Exploring

Nick Montfort

Experimenting suggests a well-defined, formalized sort of scientific and engineering approach: Forming a hypothesis and testing it, following established procedures. In contrast, a researcher in a lab can explore in considerably less formalized ways. Consider a lab/studio dealing with creative computing—specifically, the MIT Trope Tank (Montfort et al. 2014). A researcher there can comb through the books, manuals, and software amassed through collecting and try out the equipment (computers, video game systems, printers, displays). By proceeding in a bottom-up way, without an initial idea of an end goal, that researcher can discover cultural artifacts that are interesting to compare and that speak eloquently of their moment in media history.

Exploring lab resources in this way requires familiarity with the lab and an understanding of how material culture can unlock histories. For these and other reasons exploration is best considered an advanced research technique. A student encountering a digital media lab for the first time may be able to conduct a well-defined experiment but is probably not ready to generatively browse the unfamiliar resources in an exploratory mode. Before independent exploration, it makes sense to participate in structured work: doing software development on a research system that models a phenomenon in the humanities, carrying out bibliography that is first enumerative, then descriptive and analytic. I have assigned my MIT Trope Tank research assistants to explore lab resources and devise their own small-scale project as their final project for me (really for them) while completing their masters degrees.

To understand how exploration works in a media lab, consider how it works in two contexts that can be distinguished but overlap: First, the laptop-based development environment of a beginning programmer; Second, the art studio.

Beginners can explore programming quickly without access to a lab. In my book Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, now in a second edition from The MIT Press and available in three open-access formats as well as in print, I rely on what I call free projects where learners don’t just solve specified problems, but, within limits, choose what to do. The limits help to keep the explorations tractable and, in a classroom context, allow for participants to share related work. As the outline of this book reveals, there are a good number of simple exercises that I see as essential for students to undertake before they get far into their explorations. A learner does not have to master object-oriented programming or intermediate data structures before exploring, but it is of great use to grasp the distinction between code and data, variables and values, functions, scope, iteration, and the conditional or “if” statement. Understanding such true essentials (the work of an intensive week or two, not a semester) allows further learning to be done via exploration and, eventually, allows learners to explore and collaborate in lab contexts.

To now consider art-making, spaces to accommodate art practices are not always there for the execution and production of fully formulated ideas. Jenny Sjöholm, researching how artists worked in their studios in London, found that

the studio is a space for exploration—a space where artists, through their collected and gathered materialities, dare to be brave, to elaborate and try new things out. . . . When a form starts to take shape former plans and instructions are, according to the artists in this study, laid to one side as the artist reaches outwards towards new ideas and approaches; they let go of the linearity of the art making.

The technique of prototyping is one of the specific ones undertaken in artistic exploration. I call the MIT Trope Tank a “lab/studio” because it supports artistic practice as well as research, visits from artists as well as from researchers, and work in the intersection that is not easily categorized.

In a mode of very open exploration, without much pre-defined or pre-planned, it is possible for projects to grow from surrounding resources. In these cases, both art-making and research as well can look less like traditional studio art and more like bricolage or Merz. Just as the bricoleur makes do with what is at hand, just as Kurt Schwitters took trash off the street to collage into art, cast-off computers and books discarded by libraries and then gathered in labs can lead to surprising and insightful juxtapositions.

Nick Montfort is a poet, artist, and professor of digital media at MIT. He lives in New York City; his lab/studio The Trope Tank has locations there and at MIT.