The Extended Laboratory Model

These aspects—space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques—are what will help us to 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 because labs themselves are continually shifting. As with the famous “circuit of culture” heuristic developed by British cultural studies scholars Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, 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. What’s important is to pass through all of its aspects, and to remember that each aspect will be imbricated into the others 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 of 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 (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 talk about it?” and “How can we make something that might help the occupants of hybrid labs to describe their own work?”