledge to being incubators for start-­ups and fashioners of the entrepreneurs that fill them. That process brings with it serious implications not only for academic researchers but for the public audience for their research. Brian Holmes argues that the entrepreneurial professor and its close companion, the university as a serious player in the business world, have their relative beginnings in the 1970s, with the development of a specific research technique, followed by a piece of legislation that formalized the policy decisions proceeding from that invention. Holmes writes that “the archaeology of the public university’s ruin” dates to 1973, when the Cohen-­Boyer method of gene-­splicing technique was invented at Stanford University and was subsequently privatized by the institution’s patent administrator. The combination of the invention of a primary research technique

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with the huge amount of money the patent netted ($300 million over seventeen years) guaranteed that university patent offices would become a significant component of research infrastructure in the decades that followed and that the amount of university research flowing directly into the public domain would begin to decrease.54 On the level of law and policy, Holmes argues that the 1980 Bayh-­Dole Act functions as “something like the genetic code of the corporate university,” because it codified “the increasingly prevalent practice of patenting and commercializing publicly funded research,” making the transfer of technology between the university and industry easier than ever before.55 The corporate university is also the entrepreneurial university that links closely with industries and constantly aims to lower the threshold of collaboration with external (commercial) partners. Indeed, the prototypical nature of the New American University (the Arizona Model), as Crow describes it, emphasizes networking and connectivity as core elements in the current neoliberal innovation discourse: Along with cutting-­edge research, universities that aspire to have broad impact are marked by a very high degree of connectivity, both internal and external. Such an ecosystem of networked connectivity creates many pathways for people to move ideas from conception to reality. When all of the elements are working together, one perceives a well-­rounded innovation infrastructure, and the university becomes part of a larger ecology of innovation.56

The production of both infrastructure and imaginaries of connected, co-­working, collaborative, and industry-­friendly staff and faculty is part of the modus operandi of this discourse. Another striking aspect of the Arizona Model’s imaginary is its vanguardism, which echoes traits we discussed in relation to the MIT Media Lab (see chapter 4). Crow and Dabars rail against “filiopietism”—­a scornful neologism they coined to describe the homogeneity that they believe results from the university’s “excessive veneration of tradition.”57 Instead, they consistently position their model as the epitome of an institutional avant-­garde because of its commitment to innovation.58 Many commentators over the last several decades, including Lev Manovich, have noted that this insistence on the production of difference and individuality is the way in which we are all now

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exactly the same.59 Manovich argues that it’s a consumer reaction that appears as a result of emerging networked forms of culture. Because the Arizona Model imagines itself in precisely this way, it’s hardly surprising that it would make such a claim. One of the problems that faces any hybrid lab attempting to do something other than business as usual is that what used to be the model of resistance has become the very model of control. The truth of interdisciplinarity is also the dismantling of departments and disciplinary priorities. Further, the fetishization of innovation has done substantial damage to the traditional functions of the university as memory institution and producer of citizens rather than employees. But all is not doom and gloom. Galison notes that the intense process of hybridization in the Rad Lab also produced its own lab discourses consisting of “local, shared sets of practices and terms, a ‘trading language’ aimed at solving problems in the borderland. . . . As the interdiscipline grows, the pidgin becomes a creole; that is, a language rich enough to allow someone to grow up within.”60 And, as Turner observes, just as the Rad Lab trading language helped to produce entire new fields outside its own research, like cybernetics, this book is itself part of the trading language of hybrid lab discourse in its early stages. Though we too might be infected by the Californian Ideology, we are not determined by it.61

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6 LAB TECHNIQUES

T

he chapters in this book so far have demonstrated that hybrid labs are a dynamic assemblage that binds together space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, and various kinds of imaginaries. Both social studies of science laboratories and studio studies of art and design have argued that material mediators (to use Antoine Hennion’s term) are a central part of this work of assembly.1 But the hybrid lab is also an entire toolbox of techniques—­material, symbolic, cultural, and bodily—­that define how objects and subjects come about. The deep entanglement of the laboratory assemblage became evident in our discussion of lab apparatus (chapter 2), which defines both the subjects and the objects involved. A lab is also constituted by the techniques that sustain it as a material and symbolic site of activity. These techniques are an important part of various genealogies of art and science, and their persistence over long periods of time is one of the factors that create family resemblances between labs and older spaces for the production of knowledge. But lab techniques do more than create historical connective tissue; they are also sites of hybridity and discontinuity. Sometimes techniques move laterally from one field into another. At other times, new techniques appear in relation to emergent technologies. On still other occasions, once-­ popular techniques can be abandoned completely for a range of reasons, from the ethical to intellectual to the pragmatic. Lab techniques are also a useful prism for the observation and analysis of the issues that hybrid labs raise in current technological culture. In this final chapter we roll out a brief and incomplete catalog—­something more akin to a demonstration of what such a catalog might look like—­of nine techniques: 3D printing,

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collaborating, collecting, dis/assembling, experimenting, failing, living labs, prototyping, and testing. All of the foregoing embody many of the themes throughout our book—­technique is just yet another way to understand how these aspects come together in the expanded lab model we propose. We have already discussed some aspects of lab techniques simply because addressing any one feature of the extended lab model involves implicating others. The way labs occupy space, their use of apparatus, and even administrative paperwork are all constitutive techniques that play roles in assembling labs, summoning people into them and transforming them into lab denizens, all while engaged in various acts of knowledge production. Research and teaching collections work in a similar manner, demonstrating not only how the objects they contain are organized into a collection but also that the collection organizes subjects into particular positions of knowledge. Many of the techniques we address in this chapter provide insights into the porous distinction—­more likely an interface—­between the lab’s “inside” work and how it links up with contemporary technological imaginaries and economies outside the lab. Techniques govern the insides and outsides of the lab, but they also sometimes carve out the space to become, in Peter Galison’s words, a trading zone for multidisciplinary alignments, discourses, and practices.2 Given the deeply hybrid and interdisciplinary nature of techniques, the fledgling set of key words we present here is meant to be introductory and suggestive, especially as we intend to continue expanding on this initial list of techniques on the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold platform for The Lab Book. We also know that labs construct consistent worlds with the help of the imaginaries they produce. Like art studios, labs function as hubs of creative discourse; but we want to approach their creativity as part of the way labs assemble and organize their space. In pragmatic terms, this organization occurs through specific practice-­ based forms of knowledge that, when bundled together, we refer to as “lab technique.” It’s worth devoting some time to observing how the studio employs objects and practices to produce material knowledge. As Farías and Wilkie emphasize, the studio is “not the place in which inventions are validated, evaluated and valorised”; it is more like a site of reverse engineering, because it picks apart experiments and

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puts “aesthetics in action” by focusing on the process more than the product.3 This idea of aesthetics in action is a particularly effective way of approaching lab activities, because we can expand it from aesthetics to assert that labs are sites that put materials in action as well as theory in action. As Cornelia Vismann articulates particularly well, cultural techniques manage things and subjects, material sites and their discursive range: “To inquire about cultural techniques is not to ask about the feasibility, success, chances and risks of certain innovations and inventions in the domain of the subject. Instead, it is to ask about the self-­management or autopraxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things, which determine the scope of the subject’s field of action.”4 This definition resonates with and responds to a similar body of work that deals with cultural practices of technology. Indeed, when Jonathan Sterne writes that “technologies are crystallized bits of practical art and practical reason—­they are techniques externalized and delegated to machines,” we are in a very similar territory, with the important caveat that it works the other way around as well: so-­called human practices are often crystallized bits of technological reason and infrastructure.5 The lab technique of “testing” is one important example: a broad modern epistemic disposition feeds into particular human actions that embody that disposition, in which testing, experimenting, trying out, rehearsing, and prototyping share a particular closeness as forms of material practice of knowledge. Discussion of both techniques and practices often leads to the Aristotelian term techné, which Sterne explains by way of musical example: “Creation and contingency are central to how we should understand techné. A simple example would be a musician’s ‘technique,’ which describes the practical sense that she bring to her instrument and the actual process through which she plays it. A musician’s technique encompasses both her actual movements and the practical, embodied knowledge she brings to the instrument.”6 Many of the examples in our short glossary of techniques exhibit this combination of embodiment with particular technological objects and specific practices. If we are paying close enough attention, it should also be possible to discern the infrastructures that guide the emergence of actions, perceptions, and movements. Creative practices of knowledge production bear a performative relation to

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what takes place as research and pedagogy. Because such techniques and practices are often relegated to a position as the silent components of knowledge, we are drawing attention to their considerable significance here.7

3D PRINTING Pithily defined, “3D printing is the social use of an industrial process” that brands the contemporary lab scene.8 As part of the contemporary lab’s bundle of prototyping, experimenting, and testing techniques, the 3D printer is a boundary object that mediates between different disciplinary attachments to the technology while opening up a space to consider the relation of technique and method.9 As a boundary object, it also performs one of the major functions of the hybrid lab: bringing people, expertise, and interests together around one site, whether that is a physical corner in the space or a more narrative site of projected uses, ideas, and potentials. 3D printing is a compelling case study of lab techniques, because it contains all the components of the contemporary hybrid lab in miniature. It is based on designing, distributing, and sharing ideas through code (STL files); it takes the form of other essential lab apparatus (the printer); it requires a relatively complex infrastructural supply chain to sustain the local application of technique (plastic filament and other consumable materials); it generates affects and collective situations (imaginaries) that bind people into temporary affiliations around projects; and it creates a long trail of documents in terms of research outputs, popular press, and gray literature. In the early twenty-­first century, the 3D printer and its earlier professional iterations, such as computer numerical control (CNC) machines, moved swiftly from the military-­industrial sphere to the counterculture, and from there were integrated into contemporary design and humanities institutions’ curricula. Now the 3D printer and related devices are a central part of the imaginary of the twenty-­ first-­century hybrid lab—­almost a cliché—­and one of the drivers of discussions about materiality, design, and infrastructure. As such, 3D printing is part of lab apparatus, technique, and method. Expectations of what it can accomplish are in constant “excess to what additive manufacturing reasonably achieves,” illustrating how deeply it is embedded in lab values and opportunities.10

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Figure 39. A few of the many 3D printers in the Mileux Makerspace, Concordia University, Montreal. Photograh by Darren Wershler.

It is worth spending some time considering the role that 3D printing plays in the contemporary lab imaginary. Discourse about 3D printers positions them as disruptive to the contemporary ecosystem of production, but not always in the same ways; these devices have been articulated to a wide range of points on the spectrum of political affiliations. From far-­right hate groups to contemporary art activism to national space laboratories, 3D printing carves out a niche of multiple overlapping, contradictory potentials in ways that make it more than an object and more akin to an infrastructure of desire: 3D printing circulates and assembles, conveys and catalyzes. Moreshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s “The 3D Additivist Manifesto” summons the imaginaries, infrastructures, and open potentials of 3D printing as part of a call for activist engagement that both recognizes the history of technologies and opens up collective use: “To mobilise this entanglement we propose a collective: one figured not only on the resolution of particular objects, but on the change those objects enable as instruments of revolution and systemic disintegration. Just as the printing press, radio, photocopier and modem were saturated

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with unintended affects, so we seek to express the potential encoded into every one of the 3D printer’s gears.”11 The call for collective use for 3D printing is the key aspect here, as a home usage case for 3D printing has yet to emerge, despite considerable hyperbole about its value, and in part because of growing evidence about carcinogenic emissions during the printing process.12 If 3D printing is to aid in the battle for technological sustainability rather than flood the landscape with even more disposable toxic plastic trinkets, its place will be in shared spaces for the time being. The Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab)13 at the University of Victoria is a compelling example of a hybrid lab that employs rapid prototyping as an integral, infrastructural part of its methods but in ways that are not “just” digital, because the MLab produces a range of material models and kits for media scholarship. Integrating contemporary design technologies with material media-­historical methodologies produces a set of spatial practices that effectively expand the scope of several academic fields. As Jentery Sayers explains, the “Kits for Cultural History” project “remakes technologies from the past, packages them in bespoke containers, contextualizes them with historical materials, and encourages people to disassemble and reassemble them in numerous ways.”14 These kits help researchers to pose a range of methodological questions that interrogate past technologies in terms of their uses, materials, intentions, and cultural contexts.

COLLABORATING While much of the discourse of making and hacktivism falls into the well-­established twentieth-­century DIY (do-­it-­yourself ) ethos of the hobbyist and the dedicated amateur, the activity in many contemporary hybrid labs has also been described with the acronym DIWO (do-­it-­with-­others)—­or, in a word, collaboration.15 The material activity of lab work has an epistemological side that points to the possibilities of collective work and to a bundle of related terms and activities: challenging, activating, sharing, co-­working, engaging, digging, deconstructing, (re)designing, and redefining.16 The lab is literally and figuratively at the center of collaboration, but collaboration is not always the same thing as inclusion or equity. At stake are issues of credit, credibility, and actionable knowledge

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that are defining a field of civic technoscience in a manner strikingly like that which Carolyn Marvin describes as the emergence of electrical expertise at the end of the nineteenth century.17 Collective work, including the collaborative making and remaking that characterizes much of contemporary technological culture, can and does redefine social ties and disciplinary relations. However, these new collectivities may exclude as well as include insofar as, for example, they may determine who is considered an amateur and who is an expert, and thus who is permitted to engage with the inner workings of machines, or who is credited during publication. Lab-­centered collaboration happens in many ways and across many levels of intensity. In addition to the more obvious collaborative activities associated with labs, such as group experimentation and project development, a shared discussion or reading group, a weekly team meeting, an email list, a joint article, or the well-­established format of the seminar are all collaborative activities that take place in and around many labs. Outside of academia, cryptoparties, hackathons, game jams, and other sorts of activities combine affective attachment with curiosity, expertise, dedication, and focus. These and other kinds of events create multiple informal ways of engaging with machines and social events around them, from coding and hardware hacking to knitting and weaving. As Daphne Dragona puts it, workshopping as an artistic methodology deployed in “artists spaces, media art centers, festivals, and other venues” has been able to combine education about particular technological skills such as exposing “technology’s inner workings” with forms of dissensus.18 In other words, collaborative activity becomes a way of articulating change. While Dragona outlines the significance of workshop formats in media arts of the past decade, her thinking also applies to critical hybrid labs more widely. In hybrid labs, questions of skill and social justice can be enacted in collective collaborative work. In such a scenario, pedagogy becomes a format for sharing technological equipment and space as well as a catalyst for wider social change. As we saw with the example of Bell Labs in chapter 5’s discussion of lab imaginaries, collaborating in the same space can redefine how we think of disciplinary ties. Particular administrative affiliations can place people with different interests and practices into the same space, producing a particular DIWO phenomenon that Marcel O’Gorman calls “elbow-­rubbing”:

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A laboratory, institute, or centre that promotes such exchanges, or even better, that promotes “elbow rubbing” between scholars with various research interests, is an effective way to foster cross-­disciplinary collaboration. Moreover, such collaboration requires scholars to question their own research methods. For example, the projects outlined here rely on the willingness of humanists, social scientists, and artists to take “things” more seriously, or perhaps to take things into their own hands.19

The power of elbow-­rubbing derives from the fact that conversation is a key technique that sustains the lab as a unit of interaction. Renaissance spaces of collection were admittedly a very different cultural and historical situation than modern laboratories, but they were already in many ways spaces of methodological interaction, or, in Paula Findlen’s words, “conversable spaces.”20 Drawing inspiration from early modern ars conversandi, it is fruitful to consider the current conversational spaces in labs as more than just occasions for chitchat.21 Conversations are not merely off-­the-­shelf tools for creating a discussion; they also include the possibility of critical pedagogy that can articulate individual experiences into a collective, political experience. Under these conditions, conversational spaces become forms of knowing. To return to the legacy of the seminar, the lab can be a space of debate and sharing, where words and discussions can feed into various forms of collective making. They may be a source of open-­ ended, aberrant notes on current projects that end up as conceptual riffs, or they can be a means of solidifying informal questions about this and that into concrete action with others. A minimum amount of framing can be enough to facilitate the switch from verbal exchange to critical epistemology as a (conversational) method. To quote Allucquére Rosanne Stone’s elaboration of collaborative activities that took place at the ACTLab: “During discussion period, which could be an intellectual free-­for-­all the only requirement of which was that ideas had to be backed up by evidence and, if appropriate, by critical analysis—­out of the blue someone would pop me a question about particle physics or organic chemistry or neurology, and, as accurately as I could, I’d pop back with an answer.”22 Finally, collective discussions are also a crucial aspect of the technique of collaborating. They are a potentially radical pedagogical form of collaboration that does not involve consolidating around a

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set hierarchical structure but instead emphasizes opening up new avenues of investigation. For example, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research has developed a tried-­and-­tested set of techniques for “an anti-­oppressive, horizontal, equity-­based meeting.”23 Their meeting techniques, which fall into the larger categories of facilitation, round robins, consensus-­based decision making (CBDM), and collaboration, consist of chains of more specific operations, which they have detailed in internal lab protocols. Protocols defining the operations involved in CBDM, which they derive from Tim Hartnett’s Consensus-­Oriented Decision-­Making,24 have been condensed into a “cheat sheet” freely downloadable from the lab website.25 Such techniques are formative of a lab as a dynamic entity of people, words, technologies, and interactions. As low tech of an approach as it might seem, it is important to understand how the often-­mentioned theme of sharing and collaborating are already nested in adjacent forms of university pedagogy.

COLLECTING Hybrid labs are often home to various kinds of research and teaching collections. As outlined briefly in chapter 2 (“Lab Apparatus”), research collections can be traced back at least to sixteenth-­century cabinets of curiosities and their subsequent incorporation into modern research spaces, including those in universities. Besides the library, which is largely a research collection of books, collections of objects such as mineralogical or biological specimens or scientific instruments and models were an important aspect of the infrastructure of academic knowledge practices. In disciplines such as archaeology and ethnology, research and teaching collections have long provided essential infrastructure within the social sciences and humanities. Though the visibility—­and funding—­of these collections diminished over the course of the twentieth century, with the rapid proliferation of labs dedicated to, for example, “vintage” or “obsolete” technologies, it appears that collecting is reemerging in the twenty-­first century as a key technique in contemporary hybrid humanities labs. Research and teaching collections are primarily for academic uses, but, as we mentioned in our discussion of the media archaeology labs in chapter 2, these collections may be a form of public interface. As

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something that resembles (but is not quite) a museum, a research collection may become a privileged access point that allows various publics to come to a new understanding of the university as an institution that also makes sense of the world by collecting things. Given that research collections are not quite museums, they are also not necessarily exhibition spaces, as contemporary lab collections are not curated according to the same principles as museum and archive collections. Cara Krmpotich points this out when articulating the work that goes into a collection before it becomes ready for academic study. In many ways, it is this process of handling that constitutes the research collection itself. This handling includes “applying an acryloid base layer, then an archival ink number, followed up by a top coat. We experiment with numbers on a smooth clear and colored glass surfaces, grainy plastic surfaces, cardboard boxes, shiny metals, ceramic teacups, and figurines. In each case, students think through storage positions, and the vulnerabilities of each object.”26 One could add to this list the work that goes into cataloging and metadata, content-­management systems and records, but it is already implied in the above description of an anthropological collection. Constituting a humanities collection (like an author’s working library) or a media collection (like the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University) requires a similar kind of care. While there are often special protocols around the access to and the handling of archival objects in such collections, the hands-­on principle is an important component of the technique of collecting. Objects in the collections of hybrid labs are handled constantly and sometimes altered, which is why sites such as the Trope Tank at MIT are careful to avoid the perception of being an archive and instead they attempt to connect with the legacy of experimentation. Trope Tank director Nick Montfort says: “By explaining that we’re not an archive, I mean to stress that the materials we have are for use, not to be preserved for decades. The Trope Tank isn’t a library in that the main interactions are not similar to consulting books. And we aren’t mainly trying to produce artworks, either. There are aspects of these, but the main metaphor for us is that of a laboratory where people learn and experiment.”27 The research and teaching collection is also a mode of placement. It takes objects out of circulation—­or perhaps in some cases rescues them from obsolescence—­and literally re-­places them into methods

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and narratives of contemporary research. On the subject of media archaeology labs, Jesper Olsson argues that this recontextualization of objects in a lab collection produces “new knowledge” about the objects. The collection shifts and situates, sometimes even transports objects and instruments (say, an oscilloscope that ends up in a video-­game collection), allowing one aspect of one part of a history of science to be placed into investigations of other fields entirely, such as media theory or the history of technology: “The transport of methods, operations, and the very conceptual and material framework of a lab from the history and practices of science to the field of the humanities might turn out to be epistemically productive in itself.”28 We hope it is clear by now that collecting is not merely a passive infrastructural activity that acts only as a support mechanism for research. Our assumptions about what constitutes research need to include any research activity in modern universities that takes place among a variety of mechanisms that are commonly considered administrative. Budgetary constraints, institutional decisions about use of space, conversations about relations with the library, purchase orders and metadata, cataloging and organizing—­all of this administrative and policy-­related activity organizes the space of the collection in ways that need to be accounted for. It is also worth noting at this point that many collections remain preemergent because of budgetary constraints. Collecting and maintaining comes at a cost that is not necessarily recognized and understood by contemporary institutional structures that still often rely on a division of labor that sees collections as the task of the library unit. Collections are thus valuable and useful as objects of study because they relate to multiple levels of processes that academia frequently fails to capture as part of the critical analyses it produces: labor of maintenance, administrative structures as part of intellectual infrastructure, the relevance of links between libraries and other forms of collections that in our case also link to the function of contemporary humanities labs.

DIS/ASSEMBLING One idea the extended lab model is designed to convey is that a lab is not only an assemblage of assemblages but also, as a punctualized

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“whole,” that a lab functions as one piece in several larger assemblages. It is worth emphasizing, though, that assembly (and disassembly, which is never really separable from assembly) is an ongoing process in lab life. Any working lab is constantly in the middle of becoming something slightly different from what it is at any given moment. A working lab is also full of things that are in a nebulous state, somewhere between being broken and rebuilt. The protean state of the lab is one of the reasons why techniques such as experiment and inscription are so crucial to its success, for without methods for proceeding and for creating a record of what occurs in the lab on a daily basis, the constant transformations that occur risk collapsing the lab into chaos. Assemblies are often provisional, subject to failure, and never really complete. Even after they make their way out into the world, objects that emerge from labs are still subject to further revisions, modifications, patches, and upgrades. Assembly often begins with disassembly, particularly in the form of reverse engineering, where taking something apart is necessary in order to begin making something new. Especially within the confines of a lab, the technique of disassembly can be managed and even

Figure 40. AJ “spoopy” Rappaport with a partially disassembled custom-­built “Smashbox” at the Residual Media Depot, where the techniques of assembly and disassembly are part of everyday work with the research collection. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

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hampered by policy and regulatory obstacles as well as technical ones. In Canada and the United States, a technical protection measure (TPM) is a kind of device that is intended to govern how a person interacts with copyrighted content within a work; it can be as simple and physical as a security screw that requires an unusual type of screwdriver head to open, or it can be an elaborate form of software. The sense of unease that individuals experience when facing a TPM can be enough disincentive to hamper the well-­established and necessary lab practice of reverse engineering; but increasingly, legislative battles are occurring within states and provinces over laws that would establish something like a user’s “right to repair.”29 Industry lobbies representing many sectors, from farm equipment to home entertainment and telephones, are launching aggressive legal campaigns to keep consumers from being able to repair their devices. This battle over the right to repair not only affects third-­ party businesses and individual hobbyists but also laboratories inside of litigation-­averse institutions such as universities. The whole question relates also to the broader approaches of ecodesign and the circular economy as pointed out in the context of recent European Union plans to legislate a comprehensive right to repair.30 Though the final products can give the appearance of objectivity and solidity, assembly techniques circle relentlessly back to the cultural. Constructions such as best practices, protocols, and standards, which strive to provide guidelines for how assembly should function in order for others to be able to make use of assembled objects, are the result of prolonged, often difficult and fractious ongoing collective conversations. As such, they are also subject to constant revision. Further, there are often competing standards, for reasons that have to do with political and geographical differences or, in some cases, sheer obstinacy. The appearance of new collaborators in a given community or the availability of new tools and techniques invented or borrowed from another discipline can shift assembly practices substantially. If those new collaborators make use of new channels of technique dissemination, especially those in a networked digital milieu like social networks and video hubs, the transformations produced by documented assembly and disassembly in even a small lab can be far reaching and rapid. In other words, what often appears to be an objective and straightforward task of assembly or disassembly is always freighted with the

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questions of style that are relevant to a given expert community. At the Residual Media Depot at Concordia in Montreal, which is currently studying the practice of modifying video-­game consoles and the culture around it, these matters take tangible form in the items in the Depot’s research collection. The collection, which includes the largest collection of unmodified consoles in a Canadian university as well as the largest university collection of modified consoles in the world, holds several different examples of the same video-­game console, modified in different ways at different times and places. This is most visible in cases where different hardware has been used to produce the same effect, for example, in the case of Sega Genesis Model 2 consoles modified with different versions of the Mega Amp circuit to improve their sound quality. These circuit boards come from all over the world and reflect different tastes and priorities in many ways, including the choice of components, circuit design, where the board is placed internally, and even the degree of technical facility with which it has been installed. Which raw materials to use and where to purchase them, how to make a good solder connection, whether or not to use hot melt glue as material support for joints, whether to cut through the original plastic or remove components, and many other factors are all matters for discussion and debate within the hardware modding community, as a quick look at YouTube or other online forums demonstrates. These questions of style in turn become a scaffolding for the establishment of cultural capital, shaming, and prestige within the community (complete with online “how to” and “how not to” videos). If a new figure comes on the scene with more technical expertise, then the opinion of the entire community about what constitutes best practice for assembly and disassembly can shift dramatically.

EXPERIMENTING (SEE ALSO TESTING; FAILING) The experiment is not just a recurring technique of the lab; it is the lab’s signature technique in modern and contemporary contexts. The lab-­based experiment is even enshrined in national guidelines for science education such as those produced by the U.S.-­based National Science Teaching Association, which declares, in no uncertain terms, that “while reading about science, using computer simulations, and

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observing teacher demonstrations may be valuable, they are not a substitute for laboratory investigations.”31 Besides the material practice of conducting lab science, the experiment also launched the world of scientific academies and institutions, journals, sites, technologies, and techniques that form the milieu in which knowledge emerges in modernity. It opens the lab up both spatially and temporally. It can act as a way of “drawing from real things in the world” instead of offering the comfort of a solitary isolation that the lab might easily connote. But its temporal axis also matters. Besides pointing back to the long history of scientific experimentation, the experiment provides researchers with a means of speculating about various possible futures. That is, it projects toward the unknown while aiming to enrich our current understanding or experience in some novel way. As a form of speculation, experimenting is deeply related to the techniques of testing and failing; it paves the way for trying out things without necessarily knowing in advance where they lead. Experimenting is thus a characteristically modern practice that cannot be reduced to a history of theory, as Ian Hacking famously argued, referring to Francis Bacon’s foundational role: “He taught that not only must we observe nature in the raw, but that we must also ‘twist the lion’s tail,’ that is, manipulate our world in order to learn its secrets.”32 The experimental setting is replete with “instruments, contraptions and apparatuses” that form the background for the experimental structure or set the scene that allows epistemological work to occur.33 Nevertheless, the experiment is not entirely reliant on equipment; it can be low tech and built on particular epistemological, social, and discursive techniques such as “testing, trials, enquiry, demonstration, evaluation.”34 As Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger argues, when trying to understand the experiment, the shift from words to practices matters most: “What we can do is to map out a discursive territory where it is possible that scientists and artists can mutually look at their hands, paying less attention to what they say but much more on what they do when they practice their craft.”35 Located between art and science, humanities and design practice, many hybrid labs are effectively infrastructures of the experiment: a set of particular instruments—­often referred to as “media”—­ that then take the role of enacting forms of knowing in relation

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to discursive structures. The experiment, then, is less one specific technique than a systematic set of technologies, epistemological attitudes, systematic practices, and wider discursive aims in which it is expressed. Entire labs, or even networks of labs, can be organized around their relationship to a single experiment.36 Notwithstanding all of the above, experimenting is not exclusively a scientific technique; the arts, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences also make use of experimenting. Because of this commonality, it frequently mediates between artistic and scientific practices, creating significant potential for cross-­pollination. Hence, many of the famous sites of (artistic) experiment like the Black Mountain College have also been sites of social experience and invention.37 To better understand the relationship of the idea of experiment to the lab, consider the Medea lab in Malmö, Sweden, which is a lab precisely because its occupants place the experiment at the center of their work: “We decided to explicitly call our environment a lab due to the experimental character of the work we do. It is experimental in the sense of conducting work where the outcome is not predetermined, and where the participants bring with them quite different kinds of experiences and get to work with people they are not accustomed to working with.”38 The links between experiment, experience, and expertise build a sense of the lab as an embodied, collective space: we are in this together. The “we” is important, because twisting the lion’s tail effectively takes more than one person (see “Collaborating”). Of course, it becomes easily tautological: labs are spaces of experimenting, and experimenting is what you do in a lab, or, “Give Me an Experiment and I Will Raise a Laboratory,” as Matthias Gross puts it in his inversion of Latour’s famous phrase “Give Me a Lab and I Will Raise a World.”39 This is ultimately another argument for why it is necessary to employ a model like the extended laboratory; on a complex object like a lab, one perspective is not sufficient. Crucially, the experiment is recorded in field notebooks, lab books, and other media—­sketches, photography, video, graphing devices, chromatographs, computers, and so on. These inscriptions are not just for purposes of verification; they exist in order to communicate anything at all about experimental results and, as an effect of that communication, to build new expert interpretive communities. Writing in the context of the SpecLab, Johanna Drucker

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defines the experimental set of practices in speculative computing as a diversion from an earlier, standardized mode of knowledge in digital humanities. In a case like this, the experimental turns into a set of propositions and principles that “push subjective and probabilistic concepts of knowledge as experience (partial, situated, and subjective) against objective and mechanistic claims for knowledge as information (total, managed, and externalized).”40 Even if the emphasis in SpecLab practice is on the term “speculative,” the link to experience is nevertheless a central part of this methodology. Following from Drucker’s invocation of Charles Peirce’s definition of a sign as “something that stands for something to someone,” Drucker sees SpecLab’s work as sited not just in space but within particular discourses and their attendant interpretive communities.41 A situated set of experiential coordinates counts as part of knowledge creation. This means that experiments must incorporate experience into their embodied and affective forms as part of creation of knowledge, accounting for the situated, historical, perspectival form of a participating or perceiving subject. Questions of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, positions and intersectionality are all part of the world of lab techniques.

FAILING (SEE ALSO EXPERIMENTING; TESTING) There’s no shortage of glorification of failure in contemporary creative scholarship and artistic discourse. The mantra of failure has shifted from the twentieth-­century avant-­garde arts, where it was cultivated to become an art methodology, into broader public discourse, largely because of unmet expectations in the face of technological hype. Even business schools and venture capitalism have embraced failure as another tool in the box (both of which constantly intone that we ought to “fail better!”). Because labs are places of experimentation, and experiments often, well, fail, it’s also not surprising that there is also a substantial element of failure in contemporary lab discourse. Andreas Treske describes their Media Archaeology Lab at Bilkent University in Ankara in ways that combine production and experimentation, success and failure. Despite hosting a variety of audiovisual equipment, the lab also hosts techniques of testing: “It’s not simply an archive, and it’s not simply a production facility. It is a space where you are able to combine

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things in different ways, where mistakes are allowed, and where the result is creative, and therefore has the potential to allow freedom in development and practice.”42 But failure has always been an important part of laboratory technique. As we discussed in chapter 5 (“Lab Imaginaries”), even before the modern avant-­gardes, Edison excelled in failure, turning it into part of the mythology of the inventor. That tradition is alive and well in contemporary hybrid labs. As Aymeric Mansoux argues, tongue firmly in cheek, “the stereotypical media art lab is a space where artists who are not always sure of what they can do with media technology due to a lack of technical knowledge come to research and develop a project.”43 Of course, methodological production of failures can have epistemological value considering how central failure is in net art and glitch art, which attempt to show the cracks and stitches beneath the smooth surfaces of computer interfaces and/or branding.44 Dismissing techniques of failure would be a major oversight when what’s necessary is to investigate its multiple forms of existence as a lab technique. The discourse of risk in digital innovation, replete with slogans like “move fast and break things,” might well have hijacked contemporary notions of failure. But failure is also an elemental part of the history of technology and, as such, media-­archaeological practices reveal there have always been other ways to articulate the term. While describing his plans for a media archaeology lab, Olsson points to the importance of failure as an integral part of the project: “In tinkering with old, forgotten, and dead media it opens our eyes to mistakes, waste, and failure. It offers a space for ‘broken world thinking’ (Steven Jackson), which could be considered crucial today.”45 As Olsson points out, the focus on brokenness can itself be an entry point for an alternative account of media technologies as both historical and contemporary. In a similar vein, O’Gorman describes his own brand of hybrid lab work as an interest in the “misfit toys, half-­baked things, malfunctioning apparatuses” that are created as extensions of philosophical arguments and experiments.”46 Finally, failure is important because it points to the possibility of moving beyond narrow functional uses, or the limits of what is currently believed to be possible. Lab spaces can operate as safe spaces for failed attempts that allow researchers to investigate the possibilities and potentials for different technologies and techniques.

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As Jamie Allen and Claudia Mareis put it, while the studio has long been considered “a sacrosanct place of experimentation and failure,” hybrid labs carry this legacy forward in new ways that do not necessarily reproduce the various connotations of the studio as spaces designed to produce and channel individual inspiration.47

LIVING LABS One of the reasons that labs are everywhere in contemporary culture is the success of techniques like the living lab. As Pieter Ballon and Dmitri Schuurman argue, the term “living lab” more accurately describes a relationship or a method than a particular kind of space.48 In this spirit, we discuss living labs as a discursive practice and a cultural technique that relates to how urban space is designated as a lab, and how this mobilizes discourses about innovation, consumption, and allocation of potential roles to citizens as stakeholders. As such, the living lab is an ongoing test situation that also speaks to how smart cities are being introduced. Ballon and Schuurman place living labs in three traditions: Scandinavian cooperative design and participatory design models developed by U.S. engineers building on the Scandinavian model; state-­sponsored social experiments with it in Europe; and the 1990s “digital city” initiatives that were a precursor to today’s omnipresent “smart city” discourse.49 If living lab discourse has a common thread, it’s that it places a heavy emphasis on community members and users as co-­creators with the experimenter, although, as we will see, the term has also become closely related to a consumer-­centered discourse and forecasting trends.50 In the 1990s, Bajgier et al. were using the term to describe a model for a course in which students at the Drexel University College of Business and Administration were studying South Street in Philadelphia. They argue that their conceptual model could also be used by other institutions and that other forms of public spaces, like “municipal facilities or sports stadiums,” can also serve as labs.51 Since the 1990s the living labs model has been adopted in a variety of contexts around the globe and has developed a robust literature.52 But from the start, a living lab has been a spatial practice or technique—­both a methodology and a physical context—­and it can be deployed in many contexts in order to produce labs.

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The key point of the living labs model is to include community engagement in the pedagogical process so that classroom members (including the instructor and graduate assistants) interact as a team with neighborhood groups and individuals. These groups and individuals are not simply sources of research problems. The long history of unexpected and unintended uses for technologies demonstrates that the users of such technologies often come up with unexpected uses for the outputs of scholarly research. The class confronts pressing issues relevant to the community and presents their findings to decision makers in the community on a not-­for-­profit basis.53 As a result, students develop not only a set of practical research skills and interpersonal communication skills but also a stake in policy debate and formation in their own community. The insights of Galison and Jones also apply here. Living labs take the form of the dominant mode of cultural production and have changed along with it. Leminen, Habib, and Westerlund have moved to describing the living lab first as a network, and then a platform. The idea of the network is important, because constant contact between researchers produces cross-­fertilization and prevents the ossification of research,54 whereas the goal is to produce an “innovation system.”55 The socially networked dimension of the living lab suggests that they also have an institutional and a policy dimension. This is strongest in Europe, though there is also an increasing interest at the municipal level of government in North America (think of the countless “smart cities” initiatives in the news at the moment). The EU living labs network has been supported by key policy measures around the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), which was put in place in 2006 and bolstered in 2010. The network now includes labs in Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, and Egypt. More than three hundred labs were evaluated by EnoLL since 2006, with 35–­40 percent no longer operating,56 a reminder that labs are often project-­based and that they have a finite life span. Living labs are no more homogeneous than labs themselves. There are significant differences between various models of laboratory community engagement, particularly in terms of those that see innovation as a process in which university research is monetized. The latter tend to conceive of community research co-­creators as consumers more than citizens. Eric Von Hippel’s influential concept

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of the “lead user” is a case in point: “Lead users are users whose present strong needs will become general in a market-­place months or years in the future. Since lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others, they can serve as a need-­ forecasting laboratory for marketing research. Moreover, since lead users often attempt to fill the need they experience, they can provide new product concept and design data as well.”57 Consumers and users are not the same as citizens and audiences, and marketing research is not the same as community issues. The discourse of lead users is all about access to emerging markets. Lead users are important because they point to developing trends, not because they identify a pressing civic need. In contemporary living lab discourse, community stakeholders increasingly become businesses rather than individuals or citizen groups; the community audience for academic research becomes consumers; and innovation prioritizes the monetization of research as opposed to contributing to the public good. In “Living Labs as a Multi-­contextual R&D Methodology,” Mats Eriksson et al. quote Per Eriksson, director at the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, as stating that “research is making knowledge out of money—­ innovation is making money out of knowledge.”58 There are also those who would reclaim the living lab model for artistic use. In Gabriella Arrigoni’s work on living labs as a model for artistic exhibition, the idea of the lead user points to “certain continuities between media labs and LLs [living labs]: the idea of artist as innovator or lead user (not just applying existing technologies to creative purposes, but developing media and applications in close collaboration with scientists and technologists) is an essential premise with which to speculate on the role of the audience itself as innovator.”59 Arrigoni believes that living labs can learn plenty from media labs, including a better sense of which publics they are addressing; new models of governance; techniques for building infrastructural relationships with existing institutions like universities, arts organizations, and lab networks; and how to structure outreach activities such as workshops and training programs.60 Arrigoni is also skeptical of the political promises that “openness” once held, but she maintains that there is a “strong political potential” for the living lab movement, because it has demonstrated the capacity to address real social needs instead of mere consumer desires.61 This

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also resonates with other voices in the field which have argued that creativity needs to be harnessed as a force with relevance beyond the usual emphasis on the artist. Atau Tanaka writes: “A more democratic model of creative practice holds enormous potential for social benefit and is consistent with the community focus of citizen media labs.”62 This focus is part of some good European examples such as the Media Lab Prado, and it represents a link between some of the uses of the terms “living lab” and “media lab” in current policy contexts.

PROTOTYPING (SEE ALSO EXPERIMENTING; TESTING) One commonly recurring term in the discourse of labs, design, and maker culture is “prototyping.” A prototype is a design model that serves as an experimental future-­projection—­“an invented, innovative device introduced to the public more like a proposal for further development to be used or manipulated, than as a unique, stable piece to be contemplated.”63 By studying how prototyping functions, we can gain important insights into how labs harbor experimental activity and how they work as collectives. In terms of studying the discourse around prototypes, the championing of prototypes tells us much about the imaginary of the hybrid lab because it emphasizes particular values, such as an emphasis on the production of something that functions, as well as the way prototyping requires and values collaboration, bottom-­up emergence, and cooperation as part of social creation in making.64 In some cases the lab becomes the spatialized manifestation of what the prototype already signified. As Mareis and Allen outline in relation to the use of the term lab in Critical Media Lab Basel, the lab “elicits collaborative working styles, open methods and central notions of testing, trials, enquiry, demonstration, evaluation. The lab is a space where things are unready, unfinished, at risk and without known utility.”65 Hence, there is also a link between prototyping and the key techniques of experimenting and testing. It is clear that the particular usefulness of the concept of the prototype lies in its propensity for flexibility and speed. It is often associated with rapid development techniques, such as computer-­ assisted design (CAD), additive technologies like 3D printing, the fab lab model, or, in less technologically intense scenarios, paper

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prototyping. But prototyping techniques and facilities are also part of methodological thinking in media and speculative design. The earlier-­mentioned (see “3D Printing”) MLab is here a proof of concept in itself. As Jentery Sayers and Tiffany Chan explain, the prototyping and fab labs cater to many sorts of uses where technological infrastructure turns to methodological experiments in media studies: We have two modest spaces on the UVic campus: a modeling and prototyping lab in the Technology Enterprise Facility (TEF) and a fabrication lab in Visual Arts. The TEF space is dedicated primarily to computer work, including physical computing, programming, and scanning. We also hold meetings there, and we co-­author publications in that space, too. The Visual Arts space is for work with hand tools as well as various types of machine work: laser cutting, printing, milling, and routing. If we are reconducting historical lab experiments (e.g. magnetic recordings on piano wire from 1898), which we often do for the Kits project, then we use the Visual Arts space as well. This existence in two spaces, across two faculty (Fine Arts and Humanities), really enriches our research. When combined, the two environments profoundly shape how we practice and share media history.66

The context of the MLab is intriguing because it switches prototyping from future-­facing innovation work onto the track of historical and media-­archaeological methodologies. Reconstructed and sometimes slightly speculative experiments with historical source material produce a tactile, sensorial take on media history: from documents to artifacts, from practices of critical close reading to aesthetic ways of investigating the material culture of earlier, pre-­digital media culture by way of digital prototyping tools. The current popularity of prototyping as a practice in contemporary design and maker theory also facilitates a more robust consideration of the ambivalent history of labs in design practice. Whether desired or not, the particular horizon of prototyping situates contemporary labs as part of the wider cultural history of design and knowledge production. Though some hybrid labs may try to differentiate themselves from the more market-­driven aspects of the media lab legacy, their practices, spaces, and methodologies tie them to the mainstream of contemporary lab practice. Walter Gropius’s statement about how the Bauhaus workshops functioned

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as “laboratories in which prototypes of products suitable for mass production and typical of our time are carefully developed and improved” links the collaborative workshops of the modernist avant-­ gardes to current business-­driven design discourse.67 In the context of innovation discourse, “prototype” is part of the connective tissue that links art practice to the form of creative engineering typical of the Californian Ideology and Silicon Valley discourse (see chapter 5). Though critical art discourses often invoke prototyping (with its connotations of the open-­ended nature of the experiment) as a gesture of resistance to more romantic forms of art practice, it was already part of engineering development pedagogical discourse, as Fred Turner notes: In a 1990 manual for developers entitled Prototyping, Roland Vonk argued that building a working if buggy software system could transform the requirements definition phase of system development. The prototype could become an object, like an architect’s model, around which engineers and clients could gather and through which they could articulate their needs to one another. It would speed development, improve communication, and help all parties arrive at a better definition of requirements for the system.68

As we have documented elsewhere in this book, many of the values to which contemporary media art aspires, such as play, intuition, future orientation, and creative thinking, have been part of industry-­ focused development since the Cold War. This version of the lab imaginary is still going strong and has characterized the nexus of the media lab and the creative economy since the 1990s. Prototyping can also transform arguments about methodology and philosophy. As Denisa Kera argues, echoing points about critical making, “collaborative and artisan prototypes built in the so called hackerspaces and DIY (Do-­It-­Yourself )-­bio labs around the world offer a convergence between philosophy and design and connect the creative practices of thinking and doing.”69 In Kera’s use, the prototype becomes the performative terminological glue for a variety of labs and practices such that prototypes are not reducible to one particular technological kit but instead are more of a politically tuned project that is itself formative of a different attitude to knowledge.

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TESTING (SEE ALSO EXPERIMENTING; FAILING) Labs are for testing. They set up the necessary apparatus, assign the appropriate personnel, and allocate the time that a given test requires. Indeed, labs embody the test as part of their normal modus operandi: they are controlled spaces where the contingency of a situation can be put under observation, variables controlled, and equipment fine-­tuned to set the tone of the research questions. While there are multiple examples of testing facilities that are part of the modern condition of test and control, the lab has a specific material and symbolic role to play. Avital Ronell describes this role as “the test drive”—­a useful term because it encompasses how the particular attitude of testing is practiced as a technical skill set, from the philosophical situation of questioning to the infrastructures of specific experiments. That is, testing is not merely scientific, but becomes part of a disposition toward the production of knowledge and actual existence. With a Nietzschean undertone, Ronell writes that “testing is constitutive of what can be designated, with the proper precautions, as real.”70 Hence the test is not merely about establishing what Latour might call matters of fact; it functions as a probing of what could be. While the test may set out to experiment with what works and what does not, it may also identify potentials. This is clear in the case of industrial engineering settings like Bell Labs. At Bell the practice of “pure” scientific research in the form of material experiments often had uncertain outcomes and unclear relationships to the core mandate of the organization, but if the experiments were successful they offered the potential of eventual social transformation, such as the work with semiconductors and other minuscule elements that become the backbone of computer culture. Furthermore, at Bell the test becomes a manner of incorporating different disciplinary attitudes, when “the experimentalists and theoreticians were encouraged to work together, and that chemists and metallurgists were welcome to join in, too.”71 Because the test has a strong affinity with a bundle of related terms used in spheres ranging from the law to the military—­such as the experiment, the probe, and the trial—­it is not surprising that we also find it in hybrid lab discourse. Many media and humanities labs speak of testing as part of the artistic methodologies that pertain

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to the harnessing of the creative drive. Siegfried Zielinski outlines this aspect of testing as what is common to both artistic practice and laboratory work: “developing, investigating, testing, discarding, and achieving results.”72 In Zielinski’s take, testing bears a strong family resemblance to the celebrated techniques for generating inspiration and intuition that many artists still employ, but here we might add that infrastructure and the spatial arrangement of the lab are what permit testing to occur (whether fueled by inspiration, intuition, or something else). Hence it is no wonder that since the 1990s, media labs and other hybrid labs have been able to brand themselves as the privileged sites where this particular art-­science activity takes place. Arrigoni outlines some of the infrastructural aspects related to techniques of creativity in similar terms, underlining that “media labs offer the artists a platform to work, test, develop a process but do not require them to show a final product.”73 It is this quality of the unfinished that becomes one feature of digital aesthetics and processes of creativity. So what makes a lab a lab is often the test—­but the test only appears as part of a longer operative chain of techniques that links it to forms of documenting, observing, inscribing, collecting, retesting, and reporting. What makes this linkage possible is the shared environment of the lab.

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CONCLUSION A whole history remains to be written of spaces—­ which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural)—­from the great strategies of geo-­politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations. It is surprising how long the problem of space took to emerge as a historico-­political problem. —­Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power”

I

n 2018 we experienced a moment of recognition when we encountered our own preoccupation with the subject of labs under the spotlight at Lab Cult, an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Like practitioners in many other fields, the curators of Lab Cult realized that contemporary architecture was saturated with lab discourse. And like us, what interested the curators was the role and function of hybridity: This exhibition suggests a history of close-­knit relationships and mutual exchanges. Architects are often accused of borrowing, transforming or even misappropriating scientific ideas, tools and working protocols in their attempt to systematize the intuitive aspects of the creative process. At the same time, though, scientists strongly rely on architectural concepts, representations and material means to stage and communicate sophisticated set-­ups of rigorous investigation.1

Hybridity brings vigor to old practices just as it produces new forms; there is no point in pretending that it does not happen or in openly denouncing it. And, as the exhibition’s subtitle, An Unorthodox History of Interchanges between Science and Architecture, suggests, engaging with unorthodox topics often elicits unorthodox methods.

239

Figure 41. Laboratory benches and stools displaying various documents and objects from the hybrid history of labs and architecture, Lab Cult, September 2018. Photograph by Darren Wershler.

This book provides both a method and a model for thinking about labs in general, and multiple specifications for the composition and function of one particularly prevalent form of hybrid lab: the contemporary media and humanities lab, especially in the context of the university environment. (That said, we also acknowledge that most of our examples of the university environment come from North America and different parts of Europe; still, we hope we have provided enough methodological ideas for further comparative approaches that expand our examples to less Western-­centered discussions and cases.) Naming such entities “hybrid labs” helps bring to the fore the historical and contemporary ways that the term “lab” is used in arts, humanities, and media studies contexts without, however, ignoring that these uses are not always entirely disciplined. That feeling that a given lab might be “not entirely disciplined” remains one of the best indicators of the presence of a hybrid lab. As we noted in the Introduction, hybridity frequently also makes labs the target of boundary work aiming to exclude them from “serious” consideration. Still, the lab is the site of new transdisciplinary exchanges and

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bears with it the potential to mobilize a range and variety of unexpected but potentially effective practices. Hybridity also marks the ability and potential to change, or at least a recognition of the institutional changes that are under way. The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, which we touch on in chapter 3, exemplifies a lab that pursues institutional change in and around labs on nearly every level. But there are numerous other examples of how change is afoot in terms of what a lab can be and what sorts of values a lab can embody. Note, for instance, the 2020 publication of the “Ten Simple Rules for How to Build an Anti-­racist Lab,” which presents concise guidelines “to help labs develop anti-­racist policies and action in an effort to promote racial and ethnic diversity, equity, and inclusion in science.” Note as well the 2019 symposium “What Is a Feminist Lab?” that Maya Livio, Lori Emerson, and Thea Lindquist organized. This symposium attempted to rethink labs in the arts and humanities in terms of cooperatives and issues of equity and equality. In Marisa Parham’s words, “feminist approaches help us set and evaluate goals” for labs.2 Labs are transdisciplinary entities that, with the benefit of such reframing, can “help us imagine new futures,” as Ashley Baccus-­Clark put it.3 We began our book with the recognition that the proliferation of labs in fields outside of science, engineering, and industrial research and development has been accompanied by the profuse spread of lab discourse. In global twenty-­first-­century culture, the lab as topos is constantly present in the double sense of the word: as actual places and their constituent infrastructures, and as discursive topoi that have a variable force of their own, depending on specific rhetorical strategies and contexts.4 Faced with this “intriguing network of interconnections” among the lab as a persistent cultural form, past cultural phenomena (e.g., apothecaries, monastic workshops, and other traditions of technical knowledge production), and the contemporary cultural context of entrepreneurial innovation, the project we undertook was to try and make some sense of it all.5 As such, we did not restrict ourselves to the topic of media labs alone—­ and we certainly did not solely focus on the MIT Media Lab, which has, notably, also claimed to be the only legitimate user of the term “media lab.” Fortuitously or not, we found ourselves writing about the MIT Media Lab at a moment when it was in the public eye not because of its long tradition of hyperbolic discourse about its degree

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of innovation but because of the scrutiny that the #MeToo movement brought to bear on its infrastructural exclusions and policy decisions, including the acceptance of funding from Jeffrey Epstein. This situation is a stark reminder that the study of labs of any sort has to involve more than an analysis of internal space, apparatus, and technique. Lab studies also need to take account of the effects that the larger systems that position labs—­and the imaginaries that inform their policy decisions about classification, standardization, and procedures—­have on the subjects who populate those labs. Ultimately, our interest in hybrid labs led us to eschew most of the predictable choices and to consider a much richer range of styles, scales, operations, and functions, including the situated practices of different academic and para-­academic institutions that extend the lab beyond its walls. As the phrase “situated practices” in the subtitle of our book suggests, it’s possible to think of the work we have been describing as location-­specific theory, if theory is not merely understood in the narrow sense of Theory with a capital T. Location-­specific theory is a version of Peter Galison’s call for specific kind of thinking that moves away from narrow empiricism and universalist assumptions. As Rosi Braidotti suggests, this sort of specificity can frame a mixture of grounded, accountable, shareable, and open scholarly work.6 There is no better way to summarize the goal of the extended lab model we have proposed. Hybrid lab practice is one way to leverage the situated nature of any institutional setting, especially if the lab’s denizens are willing to do something other than “invent the future” in the same old way that the future has been invented for much of the last century. As we have emphasized throughout this book, labs are at the center of reproduction of power. While we did not want to dismiss the significant innovation-­oriented labs that gear their work toward digital futures (often with corporate funding and as exemplary of contemporary neoliberal university policy, which we addressed in chapter 3), it was imperative to remember that all sorts of spatial practices form the long tail of the multitude of things that fall under the term “lab.” When we write about labs in terms of their situated practices, we remain mindful that there are and have always been situated practices outside of laboratories and that laboratory-­situated practice produces exclusions, omissions, and gaps as well as knowledge.

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The legacy of the term in feminist science studies is particularly useful, as it allows a specified view of science, academic knowledge, and practice to come to the fore. There is no “view from nowhere”; architectures and infrastructures delimit what sorts of knowledge and truth claims a lab can produce. This positionality is a useful tool of productive critique, because it enhances our sense of what sorts of bodies—­gendered and racialized, marginalized and dominant—­ are incorporated in any situation of knowledge, whether in labs or otherwise. Labs are always part of spaces of knowing and the production of knowing: libraries, studios, seminars, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and the longer lineage of spaces from monasteries to factories that have been central to various cultural tasks. Elements from the discourses that surround many of these other kinds of spaces from past and present (topoi indeed) are activated as models for laboratories in a contemporary context. Labs incorporate historical references and produce their own histories through the reference points that lab denizens identify. This iterative sense of the lab is central to what constitutes the lab as a material and symbolic performance. What’s at stake in the lab’s own histories and stories is not only the reproduction of existing roles of subjects and objects of knowledge, but also challenges to them. What kind of institutions are being created, what forms of rituals and practices, what kind of knowledge is verified as legitimate for global (but always situated) academic institutions and creative studios? Being situated does not necessarily mean that a lab is tied to one specific location, such as a studio or other similar space of knowledge or creative practice. Situated practice can also be a form of engagement that recognizes social specificity, because hybrid lab practices mobilize multidisciplinary expertise to hone in on lived realities. A case in point is the Hyphen-­Labs, “a global team of women of color”7 that includes the aforementioned Ashley Baccus-­ Clark. Their practice of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism combines artistic and design practice, engineering skills and playful takes on contemporary realities in installation and VR form: “Speculative products designed for women of color . . . include sunscreen for dark skin, a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software, earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations, and a reflective visor that lets wearers see out while hiding their faces.”8 This work reframes the example of the Lab Series of men’s cosmetics

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that we touched on in the Introduction, underlining the fact that the ostensibly neutral, “scientific” discourse around everyday products like cosmetics is always racialized, gendered, and class-­specific. An entirely different practice is at stake here. The VR component of the project is a “neurocosmetology lab” that stages a future where the “participants see themselves in the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they are about to receive Octavia Electrodes—­cutting-edge technology involving both hair extensions and brain-­stimulating electrical currents.”9 The allusion to the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler is a way of indicating the vital role that speculation and imagination play in such situated practice. Hyphen-­Labs is not so much a single location, or even a single discursive formation, but the totality of spaces, people, imaginaries, apparatus, infrastructures, and techniques that situate this lab’s practice. In this way, we see them as an example of practices that respond to the call for grounded and accountable work that takes place both within and beyond academia. As the example of Hyphen-­Labs demonstrates, the lab imaginary is a crucial, if often-­maligned, element of the extended laboratory. In the context of the extended lab model, the imaginary shifts from fabulation into a tool for developing other sorts of critical methodologies. One such methodology, media archaeology, receives particular focus in this book. It leads not only to new spatial practices but also to operating in a different “time zone,” whether of speculative futures, imagined pasts, or engagement with the conflicts of the contemporary. The time in which lab practices take place is also the time over which they change. The epistemic, the experiential, and the political are closely connected. Knowing which subject and which matters are at play helps to recognize those exchanges. Andrew Pickering argues that “the contours of material agency are never known in advance”; it takes time to work them out.10 Hybrid labs are one product of Pickering’s dialectical “mangle” of resistance and accommodation.11 As a result, pushback against the insistence of nonscientists using the term “lab” along with its tools and techniques is misguided to the extent that it does not allow for the possibility of something new to emerge. By inventing new ways to deal with time that contribute to media theory, the work that media archaeology labs and other forms of hybrid labs undertake presents new possibilities for critical intervention and for

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fresh positions in the argument about how a “postdigital” approach might be useful when thinking about media-­cultural time. Here postdigitality is meant to refer to the set of practices and concepts that emerge after the digital has become a naturalized reference point and is not, in any way, “new media” anymore—­a situation which then also produces new practices with old materials and media from cassettes to film, zines, and vinyl. As Florian Cramer puts it: “Such practices can only be meaningfully called ‘post-­digital’ when they do not merely revive older media technologies, but repurpose them in relation to digital media technologies: zines that become anti-­blogs or non-­blogs, vinyl as anti-­CD, cassette tapes as anti-­MP3, analog film as anti-­video.”12 While recognizing the polytemporal cultural modes that emerge in these postdigital contexts of lab culture and practices, it is also important to ask about “the political anthropology of new institutional forms.”13 Taking a page from Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-­ Pump, a field-­defining work in science and technology studies, we would like to suggest in closing that hybrid labs present “practical solutions to the problem of social order” and that they employ new “practical solutions to the problem of knowledge.”14 In a relatively short period, hybrid labs have managed to produce a vivid range of discourses about knowledge-­power. They proceed in various heterogeneous fashions, constituting new objects, new forms of apparatus, and new social relations as a result of their interactions with the objects and devices proper to their labs. They accomplish this production of newness by establishing a difference between their space and the space of more conventional kinds of labs, and they create different operative rules for being within them that affect how knowledge is produced and circulated. The foregoing is why techniques like the ACTLab’s codeswitching umbrella and best practices like the Lab Book developed in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research are so important: they outline new forms of social regulation.15 As Shapin and Shaffer argue, the practical social regulation of both people and lab apparatus is necessary for the production of knowledge.16 Compare their claims about the necessity for the production in the seventeenth century of “calm spaces” for discussion and debate in order for knowledge production to occur with today’s “safe space” protocols. Then, as now, participation is a form of “moral distinction.”17 These hybrid labs do more

Conclusion 245

than produce external products, things, and ideas; through their own processes of discipline and “sorting things out” (to echo Bowker and Star), they produce their own existence as a protocol or even an ethic that other labs might also pick up and deploy. The larger community of hybrid labs is still emerging. It has taken an immense amount of labor to get it this far, and it will take more yet. One thing hybrid labs are becoming quite good at is internal social organization, but without a concomitant external effort to organize them socially into a collective (perhaps one that challenges the long history of what Carolyn Marvin calls the “expert community”), they could disappear rather than flourish. Without a legitimating community, there is no way to secure assent for any given hybrid lab’s accomplishments. Hybrid labs need this multiplication effect if their contributions are to count for anything to anyone. There’s a lot at stake in the discussion of the legitimacy of hybrid labs, not only because of the need to grow a community of these entities but also because disputes over knowledge produce social strife. The COVID-19 period has proved that over and again, with the persistent and troubling undermining of scientific and expert knowledge, whether for financial or political gain. Scientific and medical labs have become the centers of political debate, as research for a vaccine has led to multiple national and geopolitical interests emerging in ways that show the complexity of infrastructures of knowledge, not least the property regimes that tightly control the patents of the vaccines with devastating effects in poorer nations of the world. Furthermore, the pandemic has shown how the legitimacy of scientific research can be strengthened or questioned. One certainty is that labs loom larger than ever in the popular imaginary because of their perceived efficacy, for good or ill. The debate about whether or not the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the COVID-19 virus will likely be part of public lab discourse for the foreseeable future. Production of doubt remains, unfortunately, a persistently effective strategy.18 We live in a post-­truth world; even the RAND Corporation writes of what it calls “truth decay” and has launched an “Initiative to Restore the Role of Facts and Analysis in Public Life.”19 Private belief formed without experiment or demonstration, then amplified by social media, threatens the social order. We don’t want to buy in to the solutionist discourse that we mentioned in chapter 4, but we believe that the extended lab model can help clarify the many ways

246  Conclusion

that knowledge is being produced, handled, and legitimized. That said, one of the most effective critiques of labs from the seventeenth century to the present has been that they are restricted places that nevertheless claim to be open; Shapin and Schaffer stated as much in the conclusion to their book in 1985: We regard our scientific knowledge as open and accessible in principle, but the public does not understand it. Scientific journals are in our public libraries, but they are written in a language alien to the citizenry. We say that our laboratories constitute some of our most open professional spaces, yet the public does not enter them. Our society is said to be democratic, but the public cannot call to account what they cannot comprehend. A form of knowledge that is the most open in principle has become the most closed in practice.20

Hybrid labs might open onto different kinds of communities, but not necessarily the ones that appear correct from the position of power, or even from the viewpoints of various publics. This is why we feel it is important to amplify certain themes in our book that link the epistemic and the social. There is a desperate global need to extend discussions about relations inside the lab to the world beyond the lab—­a world currently engaged in arguments over the ideals of democracy and the nature of social justice. It is important to realize that the “hybrid” in “hybrid labs” can also refer to the various intersectional issues that are central to maneuvering contemporary societies across different national and international contexts. Writing these concluding words in 2021 in the midst of both Covid-­19 and Black Lives Matter has become an important reminder of the stakes of people in institutional practices: the question of what forms of knowledge are being legitimized needs to be complemented with the question of who is being legitimized. Our own intervention is in these pages. In the process of researching and writing about the range of hybrid lab forms in this book, from media and media archaeology labs to design labs, language labs, home economics labs, digital humanities labs, studio labs, spiritualist labs, mobile labs, and many others, we have also, out of necessity, produced a method. Rather than undertaking a quixotic survey of the congeries of hybrid lab types (a project whose impossibility loomed over us from the early days of thinking about this book), The Lab Book makes a methodological proposition that we call the

Conclusion 247

extended lab model. We have developed a heuristic that encourages any researcher interested in anything that claims to be a lab, or any representative of anything that claims to be a lab, to consider its multiple aspects: from space, apparatus, and techniques to people, from administration, infrastructure (including the gray literature that, with its bureaucratic prose, helps to order and run institutions), and policy to various types of imaginaries, the continuum across the discursive and the material registers defines our proposal. As we noted at the outset, these aspects are deeply entwined with each other. Any given lab assemblage will articulate them differently, requiring analytic emphasis on different aspects in different cases. But we find it useful to move through all aspects of the model in any given case, in an effort to check our own disciplinary and subjective biases. From Thomas Kuhn’s perspective, communication breakdown is an inevitable result of lab work, which involves the regrouping and reordering of things in the lab and of concepts in the world. The way out of the breakdown is a comparative approach: scholars should attempt “to discover what the other would see and say when presented with a stimulus to which [their] own verbal response would be different.” The result is not necessarily the solution to the original problem, but rather the production of better scholars who have out of necessity developed a facility for interdisciplinary translation and an ability to see and describe the world to which the conflicting theory applies.21 Kuhn further argues that what comes next is an ongoing project of translation from the disciplinary language of one community into that of another. Make no mistake: “For most people translation is a threatening process, and it is entirely foreign to normal science,” but “new practices do not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings.”22 And this takes time. We offer the extended lab model as a tool for anyone interested in this ongoing project of translation.

248  Conclusion

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Wondrich, Punch; O’Neil, Fix the Pumps. 2. Lab Series website, https://www.labseries.com. 3. Hudson’s Bay Company, “Hudson’s Bay and Lord & Taylor.” 4. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 79–­82. 5. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 165. 6. Latour, 168. 7. Latour, 166. 8. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13, 27. 9. Latour, 27. 10. Latour, 34. Many years before, Lewis Mumford makes a similar argument in Technics and Civilization, 130. 11. Latour, 11. 12. Alpers, “The Studio.” 13. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media. 14. Marx, “Preface to the First Edition,” 89. 15. Bök, ’Pataphysics. 16. Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus.” 17. See Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science.” 18. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 30. 19. Mattern, “Intellectual Furnishing.” 20. Stengers, Power and Invention, 170. 21. Geoghegan, “After Kittler,” 70. 22. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 2015. 23. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 47. 24. Shaviro, Without Criteria, 61. 25. Urry, Mobilities, 253–­54.

249

26. Gieryn, “Truth Is Also a Place.” 27. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 64. 28. Latour and Woolgar, 65. 29. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 40–­41. 30. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 58. 31. Latour and Woolgar, 48. 32. Sterne, “The Example,” 22. 33. Sterne, The Audible Past, 36. 34. Sterne, 42. 35. T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 527. 36. T. Bennett, 528. 37. The “interthing communication” that takes place in that network, Marc Steinberg proposes, is the precondition for the social function of those things, in that it allows the things to speak to people, and people to speak to each other through them as media. Media are irreducible to commodity products, but commodities are undeniably part of the infrastructure of our communication and making (Anime’s Media Mix, 91). 38. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380–­81. 39. Star, 381–­82. 40. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 5. 41. See Knorr Cetina, “The Couch,” 121. 42. Burns, The Scientific Revolution, 164. 43. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 44. 44. Zielinski, “Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola.” 45. Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 45. 46. Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science,” 104. 47. Bruno, 91. 48. Bruno, 100. 49. Bruno, 109. 50. Feder, “Scrounging Old Equipment.” Scrounging could easily be described as part of the list of common laboratory techniques. 51. Sterne, “Headset Culture,” 58. 52. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 182. 53. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11. 54. Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 4. 55. See, for example, Angus, “The Materiality of Expression,” and Gitelman, Always Already New. 56. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 243. 57. T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 525. 58. Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology, 29. 59. Knorr Cetina, “The Couch.” Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 60. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 24. 61. Hacking, 36. 62. Hacking, 36.

250  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

63. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 257. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 64. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 562. 65. Pickering, 563. 66. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 11. 67. Kuhn, 19. 68. Kuhn, 20. 69. De Landa, Assemblage Theory, 89–­90. 70. De Landa, 90. 71. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 15. 72. Marvin, 4. 73. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 38–­39. See also T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 522, 526. 74. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126. 75. Hacking, “The Self-­Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” 30. 76. Hacking, 30. 77. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 46. 78. Kuhn, 46. 79. Kuhn, 79. 80. Kuhn, 149. 81. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 142.

1. LAB SPACE 1. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 37, 57. 2. Lefebvre, 33. 3. Lefebvre, 39, 46. 4. Dourish, email to Lori Emerson, November 9, 2018. 5. Latour, Science in Action, 4, 99. 6. Kohler, “Lab History,” 766. 7. See Larocque, “Hook & Eye”; Bowie, “SpiderWebShow.ca”; and Stepić, “Bums in Seats.” 8. The origin of most discourse on cyberspace is, of course, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer; but in terms of media studies works, Michael Benedikt’s edited collection Cyberspace: First Steps and Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community are a few of the earliest and most extensive accounts of the shape and contours of early, online communities. 9. “Professor to Use Sky.” 10. See, for example, Lomas, “Here’s Cambridge Analytica’s Plan,” and Wong, Lewis, and Davies, “How Academic at Centre of Facebook Scandal Tried.” 11. Miller and Yúdice, Cultural Policy, 15. 12. Kim, “An Interview with Edward Kim.” 13. Kim. 14. The Lab at Ada’s, https://thelab.adasbooks.com.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 251

15. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 138. 16. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 4. 17. Gooday, “Placing or Replacing the Laboratory,” 788. 18. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 581. 19. Price, The Plan of St. Gall, 32. 20. M. W. Jackson, “Illuminating the Opacity,” 142. 21. Jackson, 142. 22. Crosland, “Early Laboratories,” 234. 23. See also Ursula Klein’s excellent account in “Apothecary’s Shops, Laboratories and Chemical Manufacture.” 24. Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge,” 770. 25. Shapin, “The House of Experiment,” 378. In addition to Shapin’s excellent historical accounts of the roots of laboratories in seventeenth-century England, there are abundant accounts of the genesis of the laboratory over the last three hundred years—­among these are Hannaway’s “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science,” James’s edited collection The Development of the Laboratory, Lenoir’s “Laboratories, Medicine and Public Life,” Gooday’s “Precision Measurement,” and Reich’s The Making of American Industrial Research. 26. Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge,” 779–­80. 27. Crosland, “Early Laboratories,” 238. 28. Cooper, “Homes and Households,” 227. 29. That said, as Marsha L. Richmond elaborates on in “‘A Lab of One’s Own,’” her remarkable history of the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women in Cambridge, the following decades featured various attempts, some successful and some not, to establish labs exclusively for women. 30. R. W. Raymond, Glossary, 52. 31. See also Starosielski’s “Thermocultures of Geological Media” as another account of how gender and power relations have played out in temperature and media. 32. Quoted in Millard, Edison, 6. See also Noble, America by Design, 119. 33. Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 29–­30. 34. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 220. 35. Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 21; Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 213. 36. Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 22. 37. Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 213. 38. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 470. 39. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, 471. 40. Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation, 33. 41. Millard, 23. 42. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 541. 43. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 225. 44. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 399. 45. Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 215.

252  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

46. There are many excellent accounts of the architecture and planning of the MIT campus in general, which of course lays the groundwork for the architecture and design of the MIT Media Lab. See, for example, Mitchell and Vest, Imagining MIT, and Jarzombek, Designing MIT. 47. Brand, The Media Lab, 4. 48. Molly Steenson quotes from Nicholas Negroponte’s personal papers, in which he states that media not only belonged to no discipline (strangely overlooking the discipline of Communication Studies and media studies that had its relative beginnings in Canada in the early 1950s and had its first department by 1965) but that it was, in the early 1980s, rejected almost completely by universities: “‘media’ was ripe for claiming, especially because of its unpopularity. . . . Media was intended to connote home, learning, and creative interfaces. . . . ‘By contrast, to my knowledge, nobody at MIT is addressing the home and, for that matter, no American university (to my knowledge) takes the world of consumer electronics seriously’” (quoted in Steenson, Architectural Intelligence, 216). 49. For more on MIT’s ties to the military-­industrial complex, see Leslie, The Cold War and American Science. 50. Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.” 51. Negroponte, Being Digital, 224–­25. 52. On the avant-­garde and corporate labs, see again Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.” 53. Ito and Howe, Whiplash, 16, 30, 140. Also note that, oddly, this reference to “an island of misfit toys” is another instance where lab discourse ignores a Canadian production in order to make a case for American exceptionalism. The metaphor comes from the 1964 Videocraft International (later Rankin/ Bass) Christmas special, which was recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto with an entirely Canadian cast, with the exception of Burl Ives. 54. Hiroshi Ishi, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab. 55. MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, Artists and Architects Collaborate, 11. 56. MIT News Office, “MIT Opens New Media Lab Complex.” 57. Brand, How Buildings Learn, 53. 58. Tereshko, “MIT Media Lab.” 59. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 690. 60. Greg Tucker, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab. 61. Tucker interview. 62. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 718. 63. Ethan Zuckerman, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab. 64. Zuckerman interview. 65. Zuckerman, “To the Future Occupants.” 66. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 621; for fur-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 253

ther analysis of contemporary labs’ space and architecture, see also Klonk’s New Laboratories. 67. The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at the University of Colorado Boulder is driven by a similar philosophy and has a similar history with and relation to its inherited space. For more on the MAL, see Emerson, “The Media Archaeology Lab” and “As If.” 68. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” 69. Ernst. 70. Ernst, Digital Media and the Archive, 55. 71. Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 774. 72. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” 73. Ernst, “Archives, Materiality, and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’”

2. LAB APPARATUS 1. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57. 2. Zephyr, “Spatial History as Scholarly Practice,” 503. 3. Nowviskie, “Resistance in Materials,” 383. 4. This stems from Michel Foucault’s understanding of the apparatus (“dispositif ”) and from Giorgio Agamben’s follow-­up essay, in which he writes: “I shall call an apparatus anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—­why not—­language itself ” (“What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, 14). 5. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 7. 6. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 160–­61. 7. Brand, The Media Lab, 18–­19. This is not to say that the current examples of digital (humanities) labs would be anywhere so naive; indeed, many of them are very aware of their proximity to “traditional” locations of old media such as the library. And many of the practices that revolve around the digital are embedded in a more pragmatic way of considering, for example, the benefits of open source systems around which the lab or digital scholarship can build itself as a different sort of a communication system. See Bickoff, “Humanity’s Place in Laboratory Space.” 8. One broader term that indicates a commitment to articulate a continuum across material objects and information technologies is postdigital. What the term offers is a way to realize the multiple histories of digital technologies from 8-­bit sound and graphics to the current HD worlds. See Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-­ digital’?”

254  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

9. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 161. See also Law, “Making a Mess with Method.” 10. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” 11. Media Archaeological Fundus, https://www.musikundmedien.hu-berlin. de/de/medienwissenschaft/medientheorien/fundus/media-archaeological-fundus. 12. Ernst, “Archives, Materiality, and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’” 13. Emerson, “Sister Labs.” 14. For a list of the objects, see the MAF wiki at https://wikis.hu-berlin.de/ maf/Kategorie:Inventar. 15. For a brief history of the intellectual trajectory of German media studies after Kittler, see Geoghegan, “After Kittler.” 16. See Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science.” 17. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” See also Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms. 18. Ernst, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’” 19. Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.” 20. As Wolfgang Hagen puts it, media devices restore parts of their own scientific history (Das Radio, xvii). 21. Thomson, “Scientific Laboratories,” 411. 22. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” 23. Guez, “An Interview with Emmanuel Guez.” The Minitel also serves as a prominent example. See, for example, Guez et al., “The Afterlives of Network-­ Based Artworks.” Their example is the lab-­created afterlife for Eduardo Kac’s Videotext Poems from the mid-­1980s where the art piece becomes also a way to address the existence of earlier now dead media infrastructures such as the French Minitel networking system: “The most common Minitel could therefore be coupled to a telephone from the 1980s. To connect to the server the user needs to compose a number, wait for the high tone specific to a Minitel server, then press the button ‘Connexion/Fin.’ This procedure, obvious to any Minitel user, is lost to the younger generation of ‘digital natives’ yet experimental media archaeology allows a new audience to re-­appropriate such knowledge and in this sense, although the Minitel is a dead medium, creating the ‘second original’ has made it into a sort of ‘zombie’ medium, giving an archival life, or afterlife, to Kac’s Poems. Any happy Minitel owner with access to a landline can call the number linked to the micro-­server and get connected” (118). 24. Höltgen, “Interview with Stefan Höltgen.” 25. See Höltgen, “Game Circuits.” 26. Fred Turner connects this to the longer history of R&D in the United States and the emergence of current forms of digital and internet-­based utopias as part of the developments since World War II. The story of modern valorization of information is also, then, a story of the emergent military-­industrial-­academic complex: “The idea that the material world could be thought of as an information

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 255

system and modeled on computers emerged not with the Internet, but much earlier, in and around the government-­sponsored research laboratories of World War II, and particularly around the Radiation Laboratory at MIT” (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 15). 27. Brand, The Media Lab, 42. 28. Sayers and Chan, “Prototyping the Past.” 29. See Hertz, “Dead Media Research Lab.” See also Zielinski, “Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola.” 30. Sayers, “Prototyping the Past.” 31. Belojevic, “Kits for Cultural History.” The “kit” also resonates strongly with some methods in critical design, like cultural probes, props, and scenarios. See Dunne, Hertzian Tales. 32. Sayers, “Kits for Cultural History.” 33. Fickers and van der Oever, “Experimental Media Archaeology,” 275. See also Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.” 34. Ernst, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’” See also Cramer, “Post-­digital Literary Studies.” 35. Ludwig and Weber, “A Rediscovery of Scientific Collections.” 36. See, for example, Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity. See also Ludwig and Weber, “University Collections as Archives.” 37. Lourenço, “Between Two Worlds,” 45. We would also like to point out that cabinets of physics instruments, models for anatomy, and all kinds of collections of ephemera offered what Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz called, in 1787, “a sort of encyclopaedia for the senses” that was particularly useful for pedagogical purposes as well as for research (quoted in Tega, “Science and Art in Palazzo Poggi,” 8). In many ways, collections were also connected to spaces and architectures such as botanical gardens and anatomical theaters. Of course, in the humanities both archaeological and ethnological collections were already a central part of earlier research collections, including a partial absorption into university museums. While, in our case, research collections are not necessarily serving the public like a museum—­and in many cases because of limited or nonexistent staffing or because of the nature of the lab or collection—­it is useful to illuminate the importance of the collection by quoting David Murray from 1904: “Every Professor of a branch of science requires a museum and a laboratory for his department; and accordingly in all our great universities and other teaching institutions we have independent museums of botany, palaeontology, geology, mineralogy and zoology, of anatomy, physiology, pathology and materia medica, of archaeology—­prehistorical and historical, classical and Christian—­each subject taught having its own appropriate collection” (quoted in Lourenço, “Between Two Worlds,” 68–­69). 38. Clark, Academic Charisma, 141. 39. Clark, 160. 40. Clark, 174.

256  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

41. Stern, “The Example,” 23. 42. On Kittler as the daunting godfather of digital humanities, see Holl, “Friedrich Kittler’s Digital Legacy.” 43. Schmidgen, “The Laboratory,” 11. 44. In addition to text-­based work, reverse engineering and forensics are relevant methodologies for a kind of media-­analytical research that approaches cultures of computation from a different perspective than that of data in the abstract. This is not meant as a dismissal of hybrid labs that focus on big data or those that incorporate the old ideal of Big Science in the humanities lab. What we are arguing, though, is that the sort of material practice we have been describing is a necessary complement to data-­based work as it frames the link between science and hybrid lab from the perspective of media studies instead of the media industry and the military-­industrial complex. 45. Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” 46. Winthrop-­Young, Kittler and the Media, 74. 47. Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK.” 48. Frost. 49. For an online catalog of the MAL’s collection, please consult http://me diaarchaeologylab.com/catalogue. 50. See Emerson, “The Media Archaeology Lab” and “Excavating.” 51. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 100. 52. Galison, “Trading with the Enemy,” 36. Thin description as defined by Galison is part of his concept of trading zones for interdisciplinary activity. 53. See the Digital Archive of entries at https://interactions.acm.org/archive. 54. Kolko, “Day in the Lab”; Budd, “Day in the Lab.” 55. Isbister, “Day in the Lab”; Watson, “Day in the Lab.” 56. Karen Barad uses the term intra-­action to emphasize the nature of agency always not merely as interactional; instead, intra-­action emphasizes the fluid boundaries in which different agencies co-­constitute each other, including the entanglement of matter and meaning in iterative rounds of engagement: “The neologism ‘intra-­action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-­action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-­action. It is important to note that the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33).

3. LAB INFRASTRUCTURE

1. Garcia, “NASA Updates Spacewalk Assignments.” 2. Voosen, “Women Make Up Just 15%.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 257

3. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380. 4. Crane, Seales, and Terras, “Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology,” section 17. 5. Crane, Seales, and Terras, section 19. 6. Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 8. 7. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.” 8. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380. 9. Anderson, “What Are Research Infrastructures?,” 20–­21. 10. Foka et al., “Beyond Humanities qua Digital,” 273. 11. Foka et al., 273. 12. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 381–­82. Latour also makes a similar point with regard to infrastructure’s visibility during breakdown by using construction sites as an analogy in Reassembling the Social, 88. 13. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.” 14. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 377. 15. Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” 112. 16. Alberani, De Castro Pietrangeli, and Mazza, “The Use of Grey Literature in Health Sciences.” 17. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 34. 18. Bowker and Star, 38. 19. Vismann, Files. 20. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 41. 21. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 290. 22. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 44. 23. Bowker and Star, 50. 24. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 322. 25. See https://civiclaboratory.nl/. 26. CLEAR, CLEAR Lab Book. 27. Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3–­4. 28. Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 17. 29. Quoted in Wilson, appendix B, 218. 30. Burwell et al., A Time in Our Lives. 31. Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 1. 32. Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 43–­44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 33. Wershler, “Neepawa and Minnedosa,” 66. 34. “Five Stories, 105 Years.” 35. A fictionalized account of this history appears in Carol Shields’s 1992 novel Republic of Love. Jessaca B. Leinaweaver published a paper on it in 2013 titled “Practice Mothers.” 36. There is another significant body of photo-­documentation from this period, though there is less writing about it. One of the interesting things about this period is that the photographic record suggests a concerted effort on the part

258  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

of the university to promote not only their sophisticated lab apparatus, but the presence of named lab technicians, who all had professional headshots taken. This is one possible avenue for ongoing research on this project. 37. Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 2. 38. Quoted in Burwell and Burwell, 2. 39. Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 42–­43. 40. Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 1. 41. Burwell and Burwell, 1. 42. Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 37. 43. Parker and Burwell, “Women’s Institute,” 14. 44. Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 3. 45. Parker and Burwell, “Women’s Institute,” 14. 46. Parker and Burwell, 14. 47. Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 4. 48. Scrase, “Foods and Nutrition,” 54. 49. Burwell, “4-­H Club Program,” 39. 50. Strong-­Boag, “Pulling in Double Harness,” 32. 51. Strong-­Boag, 43–­44. 52. Strong-­Boag, 43–­44. 53. Keselman, “Academic Structure Initiative Update.” 54. Reverby, “More than Fact and Fiction,” 22. 55. Brandt, “Racism and Research,” 21. 56. Reverby, “Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” 3–­4. 57. Reverby, “More than Fact and Fiction,” 27. 58. Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 10. 59. Cruzado, “Who Needs Extension, Anyway?,” 6. 60. Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 9. 61. Campbell, Movable School, 92; Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 11. 62. Winn, Documenting Racism, 20. 63. CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1906 ?amount=674.50, consulted September 14, 2020. 64. Campbell, Movable School, 94. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 65. This is not hyperbole; for Winn there is little of actual educational value in this film. He cites an internal government document that uses eye-­wateringly frank language: “The pictures enabled those who saw them to visualize into concrete action the otherwise abstract points of the propaganda” (“Report to the Secretary of Agriculture on the Work of the Committee on Motion Picture Activities,” November 30, 1914, 8, in Winn, Documenting Racism, 16). 66. Winn, 13. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 67. Campbell, Movable School, 120–­21, 125. 68. Brown, “1890 Institutions’ Extension Program,” 65. 69. McFarlane and Rutherford, “Political Infrastructures,” 371. 70. Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio,” 498.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 259

71. Galison and Jones, 524. 72. Museum of Modern Art, Art in Our Time, 15. See also Museum of Modern Art, “Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Biographical Notes.” 73. Lowell and the Fogg Art Museum, The Fine Arts in a Laboratory. 74. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 56. 75. Kantor, 93. 76. Kantor, 93 77. Monash University, “Emerging Technologies Lab Collaboration.” 78. Liboiron et al., “Equity in Author Order.” 79. Century, Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 80. See also Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.” 81. Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 82. This is also evident in the history of the art and technology lab as it emerges as part of U.S. Cold War institutions. See Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.” 83. Frodeman, Sustainable Knowledge, 51. 84. Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 85. Weingart, “A Short History of Knowledge Formations.” 86. University Innovation Alliance, http://www.theuia.org. 87. Crow and Bozeman, Limited by Design, 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 88. Zielinski, [. . . After the Media], 226. 89. To be fair, some European projects have tried to address this: Baltan Laboratories’ project set itself as an “active laboratory space for research and development in the technological arts,” echoing also our contention that it often takes a lab to understand a lab. Plohman, A Blueprint, 7. See also, for example, the CCCB (Barcelona) Dossier on laboratories in the cultural sector, which also includes various insights into the policy aspects in Europe: http://lab.cccb.org/ en/dossier/laboratories. 90. Stripling, “Arizona State U Has Problems.” 91. See Wysocki, “Once Collegial”; M. L. Phillips, “ASU Cancer Researchers Fired”; Irwin, “ASU Inc.”; Milun v. Arizona Board of Regents; and Wagner and Ryman, “Prominent ASU Scientist Sues University.” 92. Crow and Bozeman, Limited by Design, 99. 93. Crow and Bozeman, 98. 94. Wysocki, “Once Collegial.” 95. Wagner and Ryman, “Prominent ASU Scientist.” 96. Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University, 182, 307 (quotation). 97. Foka et al., “Beyond Humanities qua Digital,” 265. 98. Foka et al., 266.

260  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

4. LAB PEOPLE 1. Kavanagh and Rich, Truth Decay. 2. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 212. 3. Bjelopera, City of Clerks, 99; Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle, 49. 4. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy, 36. 5. Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-­Away Culture,” 3–­4. 6. Krajewski, “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy,” 59. 7. Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-­Away Culture,” 3–­4. 8. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 227. 9. Latour, 231. 10. News of the entanglement of the Media Lab in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke while we were in the final stages of manuscript preparation. If anything, it has strengthened our sense of the usefulness of the extended lab model in terms of its ability to explicate aspects of laboratories that might not otherwise be visible: what forms of agencies are promoted and supported by labs, what sort of promotional strategies project a sense of “humanism,” and how alternative discourses and techniques have been employed as part of another legacy of the lab since the 1990s. 11. Brand, The Media Lab, 6. 12. Bass, “Being Nicholas.” 13. P. F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 23. 14. MIT 150 Exhibition, “MIT Charter of 1861.” 15. “Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology,” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. 16. For a complete history of the founding of MIT, see Stratton and Mannix, Mind and Hand. 17. “Scope and Plan of the School of Industrial Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. 18. Quoted in Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation, 18. 19. Millard, 30. 20. P. F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 137. 21. Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 77. 22. Noble, America by Design, 118. 23. Noble, 118. 24. Noble, 118. 25. Etzkowitz, MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science, 50. 26. Etzkowitz, “The Making of the Entrepreneurial University,” 530. 27. Etzkowitz, 530; Guerlac, Radar in World War II, 293. 28. Guerlac, Radar in World War II, 293. 29. Guerlac, 681. 30. Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.” 31. For more on this long-­standing porousness between the public and private sectors, see Barrow’s contemporary account, Universities and the Cap-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 261

italist State, and Etzkowitz’s “The Making of the Entrepreneurial University.” For early, critical accounts of the increasing influence of the private sector on higher education, see John Henry Newman’s 1858 The Idea of the University and Veblen’s 1918 The Higher Learning in America. 32. Slotnick, “Membership Levels.” 33. Evers, “Frequently Asked Questions.” 34. Ethan Zuckerman, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab. 35. MIT News Office, “Letter Regarding Jeffrey Epstein and MIT.” 36. Farrow, “Élite University Research Center.” 37. Chen and Hao, “MIT Media Lab Founder.” 38. Chen and Hao. 39. Brand, The Media Lab, 4. See also Halpern, “The Trauma Machine.” 40. Ito and Howe, Whiplash, 100. 41. Ito, “Organizational Structure.” 42. Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, 94. 43. Veblen, 96, 99. 44. Just a few of the more recent books published on the intersection of neoliberalism and higher education are Labaree’s A Perfect Mess, Di Leo’s, Higher Education under Late Capitalism, and Gumport’s Academic Fault Lines. 45. Servan-­Schreiber, The American Challenge, 69. 46. Servan-­Schreiber, 78. 47. P. F. Drucker, Management, 131. 48. Drucker, 131. 49. Drucker, 325. 50. Drucker, 333. 51. Johnson, “MIT Commencement Speech.” 52. Johnson, 7. 53. Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here. 54. Renata Avila describes digital colonialism as “the new deployment of a quasi-­imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a vastly dominant power” (“Resisting Digital Colonialism”). However, Negroponte’s writing from the 1960s through the 2000s along with Kay’s and Servan-­Schreiber’s writing from the 1970s demonstrates it’s anything but new. See Negroponte, The Architecture Machine; Kay, “A Personal Computer”; and Servan-­Schreiber, The American Challenge. 55. Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.” 56. Farmer, “Where Tomorrow’s Technology Is Born.” 57. There is significant research on the history of futures and the notion of futurity that goes back to the RAND Corporation in the 1940s. See Beck, “The Future.” 58. Hearn and Banet-­Weiser, “Future Tense.”

262  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

59. Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 60. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 61. 61. Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 55. 62. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 61. 63. Jewish Museum, Software, 23. 64. Halpern, “Inhuman Vision.” 65. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 63. 66. Negroponte, “A 30-­Year History.” 67. Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 59. 68. Kay, “A Personal Computer.” 69. Kay. 70. Kay. 71. Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects, 2. 72. Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines, 103. 73. Negroponte, 104. 74. Negroponte, 108. 75. Steenson, Architectural Intelligence, 179. 76. It’s also worth noting that, while Negroponte appropriates the figure of the “indigenous architect” as his inspiration for his various AMG projects using machine intelligence to solve so-­called urban problems, his obsession with the “urban” as such may (whether he was aware of it or not) be part of MIT’s larger obsession of the time, which started in the mid-­1960s with solving what it euphemistically referred to as society’s “urban” problems—­coded language for, in Charlton McIlwain’s words in Black Software, “the Negro, the Puerto Rican, racial and ethnic minorities, the poor” (19). Across the 153-­page-­long The Architecture Machine, Negroponte mentions “urban” no fewer than eighty times. 77. Servan-­Schreiber, The World Challenge, 6. 78. Servan-­Schreiber, 13. 79. Servan-­Schreiber, 13. 80. Servan-­Schreiber, 268. 81. Negroponte, “The $100 Laptop,” 19. 82. Negroponte, 19. 83. Negroponte, 20. 84. See Negroponte, 19–­20, and Kane et al., Learning to Change the World, 175. Anita Say Chan has astutely described this method of delivering education technology initiatives to those living in countries perceived as “underdeveloped” or “needy” as an air-­drop deployment that’s part of a larger program of technological fundamentalism (“Beyond Technological Fundamentalism”). 85. Markoff, “Taking the Pulse of Technology.” 86. Negroponte, “One Laptop per Child.” 87. Negroponte.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 263

88. Negroponte. 89. Fouché, “From Black Inventors to OLPC,” 72. 90. Diamandis, “XPRIZE.” 91. Ames, The Charisma Machine. 92. Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK.” 93. Bosma, Nettitudes, 136. 94. Bosma, 136. 95. Bosma, 136. 96. Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!” 97. Derrida, Dissemination, 5. 98. Stryker, “Another Dream of Common Language,” 302. 99. C. Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone.” See also C. Williams, “Radical Inclusion.” 100. C. Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone.” 101. Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back,” 230. 102. Stone, 230. 103. ACTLab, “The Historical ACTLab.” 104. Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations,” 55; Stryker, “Another Dream of Common Language,” 302. 105. Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!” 106. Stone, “On Being Trans.” 107. Doctorow, “U Texas/Austin’s ACTLab to Close.” 108. Braidotti, “The Critical Posthumanities,” 382. 109. ACTLab, “The Historical ACTLab.” 110. ACTLab. 111. Stone, “On Being Trans.” 112. Stone. 113. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 587. 114. Svensson, “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.” 115. Toupin, “Feminist Hackerspaces.”

5. LAB IMAGINARIES 1. See, for example, Lecher, “The 10 Best Fictional Laboratories.” See also Bouton, “In Lab Lit, Fiction Meets Science.” 2. Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 106. 3. Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 41–­62. 4. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter, 42, 43. 5. Mullaney, 22, 23, 26. 6. To quote Gilles Deleuze, “the institution is always given as an organized system of means. . . . Law is a limitation of actions, institution a positive model for action” (“Instincts and Institutions,” 19). 7. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 10.

264  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

8. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter, 30. 9. Mullaney, 37. 10. Mullaney, 56 11. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 341. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 12. See Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science.” 13. Bureau d’études writes of the planetary lab: “Since World War, the planet is gradually transformed into a scale 1 laboratory. The old model of ‘world factory’ has given way to the model of the ‘world laboratory.’ Objects of this laboratory, can we also be the subjects? Can we reclaim this huge machine that became autonomous and is now developing according to its own dynamic? Can we redirect the fate and direction of this laboratory?” Quoted on the Laboratory Planet website: http://laboratoryplanet.org/en. 14. Bishop, “The Global University.” 15. Krzyżanowski, “Values, Imaginaries and Templates,” 346–­47. 16. Gieryn, “Boundary-­Work,” 782. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 17. There are plenty of relevant examples, but in terms of recent activism where the rhetoric of the lab is mobilized as a feminist network. It is also a good example of the ways in which the notion of the lab is not necessarily contained by normal architectural arrangements, but becomes a network of participants working on a wider geographical scale and with wider set of global social issues. 18. Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio.” 19. Edison to Charles E. Buell, December 1, 1873, quoted in Israel, “Telegraphy and Edison’s Invention Factory,” 69. 20. Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve, 8. 21. “Undergirding this new context was an emerging corporate culture that relied less on the invisible hand of the market and more on what historian Alfred Chandler has called the ‘visible hand’ of modern management.” Israel, “Telegraphy and Edison’s Invention Factory,” 66. 22. Millard, “Thomas Edison,” 199. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 23. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 45, 343. 24. Altice, I Am Error, 22. 25. Millard, “Thomas Edison,” 192–­95. 26. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 91. 27. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 165. 28. Latour, 154. 29. Kluitenberg, “Connection Machines,” 160. 30. Kluitenberg, 168. 31. Kluitenberg, 170. 32. Thibault, “The Automatization of Nikola Tesla.” 33. Wolffram, “In the Laboratory of the Ghost-­Baron.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 265

34. See Hamilton, Intention and Survival. See also Sconce, Haunted Media. 35. Hamilton Family fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections. 36. “At present, photography of the substance is the most valuable means at our disposal of showing its objective reality and of studying its morphology and processes.” Hamilton, Intention and Survival, 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 37. “That these phenomena were secured under the direction of intelligences, known as ‘controls,’ that is, trance personalities claiming to be individuals who have survived death, is generally known, and a fact that makes the whole enquiry particularly distasteful to many” (Hamilton, 10). 38. Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, a British inventor and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of radio, referred to this room as Hamilton’s “laboratory” (quoted in Hamilton, 132). 39. Wojcik, “Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions,” 120. Wojick cites Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, and Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow. 40. Hamilton writes: “Many of my medical colleagues have accepted my experiments as attempts to get at the truth by genuinely experimental methods, regardless of the somewhat unusual nature of these things” (Intention and Survival, 16). 41. Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 4. See also Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio.” 42. Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 56–­57. 43. For example, from his first sentence (“This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men” [1]), Jon Gertner is unabashed about The Idea Factory being a “great man history.” For all its virtues, he retrenches a mythology of male American midwestern genius at the roots of technological innovation by glossing over the contributions of the thousands of employees (fifteen thousand at its peak) for the work of a handful, including the women who worked at Bell Labs (121) and the Europeans whose discoveries sometimes served as the occasion for innovation (13, 67). The story could have been told otherwise. 44. Gertner, 346. 45. Dickerman, “‘Our Future.’” 46. Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” 52, 45. 47. Barbrook and Cameron, 50, 49. 48. Barbrook and Cameron, 53. 49. Barbrook and Cameron, 55. 50. Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here; Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation, 3–­4. Golumbia sees in computationalism not only a drift toward the right but also the seeds of a Hobbesian, winner-­take-­all sensibility that leads directly to authoritarianism: “There is no room in this picture for exactly the kind of distributed sovereignty on which democracy itself would seem to be predicated” (224). And, in the wake of Gamergate and the rise of Trump,

266  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Josephine Armistead extends the argument yet again to account for the rise of neo-­reactionary philosophy and outright fascism. See “The Silicon Ideology” and “The Silicon Ideology Revisited.” 51. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 240. 52. Turner, 242. 53. Turner, 19–­20. 54. Holmes, “Disconnecting the Dots,” 185. 55. Holmes, 185. 56. Crow, “Building an Entrepreneurial University,” 76. 57. Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University, 10–­11. 58. Crow and Dabars, 103–­4. 59. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 129. 60. Galison, “Three Laboratories,” 1149. 61. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 20.

6. LAB TECHNIQUES 1. See, for example, Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 6–­7. 2. Galison, “Trading Zone.” 3. Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 10, 12. 4. Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” 84.  5. Sterne, “Communication as Techné,” 4. 6. Sterne, 5. 7. Krämer and Bredekamp, “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques,” 23. 8. Fordyce et al., “3D Printing and University Makerspaces,” 193. 9. Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology,” 393. 10. Fordyce, “Manufacturing Imaginaries,” 3. 11. Allahyari and Rourke, “The 3D Additivist Manifesto.” 12. Molitch-­Hou, “3D Printing Health Risks.” 13. Since the writing of this book, the Lab has continued work renamed as the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies. See https://maker.uvic.ca/ studio/. 14. Sayers, “Prototyping the Past.” 15. Catlow and Garrett, “DIWO.” 16. See also Parikka, “Digging.” 17. Wylie et al., “Institutions for Civic Technoscience”; Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 4. 18. Dragona, “What Is Left to Subvert?,” 187. 19. O’Gorman, “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys.” 20. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 100. 21. Findlen, 107. 22. Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!” 23. Liboiron, “How to Run a Feminist Science Lab Meeting.” 24. Hartnett, Consensus-­Oriented Decision-­Making.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 267

25. https://civiclaboratory.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/codm-cheat-sheet. docx. 26. Krmpotich, “Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically,” 115. 27. Montfort, “An Interview with Nick Montfort.” 28. Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.” 29. For organizations lobbying on behalf of consumers, see, for example, the Repair Association (www.repair.org) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Defend Your Right to Repair!” 30. Rankin, “EU Plans ‘Right to Repair’ Rules.” 31. National Science Teaching Association, “Integral Role of Laboratory Investigations.” 32. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 149. 33. Rheinberger, “Experiment, Research, Art.” 34. Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.” 35. Rheinberger, “Experiment, Research, Art.” 36. See also Schwab, Experimental Systems. 37. For more on Black Mountain College see, for example, Díaz, The Experimenters. 38. Reimer, “An Interview with Professor Bo Reimer.” 39. Gross, “Give Me an Experiment”; Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory.” 40. J. Drucker, SpecLab, 5. 41. J. Drucker, 21. 42. Treske, “An Interview with Andreas Treske.” 43. Quoted in Plohman, A Blueprint, 253. 44. White, “The Aesthetics of Failure.” 45. Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.” 46. O’Gorman, “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys,” 40. 47. Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.” 48. Ballon and Schuurman, “Living Labs.” 49. Ballon and Schuurman. 50. Ballon and Schuurman. The term “living lab” is often credited to William Mitchell, Kent Larson, and Alex Pentland at MIT, who used the concept in the field of urban planning and city design to observe people in smart homes (the living labs, in this case) and then iterate their product design based on patterns of actual use. But Seppo Leminen (with researchers including Anna-­Greta Nyström, Christ Habib, and Mika Westerlund) has argued for a more complex relative beginning for the term, finding early uses in 1749 and 1956, with its relative formalization in 1991 with Bajgier (Leminen, Westerlund, and Nyström, “Living Labs as Open-­Innovation Networks,” 7). 51. Bajgier et al., “Introducing Students,” 708. 52. For bibliographic surveys see Leminen, Habib, and Westerlund, “Living Labs as Innovation Platforms,” and Leminen, Westerlund, and Nyström, “Living Labs as Open-­Innovation Networks.” 53. Bajgier et al., “Introducing Students,” 703, 709.

268  NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

54. Leminen, Habib, and Westerlund, “Living Labs as Innovation Platforms,” 2. 55. Ballon and Schuurman, “Living Labs.” 56. Ballon and Schuurman. 57. Von Hippel, “Lead Users,” 791. 58. Mats Eriksson et al., “Living Labs,” 2. 59. Arrigoni, “Innovation, Collaboration, Education,” 217. 60. Arrigoni, 219, 223. 61. Arrigoni, 216. 62. Tanaka, “Situation within Society,” 19. 63. Arrigoni and Schofield, “Understanding Artistic Prototypes between Activism and Research,” 25. 64. Tanaka, 26. 65. Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.” 66. Sayers and Chan, “Prototyping the Past.” 67. Quoted in Redström, Making Design Theory, 73. 68. Turner, “Prototype,” 258. 69. Kera, “On Prototypes,” 425. 70. Ronell, The Test Drive, 164. 71. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 56. 72. Zielinski, “Thinking about Art after the Media,” 299. 73. Arrigoni, “Innovation, Collaboration, Education,” 219.

CONCLUSION 1. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Lab Cult. 2. Parham, “Everything Is New.” See also Chaudhary and Berhe, “Ten Simple Rules,” and the website for the “What Is a Feminist Lab?” symposium: http://whatisafeministlab.online. 3. Baccus-­Clark, “What Role Does Immersive Storytelling Play?” 4. Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine,” 34. 5. Huhtamo, 41. 6. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 157. 7. Ding, “Interview with Hyphen-­Labs.” See also the Hyphen-­Labs website at http://www.hyphen-labs.com/. 8. Ding, “Interview with Hyphen-­Labs.” 9. Ding. 10. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 564. 11. Pickering, 567. 12. Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-­digital’?,” 18. See also Bishop et al., Across & Beyond. 13. Parikka, “The Lab Imaginary.” 14. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump,15. 15. CLEAR, CLEAR Lab Book.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 269



16. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 281. 17. Shapin and Schaffer, 76, 303. 18. Conway and Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt. 19. Kavanagh and Rich, Truth Decay. 20. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 343. 21. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 201. 22. Kuhn, 202, 5.

270  NOTES TO CONCLUSION

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302  Bibliography

INDEX

abbeys. See monasteries and abbeys abstractions, problematic, 168–73 academia: codeswitching and, 182–85; institutionalism of, 180; interdisciplinarity in, 142, 143. See also colleges and universities; university labs Academy of Media Arts (Cologne, Germany), 87 Access Space (Britain), 100–101, 103 ACM Interactions ( journal), 104–5 ACTLab (Austin, Texas), 40, 177–84; codeswitching umbrella and, 111, 146, 156, 177, 182–85, 245; collaboration in, 220; mission and goals of, 179–80, 181–82; separatism criticism, 184–85 Ada’s Technical Books and Café (Seattle, Washington), 44–45 additive manufacturing. See 3D printing Adorno, Theodor, 140 advertising, 152–53, 155, 167, 206 aesthetics in action, 215 Africa, 171–72 Agamben, Giorgio, 254n4 agential relations, 78, 81

agricultural extension policy project (Canada), 117, 124–25, 129. See also home economics labs (Canada) agricultural extension policy project (U.S.), Black operators of, 128–33 Agricultural Society Act (1902, Canada), 125 alchemical laboratories, 50 Alexander, Christopher. See Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein) Alexandra School (Winnipeg), 120 Allahyari, Moreshin, 217 Allen, Jamie, 231, 234 America by Design (Noble), 158 American Challenge, The (Servan-Schreiber), 165, 173 American exceptionalism, 61, 253nn48, 53 Ames, Morgan G., 176 AMG. See Architecture Machine Group (AMG, MIT) analog apparatus and technology, 82–83, 88–89, 93–94, 254n7. See also digital technology anatomical theaters, 49

303

Anderson, Sheila, 110 animal research, 122, 123, 170 antidisciplinarity, 62, 64. See also inter- and transdisciplinarity antifoundationalism, 111 anti-hierarchical structure, 180, 184–85, 210. See also management practice Anzaldùa, Gloria, 180 apothecaries, 46, 49–50, 59 apparatus, analytic category of, 2, 13–16, 78, 79–106; analog apparatus and technology, 82–83, 254n7; on Booker T. Washington Agricultural School on Wheels, 133; defined, 80–81, 254n4; experimentation and, 227; Foucault on, 254n4; in French-language lab, 14, 15, 18–19; in Hamilton séance rooms, 198, 201–3; in HICapacity, 44; historical experience through, 51, 95–96; in home economics labs, 120, 122–23, 127; hybrid lab epistemology and, 83, 86, 227; infrastructure and policy, compared, 109; inscription devices, 30, 228–29; on Jesup Wagon, 129–30; juxtaposition of operationality, 89–90; measurement and quantification by, 86, 91–92; media archaeology through, 83–90; Menlo Park and, 194; messiness of, 83; monetary value of lab equipment, 120, 129–30, 147–48; Münsterberg’s instruments, 20; people as, 90, 91, 200, 213; as relational, 16, 23–24; research and teaching collections and, 82, 97–104, 106; scrounging equipment, 21, 250n50; Signal Lab and, 81–82, 85, 88, 93–94, 100–101; social regulation of, 245; space and, 79–80; specialized equipment, tracking proliferation

304  Index

of hybrid labs through, 137–38; technique and, 89, 213, 214; testing and, 237; 3D printing, 213, 216–18, 234–35. See also Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin); media archaeology; research and teaching collections, apparatus and Apple II computers, 174 Arab people, 173–74 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 37 architecture and exterior space design: indigenous architecture, 172; Lab Cult exhibition and, 20, 21, 206, 207, 239–40; of MAF, 75–77; of Menlo Park, 54–56; of MIT Media Lab, 60, 64–66, 71, 253n46; of monasteries, 47–49. See also floor layouts and interior space design; Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein); space, analytic category of Architecture Machine, The (Negroponte), 168, 171, 263n76 Architecture Machine Group (AMG, MIT), 60, 61, 155, 166, 168–72. See also Negroponte, Nicholas Architecture without Architects (Rudofsky), 172 Aristotle, 215 Arizona Model (New American University), 108, 141–48, 211–12 Arizona State University (ASU), 141, 142, 147 Arrigoni, Gabriella, 233, 238 art history, 135 Art in Our Time (MOMA exhibition), 135 artistic and creative activity, 140, 214, 215–16; at Bell Labs, 205; boundary work and, 193; hacker ethos and, 177; living labs for,

233–34; prototyping and, 236; testing and, 237–38 Artists and Architects Collaborate (MIT Committee on the Visual Arts), 64 art studios and art institutions, 134–38, 193; factory model for, 134–35, 205; infrastructure and policy and, 134–36; inspiration and, 231; knowledge production in, 214–15; lab designation, by users, 8, 135–36; studio-labs (1990s European media art scene), 87; studio-labs debates, 136–38. See also ACTLab (Austin, Texas); hybrid labs assembling and disassembling, 214, 223–26. See also technique, analytic category of Association for Computing Machinery National Conference (Boston), 171 astronomy, 41–42 Audible Past, The (Sterne), 22 Australia, 175, 232 automobile industry, 153 Avila, Renata, 262n54 Ayer, N. W., 152 Baccus-Clark, Ashley, 241, 243 Bacon, Francis, 227 Bajgier, Steve M., 231, 268n50 Baker, Gladys, 131 Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women (Cambridge), 252n29 Ballon, Pieter, 231 Baltan Laboratories, 260n89 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 167 Barad, Karen, 257n56 Barbrook, Richard, 208–9 Bar Lab (bar, Montreal), 3 Barnum, P. T., 152 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 135 bartending, 3

Barthes, Roland, 30 basic vs. applied research, 205 Bauhaus, 8–9, 235–36 Bayh-Dole Act (U.S., 1980), 211 Being Digital (Negroponte), 61–62 Bell, Alexander Graham, 15, 16 Bell Labs, 194, 204–8, 210, 219, 237, 266n43 Bender, Walter, 62 Benedictine abbeys, 48–49, 54, 55 Benedikt, Michael, 251n8 Benediktbeuern Abbey, 48–49 Benjamin, Walter, 37 Bennett, Tony, 15–16 Bernbach, Bill, 206 Better Farming trains, 124–25 Between Humanities and the Digital (Svensson and Goldberg), 99 “Beyond Humanities qua Digital” (Foka et al.), 148–49 bias, 243–44; acknowledging, 77, 248; in technology design, 172, 173–74. See also gender; marginalized groups; power, forms of; racism bicycle industry, 153 Bilkent University (Ankara), 229 bioinformatics lab, 33 Black, W. J., 125 black-box metaphor, 39, 42, 45, 86. See also opacity and transparency Black Lives Matter, 247 Black Mountain College, 180, 228 Black people, 127–33; agricultural extension laboratories run by, 128–33; experimentation on, 127–28; “urban” as stand in, 168; women of color, Hyphen-Labs and, 243–44. See also marginalized groups; race Bogost, Ian, 104 Bolsheviks, 124 Bonaccini, Léonore, 191 Booker T. Washington School on Wheels, 128, 133

Index 305

Bosma, Josephine, 177 Boston, Massachusetts, 166, 168–69 boundaries, disciplinary. See disciplinary boundaries boundary objects, 3D printers as, 216 boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion), 32, 110, 197–98, 240, 244; collaboration and, 218–19; expertise and, 192–93, 219; gender and, 49, 52, 63, 252n31; Gieryn on, 7, 192–93; gray literature and, 114. See also naming determination “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science” (Gieryn), 192 bounded and unbounded space, 29, 38–39, 40, 41–42, 54; codeswitch umbrella of boundary making, 111, 146, 156, 182–85, 245; in MAF, 77; medieval research spaces and, 46–49; in MIT Media Lab, 69–70; placelessness and placefulness, 40, 77; simulation labs, 27. See also online and virtual labs; opacity and transparency; space, analytic category of Bowker, Geoffrey C., 113–14 Boyle, Robert, 18, 191 Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs (later 4-H Clubs), 126 Bozeman, Barry, 108, 143–48 Braidotti, Rosi, 181, 242 brain drain, 165 Brand, Stewart, 61, 63, 66, 82, 94, 155 Brandon Central School (Winnipeg), 120 Brazil, 232 Breaking Bad (television show), 19 Britain: British cultural studies, 116; British media labs, 100-101, 177 Brownridge, T. R. (was Florence Mclauchlin), 121 Bruno, Giuliana, 20

306  Index

building complexes, 54–56, 60. See also architecture and exterior space design Bureau d’études (artistic duo), 191, 265n13 Burns, William E., 18 Busa, Roberto A., 83 Bush, Jeb, 142 business, lab functions as. See entrepreneurship; funding sources; industrial labs; management practice business, lab imaginaries and, 193–98 Butler, Octavia E., 244 Californian Ideology, 189, 208–10, 236 “Californian Ideology, The” (Barbrook and Cameron), 208–9 California Trip (Stock), 208 calm space protocols, 245–46 Cambodia, 174, 175 Cambridge Analytica, 42 Cameron, Andy, 208–9 Campbell, Thomas Monroe, 128, 129–31, 132 Canada: agricultural extension in, 117, 124–25, 129; communication studies in, 61, 253n48; living labs and, 232; R&D labs in, 143; TPMs in, 225; university lab funding in, 162 Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Lab Cult exhibition, 20, 21, 206, 207, 239–40 Canguilhem, Georges, 100 Carver, George Washington, 129, 132 CCCB (Barcelona) Dossier, 260n89 Centre mondiale informatique et ressource humaine, 173, 174; OLPC project, 101, 155, 168, 171, 174–75, 176 Century, Michael, 107–8, 136–39

Chan, Anita Say, 263n84 Chan, Tiffany, 94–95, 235 Chen, Angela, 161–62 children: childrearing, home economics labs and, 120–22, 258n35; DynaBook project, 171–72, 173; OLPC project, 101, 155, 168, 171, 174–75, 176 China, 232 Chinese typewriter, 188–89 “circuit of culture” heuristic, 23, 116 citizens: community engagement of, 231–34; crowd-sourced observation by, 41–42 Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR, Memorial University, Newfoundland), 115–16, 136, 221, 241, 245 Clark, William, 98–99 Clarke, Arthur C., 205 Clinton, Bill, 128, 142 closedness. See opacity and transparency closure, refusal of, 182–83 Coach House Press, 83 codeswitching umbrella, 111, 146, 156, 177, 182–85, 245. See also ACTLab (Austin, Texas) Cohen-Boyer gene-splicing method, 210–11 collaboration, 43; at ACTLab, 220; codeswitch umbrella hinders, 184; communication in, 220–21; communitarian ethos, 87, 100; with community members, in living labs, 231–34; dis/assembly and, 225; experimentation and, 228; inclusion and equity issues, 218–19; at Menlo Park, 158; at MIT Media Lab, 60, 64, 68, 69; networking and connectivity, 146–47, 208; prototyping and, 234, 236; at Rad Lab, 210; space design to facilitate, 64, 68;

technique and, 214, 218–21; 3D printing, collective use of, 217–18. See also inter- and transdisciplinarity; technique, analytic category of collecting, 93–94, 98–99, 220, 256n37; technique and, 214, 221–23. See also apparatus, analytic category of; research and teaching collections; technique, analytic category of College Press Club (Middlebury College), 17 colleges and universities: administrative activity in, 111–12, 223; vs. community-oriented spaces, 101; department dismantling in, 147, 212; entrepreneurship and, 157, 164–65, 176; failure of, 167; mission and goals of, 141, 142–43, 148, 156–57; New American University (Arizona Model), 108, 141–48, 211–12; patent offices, 210–11; professorial power and, 41; traditional civic functions of, 212; tuition, 139, 162. See also educational function of labs; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); research and teaching collections; university labs Colombia, 174, 232 commercial brands, 16, 42, 228–29 common areas, 72–73 communication, 32, 145, 199; collaboration and, 220–21; machine conversationalist project, 168–69; translation, 248 communication studies discipline, 61, 253n48 communitarian ethos, 87, 100 communities of practice, 111 community, of hybrid labs, 246 community engagement, 101, 177, 231–34

Index 307

comparative research, 2, 24, 240, 248 computer-assisted design (CAD), 234 computer numerical control (CNC) machines, 216 computer use: Bell Labs’ influence on, 205; Californian Ideology and, 209; DynaBook project, 171–72, 173; human-computer interface, 155; IBM computers, 83; Kittler’s computer programming instruction, 100; MAL collection and, 102–3; OLPC project, 101, 155, 168, 171, 174–75, 176; Pattern Language and, 38; Signal Lab, study of obsolete computers, 93; simulation labs and, 27; in techno-humanist projects, 167–72; terminal rooms in early days of, 68; “third world” market for, 174–75; 3D printing and, 216. See also digital technology; online and virtual labs Concordia University (Montreal), 217, 226 Conquest of Cool, The (Frank), 206 Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making (Hartnett), 221 consumerism, 154 Cooper, Alix, 52 cooperative design, 231. See also collaboration copyright law and intellectual property, 63, 160, 162, 225 corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs, 138–40; apothecaries, 50; home economics lab graduates work for utilities companies, 126; innovation model in, 151, 154, 157, 167, 177, 211, 242; Menlo Park, 157, 159; monetization of knowledge production, 139–40, 148, 164; planned obsolescence and, 153–54; prototyping’s importance in, 157; techno-humanist

308  Index

solutionism by, 156, 173. See also funding sources; nonprofit labs and organizations corporate-sponsored university labs, 139–40; AMG and, 170; Bayh-Dole Act and, 211; Century on, 137, 138; discourse of entrepreneurship and, 189, 210–12; lab-to-industry pipeline for students, 160; MIT, 61, 156–57; MIT Media Lab, 61, 154, 160, 167, 177, 178. See also university labs, funding for cosmetics, 3–4, 243–44 Costa Rica, 174 “Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory, The” (Knorr Cetina), 26 Covid-19 pandemic, 152, 167, 246 Cramer, Florian, 245 Crane, Gregory, 109 creative industries, 137, 140–41 creativity. See artistic and creative activity Critical Art Ensemble, 9, 184 critical making, 236 Critical Media Lab Basel, 234 critical pedagogy, 220 critical theory, 180 Croffut, William, 59 Crosland, Maurice, 50, 51 Crow, Michael M., 108, 141–48, 211 the Cube (MIT Media Lab), 66–68, 71 cultural analytics field, 139 cultural imaginary, 20 cultural institutes, labs affiliated with, 138 cultural policy, 125 cultural studies: ACTLab as lab for, 181; “circuit of culture,” 23, 116 cultural techniques, 10–11, 215. See also technique, analytic category of culture, construction and deconstruction of, 25–26; apparatus

and, 79; infrastructure and, 110; paradigms in, 31 culture, defined, 30 culture industry, 140 Cyberspace: First Steps (Benedikt), 251n8 Dabars, William B., 141–43, 211 data, manipulated/falsified, 152–53, 154–55; hyperbolic discourse, 152, 154, 155, 196, 241–42 data focus, 100, 257n44 Davisson, Clinton J., 205–6 dead media, 15, 21, 77, 84, 92, 255n23. See also media archaeology De Landa, Manuel, 31 Deleuze, Gilles, 264n6 “demo or die” motto, 61, 162, 171. See also prototyping Denkinger, Marc, 18 Department of Health Education, and Welfare (HEW, United States), 128 Derrida, Jacques, 178 Designing the New American University (Crow and Dabars), 141–42 Design Lab (Hudson Bay Company clothing line), 4–6 design methodology: bias in, 172, 173–74; MLab as site of, 94–95 Dewey, John, 172, 174 Dictaphone Corporation, 15, 16 digital city initiatives, 231, 232 digital colonialism, 166, 262n54 digital humanities, 82, 83, 88–89, 96, 99; infrastructure and policy and, 111, 148, 184; media archaeology labs and, 103, 104, 105 digital humanities labs, 33, 254n7 digital media labs, early, 82 Digital Memory and the Archive (Ernst), 74–75 digital technology, 81, 137; ACTLab

and, 181–82; analog and, 82–83, 88–89, 93–94, 254n7; MLab and, 94–95; postdigital, term, 96, 98, 104, 245, 254n8. See also computer use dis/assembly, 214, 218, 223–26. See also technique, analytic category of disciplinary boundaries: apparatus reveal, 80; communication studies discipline, 61, 253n48; scholarship on, 29, 31, 35. See also collaboration; inter- and transdisciplinarity divisional business structure model, 195 DIWO (do-it-with-others) ethos, 218. See also collaboration DIY (do-it-yourself ) ethos, 218, 236 Documenting Racism: African Americans in U.S. Department of Agriculture Documentaries, 1921–42 (Winn), 131–32, 259n65 domestic science, 117. See also home economics labs (Canada) doors, open/closed, 69–70, 206 Dourish, Paul, 38 Dragona, Daphne, 219 Drexel University College of Business and Administration, 231 Drucker, Johanna, 228–29 Drucker, Peter, 156–57, 165 du Gay, Paul, 23 Duggar, J. F., 131 Duncan, L. C., 121 DynaBook, 171–72, 173 E14 (second media lab building at MIT Media Lab), 60, 69, 71–73 E15 (first media lab building at MIT Media Lab), 60, 64, 66–70, 71 Earl, Harley, 153 eccentricity, 206–7. See also lone genius figure ecodesign, 225

Index 309

Edison, Thomas, 39, 53–54, 57, 62, 157–58; failure and, 195, 230; the imaginary and, 193–96, 197; occult discourse of, 197; as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” 194, 196, 197. See also Menlo Park laboratory educational function of labs, 49, 50; ACTLab, 181–82; community-oriented, 101, 231–34; experimentation and, 226–27; innovation and, 165–66; MAF, 77, 85, 100; Signal Laboratory, 85. See also home economics labs (Canada); university labs Egypt, 232 elbow-rubbing, 219–20. See also collaboration; inter- and transdisciplinarity electricity, 126 emancipation ideals, 209 “Empire Strikes Back, The: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (Stone), 179 empiricism, 154, 242; parapsychology and, 199–200, 204 engineering, 192 entrepreneurship, universities promote, 156–57, 160, 189, 210–12. See also corporate-sponsored university labs entrepreneurship discourse, 189, 210–12 epistemic objects, 91, 100 Epstein, Jeffrey, 161–63, 176, 242, 261n10 Eriksson, Mats, 232 Eriksson, Per, 233 Ernst, Wolfgang, 73–75, 84, 87, 88–90, 91–92 ethics: of childrearing in home economics labs, 122; in parapsychology, 199; of research circula-

310  Index

tion, 136; research fraud, 70–71; of Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 128 “Ethnography of Infrastructure, The” (Star), 16, 109 Etzkowitz, Henry, 159 Europe, 260n89, 266n43; European net art scene, 177, 231; living labs and, 231, 232; right to repair, EU legislation on, 225 European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), 232 Excelsior Edison Phonograph, 90 experimental media arts, 96, 177 experimentation, 7, 41–42, 47, 50–51, 234; on Black people, 127–28; collaboration and, 228; in early MIT labs, 157; experimental space, the imaginary and, 190; failure and, 195, 214, 229–31; THE LAB and, 44–45; lab definition and, 26, 227–28; at MAF, 75, 77, 85–86, 91, 92; at MAL, 102–3; at Menlo Park, 193; at MIT Media Lab, 60; at MLab, 94–96; parapsychological, 199–203, 266nn36–38, 40; in science labs, 27, 28–29; technique and, 214, 226–29; using 3D printing, 216; virtual witnessing, 190–91. See also hands-on experimentation; observation; technique, analytic category of; testing expertise, 108; advertisers’ authority and, 152–53; boundary work and, 192–93, 219; collaborative, 219, 228; dis/assembly and, 226; prelegitimation and, 192; in university management, 164–65. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); lone genius figure extended lab model, 2, 11, 23–25, 113, 116–17; agricultural extension, 117, 124–25, 128–33;

experimentation and, 228; home economics labs, 125; knowledge production and, 246–47; overlap of aspects in, 37, 127, 134, 194, 200, 213, 216; as research framework, 145, 146, 247–48, 261n10. See also apparatus, analytic category of; the imaginary, analytic category of; infrastructure and policy, analytic category of; people, analytic category of; space, analytic category of; technique, analytic category of exterior space design. See architecture and exterior space design; space, analytic category of “Eye of Power, The” (Foucault), 239 fab lab (fabrication lab) model, 234, 235 Fables of Abundance (Lears), 152–53 fabulation, 187–88 Facebook, 42 Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (National Academies Press report), 142–43 Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Raunig), 139–40 factory production model, 133, 134–35, 140, 205 Faculty of Human Ecology (University of Manitoba), 127. See also home economics labs (Canada) failure, 214, 229–31; Edison and, 195, 230. See also experimentation; technique, analytic category of; testing Farías, Ignacio, 214–15 Farnsworth Museum (Wellesley College), 135 Farrow, Ronan, 161 Fecker, Thomas, 74 female scientists. See women

feminism: hackspaces and, 184; lab rhetoric and, 265n17; “working feminism,” 127 feminist theory, 241, 243 Fickers, Andreas, 96 film history, 9 financing. See corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs; funding sources; university labs, funding for Findlen, Paula, 220 Fix the Pumps (O’Neil), 3 Flaubert, Gustave, 187–88 Fleck, Ludwik, 26 Fliehkraftregler (regulator component), 90 flip-flop circuit, 88–89 floor layouts and interior space design: of E14 (MIT Media Lab), 60, 69, 71–73; of E15 and the Cube (MIT Media Lab), 60, 64, 66–70, 71; of Home Economics Food Lab, 120; of MAF, 75, 77–78; of Menlo Park, 54, 56–59; of MIT Media Lab, 63; of séance room in Hamilton house, 201–3. See also architecture and exterior space design; space, analytic category of Florida, Richard, 208 Fogg Art Museum (Harvard), 135 Foka, Anna, 110–11, 148–49 food laboratories, household science and, 118–20, 122, 124. See also home economics labs (Canada) forces and reality, constructing, 25, 27–28, 178 for-profit labs. See corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs Foster, Leroy, 159 Foucault, Michel, 115, 187–88, 239, 254n4 Fouché, Rayvon, 175

Index 311

4-H Clubs, 126 Fourt, Xavier, 191 Frank, Thomas, 206 Frankenstein (Whale), 19 Frodeman, Robert, 141, 142 From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Turner), 209 funding sources, 43–44; Bayh-Dole Act and, 211; Crow and Bozeman on, 144–45, 147; for cultural-institute labs, 138; gray literature to secure, 112, 113; infrastructure and policy relationship to, 115, 139, 141, 146–47, 148–49, 210–11; investment size, 196; for Menlo Park, 157, 159; prelegitimation of practice in funding requests, 192; prototyping’s importance for, 157; race and gender and, 160–61, 162; for research and teaching collections, 221, 223; for studio-labs, 137. See also corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs; government funding; nonprofit labs and organizations; university labs, funding for Furtherfield, 101 future, notions of, 167–68, 169, 262n57; ACTLab and, 178; apparatus and, 81; Edison and, 157; the imaginary and, 189, 204, 207, 208; “inventing the future,” 63–64, 81, 167, 207, 242; by lead users, 233; at MIT Media Lab, 63–64, 81, 155, 167, 207, 242; ownership and control of, 155, 157; prototyping and, 234; retro-futurism, 77; signal artifacts and, 94; techno-humanist solutionism and, 166–68; timescale of, 148,

312  Index

189, 204, 207, 244. See also media archaeology Galison, Peter, 232, 242; on factory model, 134–35, 140, 205; on trading zones of interdisciplinarity, 212, 214, 257n52 Gall, Michael J., 53, 157–58 gatekeeping. See boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion) gender: Agricultural College degrees and, 125; anatomical theaters and, 49; Bell Labs and, 266n43; design bias and, 243–44; knowledge production and, 18, 229; lab funding and, 160–61, 162; male privilege and eccentricity, 206; management practice and, 151, 160–61; MIT Media Lab gender demographics, 161; NASA and, 108; Pattern Language and, 58; research ethics and, 70–71, 128; transgender identity and studies, 178–79, 181. See also bias; men; women General Motors, 153 German conception of media studies as media sciences, 86–87. See also Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin) Gertner, Jon, 205–7, 266n43 Gibson, William, 251n8 Gieryn, Thomas F., 7, 13, 192–93 gig economy, 140 Gitelman, Lisa, 24 “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World” (Latour), 6, 228 Gladstone, W. E., 199 Glastonbury Abbey, 51–52 Global Literacy X Prize, 175–76 Golumbia, David, 209, 266n50 Gooday, Graeme, 47

Goodyear, George, 53 government: institutionality and, 9; USDA documentary on Jesup Wagon, 131–32, 259n65 government funding, 112, 130, 138, 139, 144; Bayh-Dole Act and, 211; for Home Economics Extension program, 125; for Rad Lab, 159, 256n26; for university labs, 125, 147, 159. See also corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs; funding sources; university labs, funding for government labs: funding and, 147, 159; interdisciplinary research in, 142–43; R&D labs, 144–48 grassroots media labs, 87, 100, 177 gray literature, 107–8, 112–14, 125, 216 “great man” narratives, 151, 266n43. See also lone genius figure Gropius, Walter, 235–36 Gross, Matthias, 228 Guerlac, Henry, 159 Guillemin, Roger, 29 Guillory, John, 112 Habib, Chris, 232, 268n50 Hacking, Ian, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 227 hackspaces and hacktivism, 43–44, 177, 184, 218–21, 236; maker spaces and maker movement, 82–83, 181–82, 218–21, 236 Hague, Nick, 108 Hall, Stuart, 23 Halpern, Orit, 169–70 Ham, Ralph, 121 Hamilton, Lillian, 201 Hamilton, Thomas Glendenning, 198, 203, 266nn36–38, 40 Hamilton family, 198–201 hands-on experimentation: at MAF, 75, 77, 85–86, 91, 92; at MAL,

102–3; at MIT Media Lab, 60; at MLab, 95–96; research and teaching collections encourage, 98, 222. See also experimentation; observation Hannaway, Owen, 26 Hao, Sarah, 161–62 Hapgood, Fred, 167 Haraway, Donna, 179 hard science, 29 hardware, 93 Hartnett, Tim, 221 Harvard Psychological Laboratory, 20 Harvard University, 135 Hearn, Alison, 167 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 75 Helping Negroes to Become Better Farmers and Homemakers (USDA documentary), 131, 259n65 Hennion, Antoine, 213 Hertz, Garnet, 95 Hessdorfer, Richard, 168 Hessdorfer project, 168–69, 171, 172–73, 175 Hester, Uva M., 130 heuristic building, 1–2, 9, 13, 24–25, 35; “circuit of culture,” 23, 116. See also extended lab model; research method HICapacity, 43–44 hierarchy, 62, 69, 158, 163. See also management practice Higher Learning in America, The: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (Veblen), 164 hippie culture, 208–9 historical genealogy of labs, 46–78, 106, 252n25; alchemical laboratories as first named labs, 50; anatomical theaters, 49; apothecaries, 49–50; Bell Labs,

Index 313

204–5; factory production and, 133, 134–35, 140, 205; functions of lab-like spaces, 47; kitchens, 47, 51–52; lab term use, 50, 240; monasteries and abbeys, 46, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 55, 117; non-linear media archaeology, 77; novelty claims and exceptionalism, 60, 61, 62, 64, 253nn46, 53; research and teaching collections, 97; technique and, 213. See also media archaeology; Menlo Park laboratory; MIT Media Lab; space, analytic category of “History of Home Economics Education in Manitoba 1826–1966, A” (Wilson), 118 Holmes, Brian, 210–11 Höltgen, Stefan, 76, 85, 88, 93–94 home-based labs, 138 home economics labs (Canada), 107, 116–27, 133; Better Farming trains and, 124–25; Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs study, 126; food labs, 118–20, 122, 124; Home Economics Food Lab (University of Manitoba), 117, 118–20; photodocumentation of, 118–19, 124, 258n36; postcards of, 123–25; Practice House, 120–22, 258n35; Winnipeg School of Household Science, 117–18. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of Hook & Eye (website), 41 hooks, bell, 184 horizontal and vertical organization, 158, 159, 195, 221 Horkheimer, Max, 140 horopter apparatus (Münsterberg), 20, 21 household science, 117–18 Household Science Association (Manitoba), 125–26

314  Index

Howe, Jeff, 62, 253n53 Hudson Bay Company, 4, 5 Hulton, Danielle, 45 Hulton, David, 45 human and nonhuman components, mixing of, 17, 61–62, 78, 105, 155 human bodies, 9, 49 human ecology, 117 humanism. See techno-humanist projects humanistic machines, 168 humanities infrastructure, 97; apparatus and, 82, 87, 99, 105. See also research and teaching collections humanities labs, 8, 20, 25–26, 30, 240; knowledge production and, 32, 140. See also art studios and art institutions; hybrid labs, defined; media labs Humanities Maker Lab (University of Victoria), 81, 92, 94–96, 218, 235, 267n13 humanities theory, 15, 95, 181 Humboldt University (Berlin), 73, 84, 85 HumlabX (Umeå University), 148–49, 184 hybrid apparatus, 83 hybrid lab discourse, 135, 212; testing and, 237–38. See also lab discourse hybrid labs, defined, 6–8, 143, 240; heuristic for study of, 1–2, 9, 13, 24–25, 35; Janus-faced qualities of, 39–40, 46, 60, 61, 64; studio-labs identified as, 87, 108, 136–38, 181. See also apparatus, analytic category of; boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); extended lab model; historical genealogy of labs; the imaginary, analytic category of; infrastructure and policy, analytic category

of; labs, defined; naming determination; people, analytic category of; space, analytic category of; technique, analytic category of hybrid labs, preemergence of, 2, 8–9, 14, 32–35, 40, 51 hyperbolic discourse, 152–54, 155, 196, 241–42 Hyphen-Labs, 243–44 IBM computers, 83 Idea Factory, The: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Gertner), 205, 266n43 identity politics, 156 the imaginary, analytic category of, 2, 19–21, 116, 187–212; ambivalence and, 189, 192–98; Bell Labs and, 194, 204–8, 210, 219, 237; Californian ideology and, 189, 208–10, 236; Foucault on, 187–88; French-language lab and, 20–21; home economics labs and, 117–18, 127; industrial research process, 194–96; media archaeology and, 19, 20, 188, 244–45; mission statements and, 117–18, 189; Plan of St. Gall as imaginary media, 48; prototyping and, 194–95, 236; Rad Lab and, 209–10, 212; as relational, 23–24; technique and, 214; technoliguistic imaginary approach, 188–89; temporality and, 188–89, 196–97, 207; term defined, 19, 187; 3D printing, 216–17; university labs and entrepreneurship, 189; virtual witnessing, 190–91. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); bounded and unbounded space; lone genius figure; parapsychological practices immateriality, 94 I. M. Pei and Partners, 60, 64

incandescent lightbulbs, 153–54 inclusion standards. See boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion) indigenous figure, AMG projects and, 172–73, 263n76 individual research, 158, 207; DIY ethos, 218, 236. See also collaboration; lone genius figure industrialization, 117, 174 industrial labs: business management of, 194–96; Edison and Menlo Park’s influence on, 53, 59, 157–59, 194–96; interdisciplinary research in, 143; lab-to-industry pipeline, for students, 160; planned obsolescence and, 153– 54; prototyping and, 236; R&D labs, 108, 143, 144–48, 153–54. See also corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs; management practice industry, term, 140 information theory, 206 infrastructure and policy, analytic category of, 2, 9, 18, 107–49, 250n37; agricultural extension programs, 117, 124–25, 128–33; apparatus, compared, 109; Arizona Model and, 108, 142–48; art institutions and, 134–36; at Bell Labs, 205; breakdown of, 111, 258n12; collecting and, 221; culture’s similarity to, 110; digital humanities and, 111, 148, 184; funding relationship, 115, 139, 141, 146–47, 148–49, 210–11; geographic specificity issues, 138, 142; gray literature, 28, 107–8, 112–14, 125, 216; hyperbolic discourse and, 152–54; the imaginary and, 188; infrastructure, defined, 109; invisibility/ visibility of, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 258n12; knowledge production,

Index 315

approaches to, 107, 110–11, 115, 116; list of properties of, 111; living labs and, 232, 234; materiality of, 107, 109; Menlo Park and, 194; MIT Media Lab and, 242; opposition to, 115, 136, 212; Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture and, 136–38; policy, defined, 115; policy aspect, 115–16, 133–39; provincialized, 133–34; R&D lab research and, 108, 143–48; as relational, 23–24, 111, 138, 146; research collections, 97, 100; rigid adherence to, 148–49; scale of, 16–17, 109, 110–11, 133–34, 142; tactical use of, 111–12, 183–85; testing and, 238; 3D printing and, 216; university entrepreneurship and, 210–11. See also funding sources; home economics labs (Canada); institutionality; mission statements; university labs, infrastructure and policy of inherited spaces, 73–74, 77, 84, 254n67. See also Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin); space, analytic category of Innis, Harold, 24, 46–47 innovation, 4, 39, 59, 92, 165–66; ACTLab and, 180–81; failure and, 230; fetishization of, 211–12; knowledge-based, 157–58, 194; living labs and, 231, 232, 233; MIT Media Lab and, 62–63, 73, 151, 155, 162, 163, 167; prototyping and, 234, 235, 236; studio-labs and, 136–37, 138 innovation, profitability and, 13, 137, 138, 232–33; Edison and Menlo Park’s influence on, 157–58, 194–95, 196; existing technology and, 157–58, 194–95; experimentation and, 51; for-profit

316  Index

labs and, 151, 154, 157, 167, 177, 211, 242; planned obsolescence and, 153–54; R&D labs and, 144; techno-humanist solutionism and, 174, 175–76 Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (Drucker), 156 inscription devices, 41, 228–29 inscription process, 29–30, 100 inscriptive lab work, 27 inspiration, 231 institutionality, 9, 180; codeswitching umbrella concept, 182–85; hybrid labs oppose or challenge, 115, 136, 212; MAF and, 73. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of intellectual property and copyright law, 63, 160, 162, 225 Intention and Survival: Psychical Research Studies and the Bearing of Intentional Actions by Trance Personalities on the Problem of Human Survival (Hamilton), 198–204, 266nn36, 37 inter- and transdisciplinarity, 240–41; ACTLab and, 177, 179–80, 181–82, 184; antidisciplinarity, 62, 64; Arizona Model and, 141–43, 147; at Bell Labs, 207, 219, 237; department dismantling and, 147, 212; funding and, 139; in government labs, 142–43; Hyphen-Labs and, 243–44; interdepartmentality, 142–43; MIT Media Lab founded in ethos of, 60–61, 62, 64; Rad Lab and, 159, 212; as response to university infrastructure, 101; technique and, 214, 216, 219–20, 225; thin description and, 104, 257n52; 3D printing and, 216; trading zones for, 212, 214, 257n52; translation

and communication in, 248. See also disciplinary boundaries; MIT Media Lab interior space design. See floor layouts and interior space design; space, analytic category of internet. See online and virtual labs intersectionality, 229, 247 intra-action, term, 105, 257n56 inventions: Edison and, 53, 195; “inventing the future,” 63–64, 81, 167, 207, 242. See also patenting; prototyping investment. See corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs; funding sources invisibility: of Bell Labs innovators, 266n43; of gray literature and, 113–14; of infrastructure, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 258n12; of lab technicians, 18–19; management practice and, 151; of media objects, 90–91. See also marginalized groups Ishii, Hiroshi, 62–63 Ishikawa, Sara. See Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein) l’Isle-Adam, Auguste Villiers de, 194 Ito, Joichi, 62, 161, 163, 176, 253n53 Jackson, Myles W., 48–49 Jackson, Steven, 230 James, William, 20 Janes, Linda, 23 Janus-faced nature of hybrid labs, 39–40, 46, 60, 61, 64 Jarry, Alfred, 8 Jehl, Francis, 53–54, 57 Jesup, Morris K., 129 Jesup Wagon (Tuskegee Institute), 107, 128–33, 259n65 Jobs, Steve, 174 Johnson, Eldridge Reeves, 62

Johnson, Howard W., 166, 168, 171–72 Jones, Caroline A., 134–35, 140, 205, 232 J. Walter Thompson company, 152 Kac, Eduardo, 255n23 Kantor, Sybil Gordon, 135 Kay, Alan, 171–72, 174, 262n54 Kelly, Mervin, 194, 205 Kera, Denisa, 236 Kerby-Patel, Kiersten, 41 Kim, Edward, 43 kitchens, 47, 51–52 “Kits for Cultural History” (MLab), 95–96, 218, 235, 256n31 Kittler, Friedrich, 20, 84, 86, 99, 100, 188 Klein, Ursula, 50–51 Kluitenberg, Eric, 197 Knapp, Seaman A., 131 Knapp Agricultural Truck, 131–32 Knorr Cetina, Karin, 26–29 knowledge-based innovation, 157–58, 194 knowledge production, 7, 242–43, 246–47; ACTLab and, 181–82; apparatus and, 79, 80; in art studios, 214–15; creativity and, 215–16; cultural shifts and studio-labs, 138; culture, construction and deconstruction of, 25–26, 31, 79, 110; experimentation and, 227; facts, Latour on, 31, 237; gender and, 18, 229; information, valorization of, 255n26; infrastructure and policy for, 107, 110–11, 115, 116; labs definition and, 25; legitimated practices of, 47, 246, 247; libraries and, 193; medieval spaces of, 46–49; monetization of, 139–40, 148, 164; scholarship on, 31, 154; of science vs. arts/ humanities labs, 32; by superlabs,

Index 317

144; technique and, 214; testing and, 237; virtual witnessing of, 190–91. See also research and teaching collections Koch, Christina, 108 Kohler, Robert E., 40 Krajewski, Markus, 153–54 Krmpotich, Cara, 222 Krzyżanowski, Michał, 191–92 Kuhn, Thomas, 14, 30, 34–35, 248 THE LAB (event space, Seattle, Washington), 44–45 Lab Cult: An Unorthodox History of Interchanges between Science and Architecture (CCA exhibition), 20, 21, 206, 207, 239–40 Lab Culture (MIT Media Lab), 163, 176 lab discourse, 39; ambivalence of, 192–93; art institutions and, 134–35; Californian ideology and, 208–10; conservative politics and, 152; failure in, 229; feminist lab rhetoric, 265n17; hybrid lab discourse, 135, 212, 237–38; hyperbolic, 152–54, 155, 196, 241–42; innovation in, 180–81; legitimacy through, 198, 203–4; living lab, 231 “lab lit” subgenre, 187 “Lab of One’s Own, A” (Richmond), 252n29 labor, lab-related: at Bell Labs, 205–6; Californian Ideology and, 209; corporate sponsor participation, 139, 160; department dismantling and, 147; etymology, 181; gray literature production, 28, 113, 114; lab directors, 176; lab technicians, 18–19, 30, 122, 259n36; machine shop culture, 56; Menlo Park, 56, 57–58; MIT

318  Index

Media Lab, 160, 163; in monasteries, 47–48; photodocumentation of home economics lab technicians, 258n36; testing and, 237; work hours and scheduling, 157, 158. See also management practice labor, of women, 127 Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar), 29, 154 laboratory planet (world as lab), 191, 209, 265n13 labs, defined, 1–2, 6–7, 9, 26–29, 41, 50; bounded and unbounded space and, 38–39; Critical Media Lab Basel on, 234; experimentation and, 26, 227–28; forces and realities constructed in, 25, 27–28, 178; hybrid labs, preemergence of, 33; kitchens and, 51–52. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); extended lab model; hybrid labs, defined; naming determination Lab Series (men’s cosmetics brand), 4 Lacan, Jacques, 19 language: apparatus and, 80, 254n4; inscription and, 27, 29–30, 41, 100, 228–29; of institutionality, codeswitching and, 182–83; machine conversationalist project, 168–69; Rad Lab’s internal, 212; trading zones of interdisciplinarity, 212, 214, 257n52 language labs, 30; Middlebury College case study, 2, 9, 10–19, 20–21, 22–23 Latour, Bruno, 6–8, 9; on apparatus, 14; on disciplinarity, 35; on doors, 69; on empiricism, 154; “Give Me a Lab” phrase, 6, 228; on inscription process, 29–30, 100; on invisibility/visibility of infrastructure, 258n12; on Janus-faced nature

of contemporary science, 39–40; on lab definition and operations, 25, 26; on matters of fact, 31, 237; on scale-shifting, 196–97; on scientific writing, 30–31; on space, differential relations, 11, 29; on technique, 22. See also Woolgar, Steve lead user concept, 233 learning process, 172, 173–74; ACTLab and, 181–82. See also colleges and universities; educational function of labs Lears, Jackson, 152–53 Lefebvre, Henri, 37–38, 43, 79 legitimacy: of knowledge claims, 47, 246, 247; lab discourse used for, 198, 203–4; prelegitimation techniques, 191–92, 198; self-designation as lab, as tactic for achieving, 32, 134, 198; through technical demonstration, 197–98 Leinaweaver, Jessaca B., 258n35 Leminen, Seppo, 232, 268n50 letterpressing, 83 Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Shapin and Schaffer), 7, 189–90, 245, 247 Liboiron, Max, 116 libraries, 193, 221. See also research and teaching collections life as a lab, 4 lightbulb manufacturers, Phoebus cartel, 153–54 Limited by Design: R&D Laboratories in the U.S. National Innovation System (Crow and Bozeman), 108, 143–48 Lincoln Laboratory (MIT), 61 Lindquist, Thea, 241 Liu, Alan, 110, 111 living labs, 142, 148, 214, 231–34, 268n50

“Living Labs as a Multi-contextual R&D Methodology” (Eriksson et al.), 233 Livio, Maya, 241 Lloyd, Seth, 161 Lodge, Oliver Joseph, 266n38 logical positivism, 9 lone genius figure, 151, 152, 158, 193–94; Davisson, 205–6; Shannon, 206–7; Tesla, 193, 196, 197. See also Edison, Thomas Lord & Taylor clothing company, 4 Lourenço, Marta, 97 Ludwig, David, 97 machine conversationalist project, 168–69 machines, the imaginary and, 188–89. See also apparatus, analytic category of machine shop culture, 56 Mackay, Esther (née Thompson), 125 Mackay, Hugh, 23 Mad Men (television show), 206 mad scientists, 79 Madsen, Anders Koed, 23 MAF. See Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin) MakerBot labs, 16 Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab, University of Victoria), 81, 92, 94–96, 218, 235, 267n13 maker spaces and maker movement, 82–83, 181–82, 218–21, 236; hackspaces and hacktivism, 43–44, 177, 184, 218–21, 236 Maki, Fumihiko, 71 MAL (Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), 82, 92, 101, 102–4, 254n67 Malécot, Gaston Louis, 18 male scientists. See men

Index 319

management practice, 265n21; at ACTLab, 177–78, 180; hierarchical structure, 62, 69, 158, 163; horizontal and vertical organization, 158, 159, 195, 221; hyperbolic discourse and, 153–54; at Menlo Park, 151, 156, 157–58, 193–96; at MIT Media Lab, 151, 159–63, 178; race and gender and, 151, 160–61; at Rad Lab, 159, 210; of TAE Inc., 195; in universities, 164–65; value production and, 163–67. See also people, analytic category of Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Drucker), 165 Mangle of Practice, The (Pickering), 30–31 Manifold publishing platform, 2–3, 214 Manitoba Agricultural College Special train, 124 Manovich, Lev, 211–12 Mansoux, Aymeric, 230 Mareis, Claudia, 231, 234 marginalized groups: digital colonialism and, 166, 262n54; infrastructure and, 133–34; labs established and operated by, 184; management practice and, 151; MIT Media Lab, race and gender demographics, 160–61, 162; tactical separation by, 183–85; violence toward, 152. See also Black people; invisibility; race; women Maric, Nada, 122 Marvin, Carolyn, 31–32, 219, 246 Marx, Karl, 8 Marxism, 8, 188 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 158–59, 166, 263n76; corporate funding for labs at, 61,

320  Index

156–57; Rad Lab, 61, 159, 209–10, 212, 256n26; Trope Tank, 92, 102, 222. See also MIT Media Lab material access, 92 material dictionaries, 14–15 materiality/immateriality questions, 94; on infrastructure, 107, 109 material manufacture, 47 mathematics, 100 McClain, Anne, 108 McFarlane, Colin, 133–34 McIlwain, Charlton, 263n76 Mclauchlin, Florence (later Mrs. T. R. Brownridge), 121 McLuhan, Marshall, 86, 113 measurement and quantification, 86, 91–92 Medea lab (Malmö, Sweden), 228 media, defined, 62–63, 85–86 Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin), 40, 73–78, 81, 84–92, 96; educational function of, 77, 85, 100; exterior architecture of, 75–77; hands-on experimentation in, 75, 77, 85–86, 91, 92; hybrid lab epistemology and, 84, 86, 91–92; inherited space of, 73–74, 77, 84, 254n67; location of, 75, 84–85; mathematics and logic in curriculum, 100; MIT Media Lab, compared, 73, 75; Signal Lab, compared, 93; staged demonstrations at, 87–91, 92 media archaeology, 24; dead media, 15, 21, 77, 84, 92, 255n23; defined, 82; experimentation in, 96; the imaginary and, 19, 20, 188, 244–45; invisibility/visibility of media objects, 90–91; media forensics, 89; as non-linear, 77; prototyping and, 95, 218, 235; research and teaching collections

and, 97, 221–22; reverse engineering and, 74, 86, 191, 214–15, 224–25, 257n44; variantology and, 145. See also apparatus, analytic category of Media Archaeology Lab (Bilkent University, Ankara), 229 Media Archaeology Lab (MAL, University of Colorado Boulder), 82, 92, 101, 102–4, 254n67 media archaeology labs, 14, 92, 106, 145; defined, 82; digital humanities and, 103, 104, 105; digital vs. analog domain in, 83; failure and, 230; the imaginary and, 19–20; material dictionaries in, 14; research and teaching collections and, 221–22, 223 media attention: on Epstein story, 161–62; on labs, 113; on MIT Media Lab, 160, 167, 176, 241– 42; on Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 128 media commodities, 16, 250n37 Media Lab, The: Inventing the Future at MIT (Brand), 61, 66, 94, 155 Media Lab Prado, 234 media labs: British, 100-101, 177; community focus of, 177, 234; early digital media labs, 82; grassroots media labs, 87, 100, 177; institutionalization of, at Bell Labs, 204–8; living labs and, 233–34; MIT claims ownership over designation of, 62–63, 241; planned obsolescence and, 153; sustainability of, 138, 149; testing in, 238. See also photographs of French-language media lab (Middlebury College) media studies: communication studies, 61, 253n48; in Germany, 86–87

medienwissenschaft (media sciences), 86–87 medieval research spaces, 46–49 mediums, Hamilton family parapsychology lab, 199, 200–201 Meldrum, Dierdre, 147–48 Memorial University (Newfoundland), 115–16 men: at Bell Labs, 266n43; cosmetics industry and, 243–44; eccentricity and, 206–7; “great man” narratives, 151, 266n43; historical education for, 49; lab designation reserved for, 63; as lab directors, 176; male bonding, 56; male privilege, 206; at Menlo Park, 56; at MIT, 161; research fraud by, 70–71; visibility and identification of, 18. See also gender; women Menlo Park laboratory, 39, 53–59; common areas in, 73; exterior architecture of, 54–56; funding for, 157, 159; the imaginary and, 193–96; machine shop culture of, 56; MAF, compared, 75; management practice in, 151, 156, 157–58, 193–96; timetable goals for production in, 53. See also Edison, Thomas Menlo Park Reminiscences (Jehl), 54, 57 Merkel, Angela, 75 messiness, 83, 182, 183 “mestiza consciousness,” 180 metallurgy, 52 metaphor of the lab, 1–6, 134–35; world as lab, 191, 209, 265n13. See also the imaginary, analytic category of #MeToo movement, 242 Mexico, 232 Middlebury College French-language lab, 2, 9, 10–19, 20–21,

Index 321

22–23. See also photographs of French-language media lab (Middlebury College) Mileux Makerspace (Concordia University), 217 military-industrial sphere, 216 Millard, André, 56, 194 Miller, Toby, 42–43 Minitel networking system, 255n23 mission statements, 44, 45, 189 MIT Media Lab, 39, 56, 60–73; advertising and, 155, 167; claims to “media lab” designation, 62–63, 241; demographics in, 160–61, 162; “demo or die” mantra, 61, 162, 171; Epstein and, 161–63, 176, 242, 261n10; exterior architecture of, 60, 64–66, 71, 253n46; funding for, 61, 154, 160, 161–64, 167, 176, 177, 178, 242, 261n10; as future-oriented, 63–64, 81, 155, 167, 207, 242; interdisciplinarity as founding ethos of, 60–61, 62, 64; interior space, E14, 60, 69, 71–73; interior space, E15, 60, 64, 66–70, 71; interior space design, 63; “inventing the future” motto, 63–64, 81, 207; Lab Culture of, 163, 176; MAF, compared, 73, 75; management practice in, 151, 159–63, 178; operating budget of, 160; organizational structure of, 163–64; techno-humanist solutionism and, 166–67; value production in, 155–56; vanguardism and, 211. See also Negroponte, Nicholas MIT Media Lab, reputation of: innovation, 62–63, 73, 151, 155, 162, 163, 167; novelty claims, 60, 61, 63–64, 159–60, 253n46 MIT Technology Review, 161–62 mixology, 3 MLab (Maker Lab in the Human-

322  Index

ities, University of Victoria), 81, 92, 94–96, 218, 235, 267n13 mobile labs, 13; agricultural and home economics trains, 124–25; Jesup Wagon, 129–33; Knapp Agricultural Truck, 131–32 modernity, 7–8, 22, 125 monasteries and abbeys, 46, 47–49, 117; Benedictine, 48–49, 54, 55; Benediktbeuern Abbey, 48–49; Glastonbury Abbey, 51–52; Plan of St. Gall, 47–48, 51, 54 monetization. See corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs Montfort, Nick, 222 Morozov, Evgeny, 209 Moss, Frank, 62 mothering, practicing, 120–22, 258n36. See also children Movable School, 128–33 Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer, The (Campbell), 128, 129–30 “move fast and break things” slogan, 230. See also failure “Muji Labo” furniture line (Muji design chain), 4 Mullaney, Thomas, 188–89 multiplicity, seeking, 182–83 Mumford, Lewis, 46 Münsterberg, Hugo, 9, 20 Murray, David, 256n37 Museum of Modern Art, 135 museums, 15–16; MAL’s resemblance to, 102–3; Museum Island (Berlin), 75, 84–85; research and teaching collections’ resemblance to, 222; University of Oxford science museum, 52 mystery, 45 naming determination, 38–39, 40–45, 145, 178, 240; ACTLab, 180;

alchemical laboratories and, 50; MIT Media Lab, 60–61; as performative act, 32, 41; self-designation as lab, 40–41, 134, 135–36, 146, 191–92, 198. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion) National Academies Press, 142–43 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, U.S.), 108 National Comparative Research and Development Project (NCRDP, U.S.), 143 National Science Teaching Association (U.S.), 226–27 Negroponte, Nicholas, 60–62, 68, 69, 253n48; AMG founded by, 166, 168; on analog domain, 82; Architecture Machine, The, 168, 171, 263n76; Being Digital, 61–62; digital colonialism and, 166, 262n54; directs Centre mondiale informatique et ressource humaine, 173, 174–75; on Epstein donations, 161–62; Global Literacy X Prize and, 175–76; machine conversationalist project, 168–69; Soft Architecture Machine, 172; techno-humanist projects of, 155, 166, 168–71, 172, 174–75; Urban5 project and, 172–73, 263n76. See also MIT Media Lab Negus, Keith, 23 neoliberalism, 162, 164–65, 176. See also corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs Nepal, 175 Nettime list community, 177 networks, 138, 208, 265n17; living labs and, 232; relationships between labs, 146–47. See also collaboration; inter- and transdisciplinarity Neuromancer (Gibson), 251n8 NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, 243

New American University (Arizona Model), 108, 141–48, 211–12 new media, 82, 245. See also future, notions of; media archaeology New York Jewish Museum, 170 Nintendo, 194–95 Noble, David, 158 nonprofit labs and organizations: living labs, 232; OLPC, 101, 155, 168, 171, 174–75, 176. See also corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs nonscientific activities, 192–93 North America: corporate innovation lab model, 151; living labs and, 232. See also Canada; United States nostalgia, 77 novelty claims and exceptionalism, 60, 61, 62, 63–64, 159–60, 253nn46, 53 Nowviskie, Bethany, 80 observation, 26, 27–28; Bacon on, 227; crowdsourced, by citizens, 41–42; in French-language lab, 12, 18; by humans, fallibility and, 198; of material in research and teaching collections, 97; observers, agency of, 169; observers, as apparatus, 90, 91. See also hands-on experimentation; participants; people, analytic category of occult discourse, 197. See also parapsychological practices office space, 12, 58, 68, 69 official/unofficial spaces, 38 O’Gorman, Marcel, 219–20, 230 Olsson, Jesper, 90–91, 223, 230 “On Being Trans, and under the Radar” (Stone), 180 O’Neil, Darcy, 3 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, 101, 155, 168, 171,

Index 323

174–75, 176. See also Negroponte, Nicholas On Historicizing Epistemology (Rheinberger), 26 online and virtual labs, 40, 41, 177, 251n8; virtual reality, 244; virtual witnessing, 190–91. See also bounded and unbounded space; computer use opacity and transparency: black-box metaphor, 39, 42, 45, 86; CLEAR’s transparency about infrastructure and policy, 115–16; MIT Media Lab workspaces and, 64–70, 72; space, placelessness and placefulness, 40, 77; transparency about outreach, 233; transparency about projects, 164 open-source software, 101 operationality, apparatus enables comparisons and juxtaposition, 89–90 organic genesis, 47 organizational structure: hierarchy, 62, 69, 158, 163; of meetings, 221; at MIT Media Lab, 163–64. See also management practice Pakistan, 174 PA-MAL Media Archaeology Lab (L’École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon), 92 Papert, Seymour, 172, 174 paradigm, defined, 31 parapsychological practices, 197–204; Hamilton family and, 198, 201, 203, 266nn36–38, 40; mediums’ role in, 199, 200–201. See also the imaginary, analytic category of Parham, Marisa, 241 Parks, Lisa, 109 participants, 2, 26, 101, 228; as apparatus, 200, 203; at MAL,

324  Index

103; networks of, unbounded labs defined by, 265n17; in séances, 199–200, 203; in Taif seminar, 173; in Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 128. See also apparatus, analytic category of; observation; people, analytic category of participatory design, 231 Pasteur, Louis, 196 past technology. See media archaeology ‘pataphysics, 8 patenting, 164, 246; by Edison, 53, 158, 194; university patent offices, 210–11. See also inventions Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture (Century), 136–39 Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein), 38, 75; on ambiguous territory, 47–48; on building complexes, 54–56; on common areas, 72; on infinite flexibility, 67; on main entrances, 56; on privacy in office space design, 69; on self-governing workshops and offices, 58. See also space, analytic category of Patterson, Clair, 13 people, analytic category of, 2, 17–19, 37, 151–85; as apparatus, 90, 91, 200, 213; falsified data by, 152–53, 154–55; HICapacity and, 44; home economics labs and, 127; hyperbolic discourse and, 152, 154, 155, 196, 241–42; invisibility and, 18–19; as relational, 23–24; scientists’ role, 158–59; social dynamics, 12, 16, 26–27, 38, 110; techno-humanist projects and, 167–72; testing and, 237. See also ACTLab (Austin, Texas); management practice; observation; participants; social change, attempts to effect

people of color. See Black people; race Pergamon Museum, 84 Perrot, Renee, 18, 23 Peru, 175 Pettingell, Louise, 123 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 231 philosophical lab equipment, 104 Phoebus cartel, 153–54 phonautograph machine, 15, 20–21, 30 phonographs, 90 photograph postcards of home economics labs, 118–19, 123–25, 258n36 photographs of French-language media lab (Middlebury College), 2, 10–11; apparatus in, 14, 15, 18–19; the imaginary and, 20–21; infrastructure and, 16; spatial relations and, 12–13; staging of, 12–13, 18, 22–23 photographs of séances and parapsychology labs, 198–204, 266n36 physical interaction, 177 Piaget, Jean, 172, 174 Pickering, Andrew, 26, 30–31, 81, 103, 244 Pierce, Charles, 229 placelessness and placefulness, 40, 77. See also bounded and unbounded space planned obsolescence, 153–54 Plan of St. Gall, 47–48, 51, 54 policy. See infrastructure and policy, analytic category of policy documents. See gray literature political affiliations, 152, 217 postdigital, term, 96, 98, 104, 245, 254n8 post-truth era, 146 power, forms of, 7, 32, 52, 151, 155; in colleges and universities, 41; to create or terminate labs, 147; gray literature reveals, 114;

infrastructure and, 71, 133–34; knowledge production and, 18; labs reproduce, 242; MIT Media Lab funding and, 160, 162–63; space design and, 69–71. See also marginalized groups; racism power and electricity, 126 Practice House (Home Economics Lab), 120–22, 258n35 “Practice Mothers” (Leinaweaver), 258n35 practices and techniques, performance of, 13 Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, 267n13. See also Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab, University of Victoria) preemergent, concept of, 33 prelegitimation of practice, 191–92, 198. See also legitimacy preservation, 85, 92, 102, 103. See also collecting; research and teaching collections printing and publishing, 83 private residences, 50–51 private sector labs, 61 process, lab as, 12–13 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 37–38 profit. See corporate-sponsored and for-profit labs profit motives of universities, 164–65, 176 propaganda, 131–32, 259n65 protocols, 107. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of prototyping: artistic, 177; at Bell Labs, 205; “demo or die” motto, 61, 162, 171; dis/assembly and, 224; Edison’s vertically-integrated business model and, 194–95; funding and, 157; the imaginary and, 194–95, 236; innovation and, 234, 235, 236; media archaeology

Index 325

and, 95, 218, 235; at Menlo Park, 53, 157, 194–95; at MIT Media Lab, 61, 159–60, 162; at MLab, 218; at Rad Lab, 159; rapid, 53, 61, 159–60, 162, 218, 234–35; technique and, 214, 234–36; 3D printing and, 216, 218. See also experimentation; innovation; testing Prototyping (Vonk), 236 provincialized political infrastructures, 133–34. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of public experimental spaces, 18 public good, contributions to, 50, 208, 209; community engagement, 101, 177, 231–34 public/private lab spaces, 18, 75; anatomical theaters, 49; funding and monetization issues, 139, 210–11; monasteries and, 48; universities and, 210–11 Punch (Wondrich), 3 Queer Media Database (online research tool), 41 race: knowledge production and, 229, 247; lab funding and, 160–61, 162; machine conversationalist project and, 168–70; techno-humanist projects and, 167, 168–70, 172–73, 263n76; Urban5 project and, 172–73, 263n76; “urban” as coded language for, 263n76. See also Black people; marginalized groups; white people racism: DynaBook and OLPC project, 171–72, 173; Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 127–28; USDA documentary, 131–32, 259n65 Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab,

326  Index

MIT), 61, 159, 209–10, 212, 256n26 radical pedagogy, 180, 220–21 railroads, 124–25, 131 RAND Corporation, 152, 246, 262n57 rapid prototyping, 53, 61, 159–60, 162, 218, 234–35. See also prototyping Rappaport, AJ “spoopy,” 224 rationality, 22, 42–43, 44 Raunig, Gerald, 139–41 R&D labs, 143–48, 153–54 reality, constructing, 27–28, 178; culture, construction and deconstruction of, 25–26, 31, 79, 110. See also knowledge production reconfiguration process, 26–27 regulatory policy. See infrastructure and policy, analytic category of Reif, L. Rafael, 161 relationships. See collaboration; networks religion, 192; spiritualism, 198, 201. See also monasteries and abbeys repair, right to, 225 representational spaces, 38, 43–44 representations, digital, 98 research and teaching collections, 14–15, 256n37; Access Space, 100-101, 103; apparatus and, 82, 97–104, 106; hands-on principle of, 98, 222; infrastructure and, 97, 110; MAL, 101, 102–4; media archaeology and, 97, 221–22, 223; preservation and, 85, 92, 102, 103; reading and interpreting material, 99–100; recontextualization of objects in, 222–23; resemblance to museums, 222; Residual Media Depot, 224, 226; technique and, 214, 221–23. See also apparatus, analytic category of; collecting;

hands-on experimentation; knowledge production; Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin) research communication, 32. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); communication; disciplinary boundaries; interand transdisciplinarity research fraud, 70–71 research infrastructures, 110. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of research method, 23, 24, 145–46, 247–48; creativity as, 205; of Limited by Design study, 144; Western-centered, 240. See also extended lab model Residual Media Depot (Concordia University, Montreal), 92, 102, 224, 226 resource sharing, 87, 100. See also collaboration retro-futurism, 77 Reverby, Susan M., 128 reverse engineering, 74, 86, 191, 214–15, 224–25, 257n44 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 26, 100, 227 Rheingold, Howard, 251n8 Richmond, Marsha L., 252n29 Roblin, Rodmond, 126 Rockefeller Foundation, 107–8, 136–37 Ronell, Avital, 237 Rourke, Daniel, 217 Royal Society, 18 Rudofsky, Bernard, 172 Ruhleder, Karen, 111 Rule of Saint Benedict, 48 Rutherford, Jonathan, 133–34 Sachs, Paul J., 135 safe space protocols, 245–46

Salk Institute, 29 Saudi Arabia, 173–74 Sayers, Jentery, 94–95, 218, 235 scale: of information dissemination, 42; infrastructure and policy and, 16–17, 109, 110–11, 133–34, 142; Latour on, 196–97; OLPC project and, 174–75; world as lab, 191, 209, 265n13 scale, temporal, 244–45; digital research infrastructure and, 111; experimentation and, 227; future, notions of, 148, 189, 204, 207, 244; the imaginary and, 188–89, 196–97, 207; rapid prototyping, 53, 61, 159–60, 162, 218, 234–35; return on investments and, 207–8 Scandinavian cooperative and participatory design, 231 Schaffer, Simon, 189–91; Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 7, 189–90, 245, 247 Schmidgen, Henning, 99–100 Scholar’s Lab (University of Virginia Library), 80 Schumpeter, Joseph, 137 Schuurman, Dmitri, 231 science, dominance of: Arizona Model and, 147; boundary work and, 192–93; “science envy,” 134. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); knowledge production; legitimacy science labs, arts/humanities labs compared, 25, 32–34, 134, 223, 257n44; apparatus and, 30, 81, 86, 91; Arizona Model and, 147; epistemological gap, 86, 91; text and inscription, 29–30, 99–100 science labs, functions of, 25–32; knowledge production and truth claims, 25; scholarship on, 26–32 Science magazine, 108

Index 327

scientific communities, 31 scientific discourse, conservative politics and, 152. See also lab discourse “Scientific Laboratories” (lecture, Thomson), 91–92 scientific writing, 30–31 scientists: awareness of proximal lab activity, 146; reputation of, 196, 206; role of, in university labs, 158–59. See also lone genius figure Scott de Martinville, Édouard-Léon, 15, 20–21 scrounging equipment, 21, 250n50 Seales, Brent, 109 seating considerations, 44, 45 Security, Territory, Population (Foucault), 115 Seek experiment, 170, 173, 175 Sega Genesis, 226 self-designation as lab, 40–41, 134, 135–36, 146, 191–92, 198. See also boundary work (gatekeeping exclusion); legitimacy; naming determination self-determination value, 148 “Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences, The” (Hacking), 34 seminar structure in German education, 73–74, 98–99 semiotic analysis, 31 Senegal, 174 separatism, 184–85 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 165, 173–74, 262n54 sexuality, 151, 229 Shannon, Claude, 170, 206, 207 Shapin, Steven, 26, 50–51, 189–91, 200; Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 7, 189–90, 245, 247 sharecropping system, 132 sharing economy, 100. See also collaboration

328  Index

Siegert, Bernhard, 17 Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University), 81–82, 85, 88, 93–94, 100–101 signs and signals, 27, 98; defined, 229; signal processing media, 93–94. See also communication Silverstein, Murray. See Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein) simulacra, 199 simulation labs, 27 situated practice, 81; Century on, 138; defined, 9, 12, 23; location-specific theory and, 183, 242–43 situation, insistence on, 182–83 Sloan, Alfred, 153 smart cities, 231, 232 smart homes, 268n50 Snow, C. P., 9 social change, attempts to effect, 165–76, 245; by AMG, 166, 168–73; Californian Ideology, 189, 208–10, 236; collaboration and, 219; the imaginary and, 190, 208–9; in living labs, 232–34; MIT Media Lab and, 166–67; by OLPC, 101, 155, 168, 171, 174–75, 176. See also people, analytic category of; techno-humanist projects social dynamics, 12, 16, 41, 95, 246; experimentation and, 228, 231, 234; hierarchy, 62, 69, 158, 163; infrastructure and, 109, 110, 112, 133; regulation of, 245; space and, 26–27, 38, 63, 68, 72, 78. See also collaboration; people, analytic category of social media, 42, 246 social space, Lefebvre’s distinctions of, 37–38, 43–44 Soft Architecture Machines (Negroponte), 172

SOFTWARE (1970 New York Jewish Museum exhibition), 170 solutionism. See social change, attempts to effect; techno-humanist projects space, analytic category of, 2, 11–13, 29, 37–78; apothecaries and, 46, 49–50, 59; apparatus and, 79–80; collaboration facilitated through, 64, 68; HICapacity and, 43–44; home economics labs in Canada and, 120–21, 122, 123–24, 127; Hyphen-Labs and, 244; infinite flexibility question, 67; inherited spaces, 73–74, 77, 84, 254n67; THE LAB and, 44–45; MAF, 40, 73–78, 84, 254n67; as measurement of adherence to lab’s stated goals, 45, 47, 73, 77; Menlo Park and, 39, 53–59, 75; as mode of production, 37–38; naming determination, 40–45; placelessness concept, 40, 77; prototyping and, 234; as relational, 23–24; representational, and representations of, 38, 43–44; sky as lab, 41–42; social dynamics and, 26–27, 38; technique and, 214; testing and, 238. See also architecture and exterior space design; bounded and unbounded space; floor layouts and interior space design; historical genealogy of labs; MIT Media Lab; monasteries and abbeys; Pattern Language, A (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein) SpecLab, 228–29 speculative design, 243 speculative fiction, 244 SpiderWebShow.ca, 41 spiritualism, 198, 201; religion, 192 “Sponsored Research at MIT” (Foster), 159

staged demonstrations: Jesup Wagon and, 129; legitimacy through, 197–98; at MAF, 87–91, 92 staging, 15, 88–89; in French-language lab photos, 12–13, 18, 22–23 Stanford University, 210–11 Star, Susan Leigh, 16, 109, 111, 113–14 Starosielski, Nicole, 109, 252n31 Steenson, Molly, 253n48 Steinberg, Marc, 250n37 Stengers, Isabelle, 9 Sterne, Jonathan, 15, 22, 99, 104, 215 Stock, Dennis, 208 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy), 111, 156, 177–83, 220 Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), 40, 42, 45 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 127 studio-as-lab metaphor, 134–35 studio-labs, 87, 108, 136–38, 181. See also art studios and art institutions study participants. See participants superlabs, term, 144 sustainability: of labs, 138, 149; technological, 218 Svensson, Patrik, 184 Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, 233 syphilis study, 127–28 tables and work surfaces, 75, 80, 85, 89–90, 120 TAE Inc., 195. See also Edison, Thomas; Menlo Park laboratory Tanaka, Atau, 233 Tarif seminar, 173–74 techné, term, 215 technical media, 188 technical protection measure (TPM), 225 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 46

Index 329

technique, analytic category of, 2, 13, 22–23, 213–38; apparatus and, 89, 213, 214; art institutions and, 135–36; collaborating, 214, 218–21; collecting, 214, 221–23; cultural technique, 10–11, 215; dis/assembling, 214, 218, 223–26; experimenting, 214, 226–29; failing, 214, 229–31; living labs, 214, 231–34; musical, 215; prototyping, 214, 234–36; as relational, 23–24; testing, 214, 215, 237–38; 3D printing, 213, 216–18, 234–35 techno-humanist projects, 156, 166–76; Negroponte leads, 155, 166, 168–71, 172, 174–75; race and, 167, 168–70, 172–73, 263n76 technolinguistic imaginary, 188–89 technological apparatus, 41, 80–81. See also apparatus, analytic category of; digital technology technological gap, 165 technological literacy, 32 technological sustainability, 218 Technology Enterprise Facility (TTEF, University of Victoria), 235 telegraph systems, 53, 77, 96 teleplasm, 199 teletype machine, 168–69 temporality. See scale, temporal “Ten Simple Rules for How to Build an Anti-racist Lab” (Chaudhary and Berhe), 241 Terras, Melissa, 109 Tesla, Nikola, 193, 196, 197 testing, 215, 237–38; failure and, 195, 214, 229–31; using 3D printing, 216. See also experimentation; prototyping; technique, analytic category of textbooks, 31. See also knowledge production texts, inscription and, 29–30, 99–100.

330  Index

See also research and teaching collections theater studies, 73, 74 theory/practice interplay, 89–90, 92, 157, 242; at ACTLab, 181 Thibault, Ghislain, 197 thin description, 104, 257n52 “Third World” conceptualizations, 173–75, 263n84 “Thomas Edison and the Theory and Practice of Innovation” (Millard), 195 Thomson, William, 91–92 “3D Additivist Manifesto, The” (Allahyari and Rourke), 217 3D printing, 213, 216–18, 234–35. See also technique, analytic category of Time in Our Lives, A: A History of Manitoba Home Economists in Extension (University of Manitoba Home Economics alumni), 118 Tomorrow’s Eve (l’Isle-Adam, Auguste ), 194 Toupin, Sophie, 184 TPM (technical protection measure), 225 trading zones for interdisciplinarity, 212, 214, 257n52 trains, for agricultural and home economics education, 124–25, 131 transdisciplinarity. See inter- and transdisciplinarity transgender identity and studies, 178–79, 181. See also gender transparency. See opacity and transparency Transsexual Empire, The: The Making of the She-Male (Raymond), 179 Treske, Andreas, 229 Trope Tank (MIT), 92, 102, 222 truth claims, 25, 146, 152. See also knowledge production truth decay, 246

“truth-spots,” 13 Tucker, Greg, 68 tuition, 139, 162. See also university labs, funding for Turner, Fred, 209, 212, 236, 255n26 Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station, 129 Tuskegee Institute, 107, 128–33 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 127–28 Tyndall, John, 192 typesetting, 15, 83 Umeå University, 148–49, 184 uniforms, 120 United States: brain drain, 165; R&D labs in, 143; TPMs in, 225; university lab context of, 148; violence against marginalized groups in, 152 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 129, 131–32, 259n65 U.S. Public Health Service, 127–28 Universal Stock Ticker, 53 University Innovation Alliance, 142 university labs, 40–41, 50; AMG, 60, 61, 155, 166, 168–72; art institutes as, 135–36; CLEAR, 115–16, 221, 241, 245; entrepreneurship promoted in, 156–57, 160, 189, 210–12; gray literature for, 112; Home Economics Food Lab, 117, 118–20; HumlabX, 148–49, 184; interdepartmentality of, 142–43; MAL, University of Colorado Boulder, 82, 92, 101, 102–4, 254n67; Media Archaeology Lab (Bilkent University), 229; MLab, 81, 92, 94–96, 218, 235, 267n13; PA-MAL Media Archaeology Lab (L’École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon), 92; Rad Lab, 61, 159, 209–10, 212; scientists’ role in, 158–59; Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University), 81–82, 85, 88,

93–94, 100–101; Trope Tank, 92, 102, 222; university patent offices, 210–11. See also ACTLab (Austin, Texas); educational function of labs; Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF, Humboldt University, Berlin); MIT Media Lab; photographs of French-language media lab (Middlebury College) university labs, funding for: Epstein and, 161–63, 176, 242, 261n10; by government, 125, 147, 159; MIT Media Lab, 61, 154, 160, 161–64, 167, 176, 242, 261n10; for Rad Lab, 159, 256n26; tuition, 139, 162. See also corporate-sponsored university labs; funding sources university labs, infrastructure and policy of, 101, 111–12, 136–48; of CLEAR, 115–16, 136; funding issues, 115, 139, 141, 147, 148–49, 210–11; home economics labs, 117–25, 127; New American University (Arizona Model), 141–48; studio-labs, 137–38. See also infrastructure and policy, analytic category of University of Colorado Boulder, 82 University of Manitoba, 117–18, 198 University of Oxford, 52 University of Victoria, 81, 92, 235 University of Virginia, 80 University Research Council, 123–24 “Unnameable Discourse,” 178 Urban5 project, 172–73, 263n76 urban space as lab, 231 “urban,” term as coded language, 263n76 Urry, John, 12 Ursuline nuns, 117 utilities companies, 126 Vail, Theodore, 207

Index 331

value, production of, 155–56; management practice and, 163–67 van den Oever, Annie, 96 vanguardism, 211 Van Vechten Brown, Alice, 135 variantology, 145 Veblen, Thorstein, 164 video-game consoles, 226 Vigneron, Marcel, 18 Virtual Community, The (Rheingold), 251n8 virtual labs, 40, 41, 177, 251n8. See also bounded and unbounded space virtual reality (VR), 244 virtual witnessing, 190–91 Vismann, Cornelia, 215 von Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm, 256n37 Von Fraunhofer, Joseph, 48 Von Hippel, Eric, 232–33 Vonk, Roland, 236 von Schrenck-Notzing, Albert, 198 Wall Street Journal, 147 Washington, Booker T., 129, 132 Weber, Cornelia, 97 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 7 Weingart, Peter, 141, 142 Weiser, Mark, 38 Weisner, Jerome, 60 Wellesley College, 135 Westerlund, Mika, 232, 268n50 Western-centered discussions, 240 Whale, James, 19 “What Are Research Infrastructures?” (Anderson), 110 “What Is a Feminist Lab?” (symposium), 241 Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Ito and Howe), 62, 253n53 Whitehead, Alfred North, 195

332  Index

white people: lab directors and, 176; techno-humanist projects and, 169, 171–72, 173; white USDA workers, 131–32. See also Black people; marginalized groups; race “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (Latour), 154 Wiener, Norbert, 53 Wilding, Faith, 184 Wilkie, Alex, 214–15 Williams, Raymond, 33 Wilson, Johanna Gudrun, 118, 121–22, 124 Winn, J. Emmett, 131, 259n65 Winnipeg School of Household Science, 117–18 Wired magazine, 160, 167 Wojcik, Daniel, 204 women: at Agricultural College, 125; Epstein and, 163; space walks, 108; “working feminism” and, 127. See also gender women, lab use by: Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women, 252n29; Bell Labs, 266n43; French-language lab, 15, 23; in home economics labs, 118–23, 126, 127; Hyphen-Labs and, 243–44; kitchens and, 52; MIT Media Lab, 70–71, 161; prohibited or assumed they won’t participate, 49, 52, 63, 252n29 Wondrich, David, 3 Woolgar, Steve, 154; on apparatus, 14; on inscription process, 29–30, 100; on lab definition and operations, 25, 26; on scientific writing, 30–31; on space, differential relations, 11, 29; on technique, 22. See also Latour, Bruno work. See labor, lab-related workshop or processing environment labs, 27

world as lab, 191, 209, 265n13 World Challenge, The (Servan-Schreiber), 173 World War II, 255n26 Wuhan Institute of Virology, 246 Xerox PARC, 38 XPRIZE Foundation, 175–76

Yamani, Sheikh, 173 Yokoi, Gunpei, 194–95 Yùdice, George, 42 Zero Dollar Laptop, 101 Zielinski, Siegfried, 8, 19, 145, 238 Žižek, Slavoj, 19 Zuckerman, Ethan, 69–71, 160–61

Index 333

LORI EMERSON is associate professor of English literature and inter-

media arts, writing, and performance at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also founding director of the Media Archaeology Lab and director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program. Emerson is author of Reading Writing Interfaces (Minnesota, 2014) and coeditor of numerous collections, including The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.

JUSSI PARIKKA is professor in technological culture and aesthetics at

Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and, starting in January 2022, professor in digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also visiting professor at FAMU at Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. Parikka is author of several books, including Insect Media (Minnesota, 2010) and A Geology of Media (Minnesota, 2015), as well as coeditor of several collections, such as Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 and Photography off the Scale.

DARREN WERSHLER is associate professor at Concordia University, where he holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature and is cofounder of the Media History Research Centre and director of the Residual Media Depot. Darren is author of several books, including Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.