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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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:

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 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

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 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 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, 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.

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.

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:

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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.