Experimenting (See Also Testing)

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 US-based National Science Teaching Association which declares, in no uncertain terms, that “[w]hile reading about science, using computer simulations, and observing teacher demonstrations may be valuable, they are not a substitute for laboratory investigations. . . .”30

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 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.”31

The experimental setting is replete with “instruments, contraptions and apparatuses” which form the background for the experimental structure or set the scene that allows epistemological work to occur.32 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.”33 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.”34

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 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.35

Notwithstanding all of the above, experimenting is not exclusively a scientific technique; the arts, humanities, fine arts and social sciences also make use of the term. 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.36

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.”37 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.”38 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 but 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 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).”39 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.40 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.