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 skillset, 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 Nietzchean undertone, Ronell writes that “testing is constitutive of what can be designated, with the proper precautions, as real.”56 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 also become 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.”57

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 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.”58 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 is what permits testing toi 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. Gabriella 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.”59 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.