Description
Book SynopsisAn important new approach to the study of laboratories, presenting a practical method for understanding labs in all walks of life
From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.
Organized by interpretive categories such as space, infrastructure, and imaginaries, The Lab Book uses both historical and contemporary examples to show how laboratories have become fundamentally connected to changes in the contemporary university. Its wide reach includes institutions like the MIT Media Lab, the Tuskegee Institute’s Jesup Wagon, ACTLab, and the Media Archaeological Fundus. The authors cover topics such as the evolution and delineation of lab-based communities, how labs’ tools and technologies contribute to defining their space, and a glossary of key hybrid lab techniques.
Providing rich historical breadth and depth, The Lab Book brings into focus a critical, but often misunderstood, aspect of the contemporary arts and humanities.
Trade Review"Lively, timely, and filled with vivid examples, The Lab Book is a highly readable and critically sophisticated account of current lab culture. Written by three distinguished practitioners, it examines the rhetoric that links real and imaginary ideas of experimentality with systems of power and authority across a surprising range of disciplines. A fun, smart, useful guide to ongoing work in media studies."—Johanna Drucker, author of Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Everything Is a Lab
Case Study: The French Language Lab (Middlebury College, U.S.)
1. Lab Space
Case Study: Menlo Park Laboratory (Menlo Park, U.S.)
Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 1 (MIT, U.S.)
Case Study: Media Archaeological Fundus (Humboldt University, Germany)
2. Lab Apparatus
Case Study: The Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University, Germany)
Case Study: The Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.)
3. Lab Infrastructure
Case Study: Home Economics Labs and Extension on the Canadian Prairies (Manitoba, Canada)
Case Study: Black Laboratories and Agricultural Extension
4. Lab People
Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 2 (MIT, U.S.)
Case Study: ActLab (University of Texas Austin, U.S.)
5. Lab Imaginaries
Case Study: Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and Parapsychology
Case Study: Bell Labs, A Factory for Ideas
6. Lab Techniques
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
