Notes
Introduction
Wondrich, Punch; O’Neil, Fix the Pumps.
Lab Series website, https://www.labseries.com.
Hudson’s Bay Company, “Hudson’s Bay and Lord & Taylor.”
See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 79–82.
Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 165.
Latour, 168.
Latour, 166.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13, 27.
Latour, 27.
Latour, 34. Many years before, Lewis Mumford makes a similar argument in Technics and Civilization, 130.
Latour, 11.
Alpers, “The Studio.”
Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media.
Marx, “Preface to the First Edition,” 89.
Bök, ’Pataphysics.
Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus.”
See Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science.”
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 30.
Mattern, “Intellectual Furnishing.”
Stengers, Power and Invention, 170.
Geoghegan, “After Kittler,” 70.
Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 2015.
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 47.
Shaviro, Without Criteria, 61.
Urry, Mobilities, 253–54.
Gieryn, “Truth Is Also a Place.”
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 64.
Latour and Woolgar, 65.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 40–41.
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 58.
Latour and Woolgar, 48.
Sterne, “The Example,” 22.
Sterne, The Audible Past, 36.
Sterne, 42.
T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 527.
T. Bennett, 528.
The “interthing communication” that takes place in that network, Marc Steinberg proposes, is the precondition for the social function of those things, in that it allows the things to speak to people, and people to speak to each other through them as media. Media are irreducible to commodity products, but commodities are undeniably part of the infrastructure of our communication and making (Anime’s Media Mix, 91).
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380–81.
Star, 381–82.
Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 5.
See Knorr Cetina, “The Couch,” 121.
Burns, The Scientific Revolution, 164.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 44.
Zielinski, “Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola.”
Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 45.
Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science,” 104.
Bruno, 91.
Bruno, 100.
Bruno, 109.
Feder, “Scrounging Old Equipment.” Scrounging could easily be described as part of the list of common laboratory techniques.
Sterne, “Headset Culture,” 58.
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 182.
Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 11.
Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 4.
See, for example, Angus, “The Materiality of Expression,” and Gitelman, Always Already New.
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 243.
T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 525.
Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology, 29.
Knorr Cetina, “The Couch.” Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 24.
Hacking, 36.
Hacking, 36.
Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 257. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 562.
Pickering, 563.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 11.
Kuhn, 19.
Kuhn, 20.
De Landa, Assemblage Theory, 89–90.
De Landa, 90.
Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 15.
Marvin, 4.
Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 38–39. See also T. Bennett, “Civic Laboratories,” 522, 526.
R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126.
Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” 30.
Hacking, 30.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 46.
Kuhn, 46.
Kuhn, 79.
Kuhn, 149.
Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 142.
1. Lab Space
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 37, 57.
Lefebvre, 33.
Lefebvre, 39, 46.
Dourish, email to Lori Emerson, November 9, 2018.
Latour, Science in Action, 4, 99.
Kohler, “Lab History,” 766.
See Larocque, “Hook & Eye”; Bowie, “SpiderWebShow.ca”; and Stepić, “Bums in Seats.”
The origin of most discourse on cyberspace is, of course, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer; but in terms of media studies works, Michael Benedikt’s edited collection Cyberspace: First Steps and Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community are a few of the earliest and most extensive accounts of the shape and contours of early, online communities.
“Professor to Use Sky.”
See, for example, Lomas, “Here’s Cambridge Analytica’s Plan,” and Wong, Lewis, and Davies, “How Academic at Centre of Facebook Scandal Tried.”
Miller and Yúdice, Cultural Policy, 15.
Kim, “An Interview with Edward Kim.”
Kim.
The Lab at Ada’s, https://thelab.adasbooks.com.
Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 138.
Innis, The Bias of Communication, 4.
Gooday, “Placing or Replacing the Laboratory,” 788.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 581.
Price, The Plan of St. Gall, 32.
M. W. Jackson, “Illuminating the Opacity,” 142.
Jackson, 142.
Crosland, “Early Laboratories,” 234.
See also Ursula Klein’s excellent account in “Apothecary’s Shops, Laboratories and Chemical Manufacture.”
Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge,” 770.
Shapin, “The House of Experiment,” 378. In addition to Shapin’s excellent historical accounts of the roots of laboratories in seventeenth-century England, there are abundant accounts of the genesis of the laboratory over the last three hundred years—among these are Hannaway’s “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science,” James’s edited collection The Development of the Laboratory, Lenoir’s “Laboratories, Medicine and Public Life,” Gooday’s “Precision Measurement,” and Reich’s The Making of American Industrial Research.
Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge,” 779–80.
Crosland, “Early Laboratories,” 238.
Cooper, “Homes and Households,” 227.
That said, as Marsha L. Richmond elaborates on in “‘A Lab of One’s Own,’” her remarkable history of the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women in Cambridge, the following decades featured various attempts, some successful and some not, to establish labs exclusively for women.
R. W. Raymond, Glossary, 52.
See also Starosielski’s “Thermocultures of Geological Media” as another account of how gender and power relations have played out in temperature and media.
Quoted in Millard, Edison, 6. See also Noble, America by Design, 119.
Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 29–30.
Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 220.
Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 21; Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 213.
Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 22.
Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 213.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 470.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, 471.
Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation, 33.
Millard, 23.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 541.
Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 225.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 399.
Croffut, “The Papa of the Phonograph,” 215.
There are many excellent accounts of the architecture and planning of the MIT campus in general, which of course lays the groundwork for the architecture and design of the MIT Media Lab. See, for example, Mitchell and Vest, Imagining MIT, and Jarzombek, Designing MIT.
Brand, The Media Lab, 4.
Molly Steenson quotes from Nicholas Negroponte’s personal papers, in which he states that media not only belonged to no discipline (strangely overlooking the discipline of Communication Studies and media studies that had its relative beginnings in Canada in the early 1950s and had its first department by 1965) but that it was, in the early 1980s, rejected almost completely by universities: “‘media’ was ripe for claiming, especially because of its unpopularity. . . . Media was intended to connote home, learning, and creative interfaces. . . . ‘By contrast, to my knowledge, nobody at MIT is addressing the home and, for that matter, no American university (to my knowledge) takes the world of consumer electronics seriously’” (quoted in Steenson, Architectural Intelligence, 216).
For more on MIT’s ties to the military-industrial complex, see Leslie, The Cold War and American Science.
Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
Negroponte, Being Digital, 224–25.
On the avant-garde and corporate labs, see again Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
Ito and Howe, Whiplash, 16, 30, 140. Also note that, oddly, this reference to “an island of misfit toys” is another instance where lab discourse ignores a Canadian production in order to make a case for American exceptionalism. The metaphor comes from the 1964 Videocraft International (later Rankin/Bass) Christmas special, which was recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto with an entirely Canadian cast, with the exception of Burl Ives.
Hiroshi Ishi, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab.
MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, Artists and Architects Collaborate, 11.
MIT News Office, “MIT Opens New Media Lab Complex.”
Brand, How Buildings Learn, 53.
Tereshko, “MIT Media Lab.”
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 690.
Greg Tucker, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab.
Tucker interview.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 718.
Ethan Zuckerman, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab.
Zuckerman interview.
Zuckerman, “To the Future Occupants.”
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 621; for furtheranalysis of contemporary labs’ space and architecture, see also Klonk’s New Laboratories.
The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at the University of Colorado Boulder is driven by a similar philosophy and has a similar history with and relation to its inherited space. For more on the MAL, see Emerson, “The Media Archaeology Lab” and “As If.”
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”
Ernst.
Ernst, Digital Media and the Archive, 55.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 774.
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”
Ernst, “Archives, Materiality, and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’”
2. Lab Apparatus
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57.
Zephyr, “Spatial History as Scholarly Practice,” 503.
Nowviskie, “Resistance in Materials,” 383.
This stems from Michel Foucault’s understanding of the apparatus (“dispositif”) and from Giorgio Agamben’s follow-up essay, in which he writes: “I shall call an apparatus anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself” (“What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, 14).
Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 7.
Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 160–61.
Brand, The Media Lab, 18–19. This is not to say that the current examples of digital (humanities) labs would be anywhere so naive; indeed, many of them are very aware of their proximity to “traditional” locations of old media such as the library. And many of the practices that revolve around the digital are embedded in a more pragmatic way of considering, for example, the benefits of open source systems around which the lab or digital scholarship can build itself as a different sort of a communication system. See Bickoff, “Humanity’s Place in Laboratory Space.”
One broader term that indicates a commitment to articulate a continuum across material objects and information technologies is postdigital. What the term offers is a way to realize the multiple histories of digital technologies from 8-bit sound and graphics to the current HD worlds. See Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-digital’?”
Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 161. See also Law, “Making a Mess with Method.”
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”
Media Archaeological Fundus, https://www.musikundmedien.hu-berlin.de/de/medienwissenschaft/medientheorien/fundus/media-archaeological-fundus.
Ernst, “Archives, Materiality, and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’”
Emerson, “Sister Labs.”
For a list of the objects, see the MAF wiki at https://wikis.hu-berlin.de/maf/Kategorie:Inventar.
For a brief history of the intellectual trajectory of German media studies after Kittler, see Geoghegan, “After Kittler.”
See Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science.”
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” See also Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms.
Ernst, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’”
Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”
As Wolfgang Hagen puts it, media devices restore parts of their own scientific history (Das Radio, xvii).
Thomson, “Scientific Laboratories,” 411.
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”
Guez, “An Interview with Emmanuel Guez.” The Minitel also serves as a prominent example. See, for example, Guez et al., “The Afterlives of Network-Based Artworks.” Their example is the lab-created afterlife for Eduardo Kac’s Videotext Poems from the mid-1980s where the art piece becomes also a way to address the existence of earlier now dead media infrastructures such as the French Minitel networking system: “The most common Minitel could therefore be coupled to a telephone from the 1980s. To connect to the server the user needs to compose a number, wait for the high tone specific to a Minitel server, then press the button ‘Connexion/Fin.’ This procedure, obvious to any Minitel user, is lost to the younger generation of ‘digital natives’ yet experimental media archaeology allows a new audience to re-appropriate such knowledge and in this sense, although the Minitel is a dead medium, creating the ‘second original’ has made it into a sort of ‘zombie’ medium, giving an archival life, or afterlife, to Kac’s Poems. Any happy Minitel owner with access to a landline can call the number linked to the micro-server and get connected” (118).
Höltgen, “Interview with Stefan Höltgen.”
See Höltgen, “Game Circuits.”
Fred Turner connects this to the longer history of R&D in the United States and the emergence of current forms of digital and internet-based utopias as part of the developments since World War II. The story of modern valorization of information is also, then, a story of the emergent military-industrial-academic complex: “The idea that the material world could be thought of as an information system and modeled on computers emerged not with the Internet, but much earlier, in and around the government-sponsored research laboratories of World War II, and particularly around the Radiation Laboratory at MIT” (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 15).
Brand, The Media Lab, 42.
Sayers and Chan, “Prototyping the Past.”
See Hertz, “Dead Media Research Lab.” See also Zielinski, “Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola.”
Sayers, “Prototyping the Past.”
Belojevic, “Kits for Cultural History.” The “kit” also resonates strongly with some methods in critical design, like cultural probes, props, and scenarios. See Dunne, Hertzian Tales.
Sayers, “Kits for Cultural History.”
Fickers and van der Oever, “Experimental Media Archaeology,” 275. See also Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”
Ernst, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine.’” See also Cramer, “Post-digital Literary Studies.”
Ludwig and Weber, “A Rediscovery of Scientific Collections.”
See, for example, Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity. See also Ludwig and Weber, “University Collections as Archives.”
Lourenço, “Between Two Worlds,” 45. We would also like to point out that cabinets of physics instruments, models for anatomy, and all kinds of collections of ephemera offered what Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz called, in 1787, “a sort of encyclopaedia for the senses” that was particularly useful for pedagogical purposes as well as for research (quoted in Tega, “Science and Art in Palazzo Poggi,” 8). In many ways, collections were also connected to spaces and architectures such as botanical gardens and anatomical theaters. Of course, in the humanities both archaeological and ethnological collections were already a central part of earlier research collections, including a partial absorption into university museums. While, in our case, research collections are not necessarily serving the public like a museum—and in many cases because of limited or nonexistent staffing or because of the nature of the lab or collection—it is useful to illuminate the importance of the collection by quoting David Murray from 1904: “Every Professor of a branch of science requires a museum and a laboratory for his department; and accordingly in all our great universities and other teaching institutions we have independent museums of botany, palaeontology, geology, mineralogy and zoology, of anatomy, physiology, pathology and materia medica, of archaeology—prehistorical and historical, classical and Christian—each subject taught having its own appropriate collection” (quoted in Lourenço, “Between Two Worlds,” 68–69).
Clark, Academic Charisma, 141.
Clark, 160.
Clark, 174.
Stern, “The Example,” 23.
On Kittler as the daunting godfather of digital humanities, see Holl, “Friedrich Kittler’s Digital Legacy.”
Schmidgen, “The Laboratory,” 11.
In addition to text-based work, reverse engineering and forensics are relevant methodologies for a kind of media-analytical research that approaches cultures of computation from a different perspective than that of data in the abstract. This is not meant as a dismissal of hybrid labs that focus on big data or those that incorporate the old ideal of Big Science in the humanities lab. What we are arguing, though, is that the sort of material practice we have been describing is a necessary complement to data-based work as it frames the link between science and hybrid lab from the perspective of media studies instead of the media industry and the military-industrial complex.
Ernst, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”
Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media, 74.
Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK.”
Frost.
For an online catalog of the MAL’s collection, please consult http://mediaarchaeologylab.com/catalogue.
See Emerson, “The Media Archaeology Lab” and “Excavating.”
Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 100.
Galison, “Trading with the Enemy,” 36. Thin description as defined by Galison is part of his concept of trading zones for interdisciplinary activity.
See the Digital Archive of entries at https://interactions.acm.org/archive.
Kolko, “Day in the Lab”; Budd, “Day in the Lab.”
Isbister, “Day in the Lab”; Watson, “Day in the Lab.”
Karen Barad uses the term intra-action to emphasize the nature of agency always not merely as interactional; instead, intra-action emphasizes the fluid boundaries in which different agencies co-constitute each other, including the entanglement of matter and meaning in iterative rounds of engagement: “The neologism ‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. It is important to note that the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33).
3. Lab Infrastructure
Garcia, “NASA Updates Spacewalk Assignments.”
Voosen, “Women Make Up Just 15%.”
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380.
Crane, Seales, and Terras, “Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology,” section 17.
Crane, Seales, and Terras, section 19.
Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 8.
Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 380.
Anderson, “What Are Research Infrastructures?,” 20–21.
Foka et al., “Beyond Humanities qua Digital,” 273.
Foka et al., 273.
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 381–82. Latour also makes a similar point with regard to infrastructure’s visibility during breakdown by using construction sites as an analogy in Reassembling the Social, 88.
Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 377.
Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” 112.
Alberani, De Castro Pietrangeli, and Mazza, “The Use of Grey Literature in Health Sciences.”
Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 34.
Bowker and Star, 38.
Vismann, Files.
Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 41.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 290.
Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 44.
Bowker and Star, 50.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 322.
CLEAR, CLEAR Lab Book.
Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3–4.
Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 17.
Quoted in Wilson, appendix B, 218.
Burwell et al., A Time in Our Lives.
Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 1.
Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 43–44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Wershler, “Neepawa and Minnedosa,” 66.
“Five Stories, 105 Years.”
A fictionalized account of this history appears in Carol Shields’s 1992 novel Republic of Love. Jessaca B. Leinaweaver published a paper on it in 2013 titled “Practice Mothers.”
There is another significant body of photo-documentation from this period, though there is less writing about it. One of the interesting things about this period is that the photographic record suggests a concerted effort on the part of the university to promote not only their sophisticated lab apparatus, but the presence of named lab technicians, who all had professional headshots taken. This is one possible avenue for ongoing research on this project.
Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 2.
Quoted in Burwell and Burwell, 2.
Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 42–43.
Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 1.
Burwell and Burwell, 1.
Wilson, “A History of Home Economics Education,” 37.
Parker and Burwell, “Women’s Institute,” 14.
Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 3.
Parker and Burwell, “Women’s Institute,” 14.
Parker and Burwell, 14.
Burwell and Burwell, “Extension in Manitoba,” 4.
Scrase, “Foods and Nutrition,” 54.
Burwell, “4-H Club Program,” 39.
Strong-Boag, “Pulling in Double Harness,” 32.
Strong-Boag, 43–44.
Strong-Boag, 43–44.
Keselman, “Academic Structure Initiative Update.”
Reverby, “More than Fact and Fiction,” 22.
Brandt, “Racism and Research,” 21.
Reverby, “Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” 3–4.
Reverby, “More than Fact and Fiction,” 27.
Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 10.
Cruzado, “Who Needs Extension, Anyway?,” 6.
Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 9.
Campbell, Movable School, 92; Goldenstein, “Booker T. Washington,” 11.
Winn, Documenting Racism, 20.
CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1906?amount=674.50, consulted September 14, 2020.
Campbell, Movable School, 94. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
This is not hyperbole; for Winn there is little of actual educational value in this film. He cites an internal government document that uses eye-wateringly frank language: “The pictures enabled those who saw them to visualize into concrete action the otherwise abstract points of the propaganda” (“Report to the Secretary of Agriculture on the Work of the Committee on Motion Picture Activities,” November 30, 1914, 8, in Winn, Documenting Racism, 16).
Winn, 13. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Campbell, Movable School, 120–21, 125.
Brown, “1890 Institutions’ Extension Program,” 65.
McFarlane and Rutherford, “Political Infrastructures,” 371.
Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio,” 498.
Galison and Jones, 524.
Museum of Modern Art, Art in Our Time, 15. See also Museum of Modern Art, “Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Biographical Notes.”
Lowell and the Fogg Art Museum, The Fine Arts in a Laboratory.
Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 56.
Kantor, 93.
Kantor, 93
Monash University, “Emerging Technologies Lab Collaboration.”
Liboiron et al., “Equity in Author Order.”
Century, Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
See also Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
This is also evident in the history of the art and technology lab as it emerges as part of U.S. Cold War institutions. See Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
Frodeman, Sustainable Knowledge, 51.
Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Weingart, “A Short History of Knowledge Formations.”
University Innovation Alliance, http://www.theuia.org.
Crow and Bozeman, Limited by Design, 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Zielinski, [. . . After the Media], 226.
To be fair, some European projects have tried to address this: Baltan Laboratories’ project set itself as an “active laboratory space for research and development in the technological arts,” echoing also our contention that it often takes a lab to understand a lab. Plohman, A Blueprint, 7. See also, for example, the CCCB (Barcelona) Dossier on laboratories in the cultural sector, which also includes various insights into the policy aspects in Europe: http://lab.cccb.org/en/dossier/laboratories.
Stripling, “Arizona State U Has Problems.”
See Wysocki, “Once Collegial”; M. L. Phillips, “ASU Cancer Researchers Fired”; Irwin, “ASU Inc.”; Milun v. Arizona Board of Regents; and Wagner and Ryman, “Prominent ASU Scientist Sues University.”
Crow and Bozeman, Limited by Design, 99.
Crow and Bozeman, 98.
Wysocki, “Once Collegial.”
Wagner and Ryman, “Prominent ASU Scientist.”
Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University, 182, 307 (quotation).
Foka et al., “Beyond Humanities qua Digital,” 265.
Foka et al., 266.
4. Lab People
Kavanagh and Rich, Truth Decay.
Lears, Fables of Abundance, 212.
Bjelopera, City of Clerks, 99; Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle, 49.
Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy, 36.
Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-Away Culture,” 3–4.
Krajewski, “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy,” 59.
Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-Away Culture,” 3–4.
Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 227.
Latour, 231.
News of the entanglement of the Media Lab in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke while we were in the final stages of manuscript preparation. If anything, it has strengthened our sense of the usefulness of the extended lab model in terms of its ability to explicate aspects of laboratories that might not otherwise be visible: what forms of agencies are promoted and supported by labs, what sort of promotional strategies project a sense of “humanism,” and how alternative discourses and techniques have been employed as part of another legacy of the lab since the 1990s.
Brand, The Media Lab, 6.
Bass, “Being Nicholas.”
P. F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 23.
MIT 150 Exhibition, “MIT Charter of 1861.”
“Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology,” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections.
For a complete history of the founding of MIT, see Stratton and Mannix, Mind and Hand.
“Scope and Plan of the School of Industrial Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Quoted in Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation, 18.
Millard, 30.
P. F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 137.
Gall, “Thomas A. Edison,” 77.
Noble, America by Design, 118.
Noble, 118.
Noble, 118.
Etzkowitz, MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science, 50.
Etzkowitz, “The Making of the Entrepreneurial University,” 530.
Etzkowitz, 530; Guerlac, Radar in World War II, 293.
Guerlac, Radar in World War II, 293.
Guerlac, 681.
Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.”
For more on this long-standing porousness between the public and private sectors, see Barrow’s contemporary account, Universities and the Capitalist State, and Etzkowitz’s “The Making of the Entrepreneurial University.” For early, critical accounts of the increasing influence of the private sector on higher education, see John Henry Newman’s 1858 The Idea of the University and Veblen’s 1918 The Higher Learning in America.
Slotnick, “Membership Levels.”
Evers, “Frequently Asked Questions.”
Ethan Zuckerman, interview by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, February 7, 2017, MIT Media Lab.
MIT News Office, “Letter Regarding Jeffrey Epstein and MIT.”
Farrow, “Élite University Research Center.”
Chen and Hao, “MIT Media Lab Founder.”
Chen and Hao.
Brand, The Media Lab, 4. See also Halpern, “The Trauma Machine.”
Ito and Howe, Whiplash, 100.
Ito, “Organizational Structure.”
Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, 94.
Veblen, 96, 99.
Just a few of the more recent books published on the intersection of neoliberalism and higher education are Labaree’s A Perfect Mess, Di Leo’s, Higher Education under Late Capitalism, and Gumport’s Academic Fault Lines.
Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge, 69.
Servan-Schreiber, 78.
P. F. Drucker, Management, 131.
Drucker, 131.
Drucker, 325.
Drucker, 333.
Johnson, “MIT Commencement Speech.”
Johnson, 7.
Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here.
Renata Avila describes digital colonialism as “the new deployment of a quasi-imperial power over a vast number of people, without their explicit consent, manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a vastly dominant power” (“Resisting Digital Colonialism”). However, Negroponte’s writing from the 1960s through the 2000s along with Kay’s and Servan-Schreiber’s writing from the 1970s demonstrates it’s anything but new. See Negroponte, The Architecture Machine; Kay, “A Personal Computer”; and Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge.
Hapgood, “The Media Lab at 10.”
Farmer, “Where Tomorrow’s Technology Is Born.”
There is significant research on the history of futures and the notion of futurity that goes back to the RAND Corporation in the 1940s. See Beck, “The Future.”
Hearn and Banet-Weiser, “Future Tense.”
Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 61.
Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 55.
Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 61.
Jewish Museum, Software, 23.
Halpern, “Inhuman Vision.”
Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 63.
Negroponte, “A 30-Year History.”
Halpern, “The Trauma Machine,” 59.
Kay, “A Personal Computer.”
Kay.
Kay.
Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects, 2.
Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines, 103.
Negroponte, 104.
Negroponte, 108.
Steenson, Architectural Intelligence, 179.
It’s also worth noting that, while Negroponte appropriates the figure of the “indigenous architect” as his inspiration for his various AMG projects using machine intelligence to solve so-called urban problems, his obsession with the “urban” as such may (whether he was aware of it or not) be part of MIT’s larger obsession of the time, which started in the mid-1960s with solving what it euphemistically referred to as society’s “urban” problems—coded language for, in Charlton McIlwain’s words in Black Software, “the Negro, the Puerto Rican, racial and ethnic minorities, the poor” (19). Across the 153-page-long The Architecture Machine, Negroponte mentions “urban” no fewer than eighty times.
Servan-Schreiber, The World Challenge, 6.
Servan-Schreiber, 13.
Servan-Schreiber, 13.
Servan-Schreiber, 268.
Negroponte, “The $100 Laptop,” 19.
Negroponte, 19.
Negroponte, 20.
See Negroponte, 19–20, and Kane et al., Learning to Change the World, 175. Anita Say Chan has astutely described this method of delivering education technology initiatives to those living in countries perceived as “underdeveloped” or “needy” as an air-drop deployment that’s part of a larger program of technological fundamentalism (“Beyond Technological Fundamentalism”).
Markoff, “Taking the Pulse of Technology.”
Negroponte, “One Laptop per Child.”
Negroponte.
Negroponte.
Fouché, “From Black Inventors to OLPC,” 72.
Diamandis, “XPRIZE.”
Ames, The Charisma Machine.
Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK.”
Bosma, Nettitudes, 136.
Bosma, 136.
Bosma, 136.
Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!”
Derrida, Dissemination, 5.
Stryker, “Another Dream of Common Language,” 302.
C. Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone.” See also C. Williams, “Radical Inclusion.”
C. Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone.”
Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back,” 230.
Stone, 230.
ACTLab, “The Historical ACTLab.”
Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations,” 55; Stryker, “Another Dream of Common Language,” 302.
Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!”
Stone, “On Being Trans.”
Doctorow, “U Texas/Austin’s ACTLab to Close.”
Braidotti, “The Critical Posthumanities,” 382.
ACTLab, “The Historical ACTLab.”
ACTLab.
Stone, “On Being Trans.”
Stone.
Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 587.
Svensson, “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.”
Toupin, “Feminist Hackerspaces.”
5. Lab Imaginaries
See, for example, Lecher, “The 10 Best Fictional Laboratories.” See also Bouton, “In Lab Lit, Fiction Meets Science.”
Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 106.
Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 41–62.
Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter, 42, 43.
Mullaney, 22, 23, 26.
To quote Gilles Deleuze, “the institution is always given as an organized system of means. . . . Law is a limitation of actions, institution a positive model for action” (“Instincts and Institutions,” 19).
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 10.
Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter, 30.
Mullaney, 37.
Mullaney, 56
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 341. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
See Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science.”
Bureau d’études writes of the planetary lab: “Since World War, the planet is gradually transformed into a scale 1 laboratory. The old model of ‘world factory’ has given way to the model of the ‘world laboratory.’ Objects of this laboratory, can we also be the subjects? Can we reclaim this huge machine that became autonomous and is now developing according to its own dynamic? Can we redirect the fate and direction of this laboratory?” Quoted on the Laboratory Planet website: http://laboratoryplanet.org/en.
Bishop, “The Global University.”
Krzyżanowski, “Values, Imaginaries and Templates,” 346–47.
Gieryn, “Boundary-Work,” 782. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
There are plenty of relevant examples, but in terms of recent activism where the rhetoric of the lab is mobilized as a feminist network. It is also a good example of the ways in which the notion of the lab is not necessarily contained by normal architectural arrangements, but becomes a network of participants working on a wider geographical scale and with wider set of global social issues.
Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio.”
Edison to Charles E. Buell, December 1, 1873, quoted in Israel, “Telegraphy and Edison’s Invention Factory,” 69.
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve, 8.
“Undergirding this new context was an emerging corporate culture that relied less on the invisible hand of the market and more on what historian Alfred Chandler has called the ‘visible hand’ of modern management.” Israel, “Telegraphy and Edison’s Invention Factory,” 66.
Millard, “Thomas Edison,” 199. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Gertner, The Idea Factory, 45, 343.
Altice, I Am Error, 22.
Millard, “Thomas Edison,” 192–95.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 91.
Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 165.
Latour, 154.
Kluitenberg, “Connection Machines,” 160.
Kluitenberg, 168.
Kluitenberg, 170.
Thibault, “The Automatization of Nikola Tesla.”
Wolffram, “In the Laboratory of the Ghost-Baron.”
See Hamilton, Intention and Survival. See also Sconce, Haunted Media.
Hamilton Family fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections.
“At present, photography of the substance is the most valuable means at our disposal of showing its objective reality and of studying its morphology and processes.” Hamilton, Intention and Survival, 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
“That these phenomena were secured under the direction of intelligences, known as ‘controls,’ that is, trance personalities claiming to be individuals who have survived death, is generally known, and a fact that makes the whole enquiry particularly distasteful to many” (Hamilton, 10).
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, a British inventor and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of radio, referred to this room as Hamilton’s “laboratory” (quoted in Hamilton, 132).
Wojcik, “Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions,” 120. Wojick cites Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium, and Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow.
Hamilton writes: “Many of my medical colleagues have accepted my experiments as attempts to get at the truth by genuinely experimental methods, regardless of the somewhat unusual nature of these things” (Intention and Survival, 16).
Quoted in Gertner, The Idea Factory, 4. See also Galison and Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio.”
Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 56–57.
For example, from his first sentence (“This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men” [1]), Jon Gertner is unabashed about The Idea Factory being a “great man history.” For all its virtues, he retrenches a mythology of male American midwestern genius at the roots of technological innovation by glossing over the contributions of the thousands of employees (fifteen thousand at its peak) for the work of a handful, including the women who worked at Bell Labs (121) and the Europeans whose discoveries sometimes served as the occasion for innovation (13, 67). The story could have been told otherwise.
Gertner, 346.
Dickerman, “‘Our Future.’”
Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” 52, 45.
Barbrook and Cameron, 50, 49.
Barbrook and Cameron, 53.
Barbrook and Cameron, 55.
Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here; Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation, 3–4. Golumbia sees in computationalism not only a drift toward the right but also the seeds of a Hobbesian, winner-take-all sensibility that leads directly to authoritarianism: “There is no room in this picture for exactly the kind of distributed sovereignty on which democracy itself would seem to be predicated” (224). And, in the wake of Gamergate and the rise of Trump, Josephine Armistead extends the argument yet again to account for the rise of neo-reactionary philosophy and outright fascism. See “The Silicon Ideology” and “The Silicon Ideology Revisited.”
Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 240.
Turner, 242.
Turner, 19–20.
Holmes, “Disconnecting the Dots,” 185.
Holmes, 185.
Crow, “Building an Entrepreneurial University,” 76.
Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University, 10–11.
Crow and Dabars, 103–4.
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 129.
Galison, “Three Laboratories,” 1149.
Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 20.
6. Lab Techniques
See, for example, Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 6–7.
Galison, “Trading Zone.”
Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 10, 12.
Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” 84.
Sterne, “Communication as Techné,” 4.
Sterne, 5.
Krämer and Bredekamp, “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques,” 23.
Fordyce et al., “3D Printing and University Makerspaces,” 193.
Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology,” 393.
Fordyce, “Manufacturing Imaginaries,” 3.
Allahyari and Rourke, “The 3D Additivist Manifesto.”
Molitch-Hou, “3D Printing Health Risks.”
Since the writing of this book, the Lab has continued work renamed as the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies. See https://maker.uvic.ca/studio/.
Sayers, “Prototyping the Past.”
Catlow and Garrett, “DIWO.”
See also Parikka, “Digging.”
Wylie et al., “Institutions for Civic Technoscience”; Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 4.
Dragona, “What Is Left to Subvert?,” 187.
O’Gorman, “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys.”
Findlen, Possessing Nature, 100.
Findlen, 107.
Stone, “ACTLab, or, Make Stuff!”
Liboiron, “How to Run a Feminist Science Lab Meeting.”
Hartnett, Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making.
https://civiclaboratory.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/codm-cheat-sheet.docx.
Krmpotich, “Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically,” 115.
Montfort, “An Interview with Nick Montfort.”
Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”
For organizations lobbying on behalf of consumers, see, for example, the Repair Association (www.repair.org) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Defend Your Right to Repair!”
Rankin, “EU Plans ‘Right to Repair’ Rules.”
National Science Teaching Association, “Integral Role of Laboratory Investigations.”
Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 149.
Rheinberger, “Experiment, Research, Art.”
Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.”
Rheinberger, “Experiment, Research, Art.”
See also Schwab, Experimental Systems.
For more on Black Mountain College see, for example, Díaz, The Experimenters.
Reimer, “An Interview with Professor Bo Reimer.”
Gross, “Give Me an Experiment”; Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory.”
J. Drucker, SpecLab, 5.
J. Drucker, 21.
Treske, “An Interview with Andreas Treske.”
Quoted in Plohman, A Blueprint, 253.
White, “The Aesthetics of Failure.”
Olsson, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”
O’Gorman, “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys,” 40.
Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.”
Ballon and Schuurman, “Living Labs.”
Ballon and Schuurman.
Ballon and Schuurman. The term “living lab” is often credited to William Mitchell, Kent Larson, and Alex Pentland at MIT, who used the concept in the field of urban planning and city design to observe people in smart homes (the living labs, in this case) and then iterate their product design based on patterns of actual use. But Seppo Leminen (with researchers including Anna-Greta Nyström, Christ Habib, and Mika Westerlund) has argued for a more complex relative beginning for the term, finding early uses in 1749 and 1956, with its relative formalization in 1991 with Bajgier (Leminen, Westerlund, and Nyström, “Living Labs as Open-Innovation Networks,” 7).
Bajgier et al., “Introducing Students,” 708.
For bibliographic surveys see Leminen, Habib, and Westerlund, “Living Labs as Innovation Platforms,” and Leminen, Westerlund, and Nyström, “Living Labs as Open-Innovation Networks.”
Bajgier et al., “Introducing Students,” 703, 709.
Leminen, Habib, and Westerlund, “Living Labs as Innovation Platforms,” 2.
Ballon and Schuurman, “Living Labs.”
Ballon and Schuurman.
Von Hippel, “Lead Users,” 791.
Mats Eriksson et al., “Living Labs,” 2.
Arrigoni, “Innovation, Collaboration, Education,” 217.
Arrigoni, 219, 223.
Arrigoni, 216.
Tanaka, “Situation within Society,” 19.
Arrigoni and Schofield, “Understanding Artistic Prototypes between Activism and Research,” 25.
Tanaka, 26.
Mareis and Allen, “An Interview with Mareis and Allen.”
Sayers and Chan, “Prototyping the Past.”
Quoted in Redström, Making Design Theory, 73.
Turner, “Prototype,” 258.
Kera, “On Prototypes,” 425.
Ronell, The Test Drive, 164.
Gertner, The Idea Factory, 56.
Zielinski, “Thinking about Art after the Media,” 299.
Arrigoni, “Innovation, Collaboration, Education,” 219.
Conclusion
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Lab Cult.
Parham, “Everything Is New.” See also Chaudhary and Berhe, “Ten Simple Rules,” and the website for the “What Is a Feminist Lab?” symposium: http://whatisafeministlab.online.
Baccus-Clark, “What Role Does Immersive Storytelling Play?”
Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine,” 34.
Huhtamo, 41.
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 157.
Ding, “Interview with Hyphen-Labs.” See also the Hyphen-Labs website at http://www.hyphen-labs.com/.
Ding, “Interview with Hyphen-Labs.”
Ding.
Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 564.
Pickering, 567.
Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-digital’?,” 18. See also Bishop et al., Across & Beyond.
Parikka, “The Lab Imaginary.”
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump,15.
CLEAR, CLEAR Lab Book.
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 281.
Shapin and Schaffer, 76, 303.
Conway and Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt.
Kavanagh and Rich, Truth Decay.
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 343.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 201.
Kuhn, 202, 5.