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What Is A Media Lab?

situated practices in media studies

ACTLab, or, Make Stuff! An Interview with Allucquere Rosanne Stone

The program started in a literal broom closet across the hall from the department’s offices.  [Myself], my TA, and five students could barely squeeze in.  Between the first two semesters, most of our equipment was stolen.  It was not an auspicious beginning.

June 2018

You had already a long career before establishing the program at ACTLab, which in many ways seemed to crystallise your different interests in sound technologies, computing, performance and not least, in radical cultural theory. Could you tell us more about what led to the formation of ACTLAB and also about its early phases? Who was involved and how did it develop?

ARS: 
I came to the ACTLab by way of the History of Consciousness program at UCSC (at which I took my doctorate while studying with Donna Haraway) and just about every department at UCSD, where I taught for several years while I was still ABD [“all but dissertation”].

Donna had suggested that I visit UCSD to sample their new Science Studies program, and perhaps to act as a bridge — to be a kind of representative of HistCon, and to try to establish some sort of exchange program whereby Science Studies students might spend some time in HistCon to broaden their understanding of subjects like Critical/Cultural Theory which were absent from the UCSD program, while HistCon students might spend some time at UCSD getting a better grasp of how traditional Science Studies worked.

This began when I cold-called the Science Studies program from Donna’s office, and was surprised when the director of the program answered.  I told him my name, and said that I was interested in being an exchange student for a year, and he asked me what department I was in at UCSC.  I looked at Donna, who shook her head and mouthed “Not HistCon”, so I said “What department are you in?”  “Sociology,” he said, and I came back with “What a coincidence, I’m in sociology too.”  This wasn’t a complete lie; I’d been taking sociology courses and working with a sociological research institute, and HistCon students were encouraged to develop a disciplinary interest more intelligible to the everyday academic than HistCon was, as a kind of epistemic camouflage.  So the next thing I knew, I was in San Diego.

The part which is relevant to the ACTLab begins there, because through a series of missteps and unfortunate incendiary interactions with the Old White Men of Science Studies, I managed to get myself thrown out of the program and instantly rehired as faculty.  From that felicitous position, over the course of the next few years I taught a variety of courses across many departments — anthropology, sociology, political science, English, history, an experimental program called The Making of the Modern World — I was like a kid in a candy store, and when I wasn’t teaching I was hanging out at Don Norman’s nascent Cognitive Science program or the physics labs, or [witnessing] the wonderful things being done by the Border Art Project.  There were rumors of a tenure line opening up for me, and it was in that heady climate that I suddenly found myself being headhunted by the University of Texas.

 

Donna was in close contact by email, and, as my advisor, was counseling me on what to do.   Being Donna, her comments were measured, meticulous, and thorough, and my fellow fledgling scholars seemed to be unused to similar levels of attention.  One evening while I was responding to one of Donna’s emails, a colleague came up quietly behind me and began reading aloud her instructions off the screen.  “Weigh carefully each of these alternatives,”  he intoned, in his best epic cinematic tones.  “My god, it’s Jor-el instructing Kal-el!  Why don’t I ever get this level of caring from my advisor?”  Why, indeed.

I didn’t want to leave San Diego.  Donna said “If they offer it, take it”, and while I was mulling that, I received a call from an old and highly respected academic friend who said bluntly that if I didn’t take UT’s offer, she would personally fly down to San Diego and strangle me.  With that kind of incentive, I didn’t have much choice; so the next thing I knew, I was in Austin.

Various departments there had hired some very interesting people, taking some risks in the process, since those people didn’t yet do things that were intelligible to a traditional department.  Gradually we discovered each other with help from Yakov Sharir, the head of the Dance program, and we discussed starting an interdepartmental interdisciplinary thing of some sort; Yakov encouraged us and arranged for us to have common office space so we could rub up against each other more often.  We studied each other’s work and thought about how we might bring about some modification of the university’s teaching structure, which, as it stood, was quite hostile to people from different departments co-teaching courses.  We began to discover other academics at other institutions thinking along similar lines.

Then came the purges.  Every single department that hosted one of those promising but untenured young scholars kicked them out.  It was a shock of seismic proportions.  Within a year, I was the only one left standing.  We had gone from a campus peppered with young brilliant faculty doing weird interesting things, to… me.  I surmised that I escaped only because no one bothered to notice that I was there.

Let me back up slightly.  When I was hired, my department gave me a brief: word for word, to “drag the department, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century”.  For a junior faculty member still wet behind the ears, that is a very large order. For the first year or so I simply mulled it over, and allowed myself to become caught up in the general excitement of those promising scholars who were discussing the future of media and pedagogy and were about to be sacked.

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Humanities Infrastructure, Inflection and Imagination: An Interview with Patrik Svensson

Interview by Lori Emerson

For more than a decade, Patrik Svensson has been relentlessly documenting, imagining and, now, reimagining the physical and conceptual meeting places that bring together the digital and the humanities. Svensson’s work has been at the center not only of my own work to situate the lab I run, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), in and around the digital/humanities as well as my attempts to better attune the spatial design and infrastructure of the MAL so it becomes more welcoming to diverse approaches to research and creative practice; but it has also been at the center of the turn in digital humanities toward expanding its sense of itself as a field – an expansion that beginning to include an infrastructural sensibility along with an attention to issues previously aligned more with media studies (for example, new materialist studies) or cultural studies (for example, the politics of gender, race, and intersectionality). In the interview below, conducted over email throughout the summer and fall of 2017, you’ll find Svensson bring all the aforementioned issues together as he discusses his role as Director of HUMlab at Umeå University in Sweden from 2001 to 2014 (an astonishingly long tenure considering the relatively short life span of humanities labs in general). While he was director, HUMlab became known as one of the most elaborate, productive, and likely one of the most well funded humanities labs in North America and Europe; by the end of his tenure, it included ten faculty from across the university, fifteen staff, 1100 square meters (or roughly 11800 square feet) of lab space on two separate campuses, more than ten externally funded research projects, involvement in numerous educational efforts on and off campus, roughly twenty-five scholarly publications per year, and a network of international collaborators spanning the globe (mostly Europe and the Anglo-American world). Svensson also revisits the series of four essays he published in Digital Humanities Quarterly from 2009 to 2012 which consistently used HUMlab as a case study to, as he put it, “broadly [explore] the digital humanities in terms of its discursive shift from humanities computing to digital humanities, the evolving disciplinary landscape, associated epistemic commitments and primary modes of engagement, underlying cyberinfrastructure, visions and hopes invested, and possible future directions” (Svensson 2012). And, finally, he reflects on how his thinking on digital/humanities/infrastructure has changed and perhaps even become more expansive or sensitive to diverse participants and diverse modes of participation since he has lived in New York City and now Los Angeles.

This is one of three extended interviews my co-authors, Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, and I will feature in our project that is both website (whatisamedialab.com) and book (THE LAB BOOK: Situated Studies in Media Studies, University of Minnesota Press). Our book is both a long history of the arts/humanities media lab as well as an analysis of how anything – from a podcast, a reading group or an idea to even a line of men’s grooming products – is now a lab; it is also a meditation on what is or could be a uniquely humanities lab. As such, to be clear, this interview is more than just about the trajectory of Svensson as a thinker, writer and administrator; it is about documenting a particularly successful and influential moment in the recent history of humanities infrastructure en route to creating what we hope will be an important contribution to the design of humanities infrastructure in and for the future.

Emerson: You’ve written extensively and compellingly about humanities infrastructure, especially in your recent book Big Digital Humanities, and many of your points are supported by your extensive work at HUMlab at Umeå University. But I am interested in hearing, first, about experiences you might have had in arts/humanities labs before HUMlab. Can you describe your pre-HUMlab experiences with these sorts of labs and how or whether HUMlab built on or departed from these early experiences?

Svensson: I was fairly junior at the time. I had just come back after a year at UC Berkeley as a finishing Ph.D. student. I do not think I reflected on it extensively then, but one thing I brought with me from Berkeley was the excitement of really sharp dialogues and to some degree a practice of making across disciplines and areas. I spent a lot of time with the neurolinguistics community there, for example. I think I was keen to keep that level of engagement, excitement and sharpness, and HUMlab was an opportunity to do such work. My early work with HUMlab I did together with Torbjörn Johansson, who started it, but left soon.

Actually, I think some of the inspiration came along the way. We tend to think of infrastructure as finished, which is of course not the case, and something like HUMlab took 10+ years for me and my team to get together (not finished, but a major milestone, which is also when I decided I wanted to do other things). Remember too that we built two physical labs on two sites as well as an extensive institutional, digital and technological infrastructure. People who came through the lab influenced it greatly. Our postdoctoral program was instrumental in this way and also the digital art fellows that were part of that program. It is about people and conceptual-material grounding.

One important early inspiration, however, was the ACTlab at UT Austin. Torbjörn Johansson had seen ACTlab earlier I think; Sandy Stone and Samantha Krukowski also visited Umeå and I went to see the ACTlab shortly afterwards in 2001. I still look at those photos sometimes. What impressed me was the actual space, the operation and also the fact that there was an idea about how the intellectual, artistic, performative and the material-technological came together partly expressed in Sandy’s piece “On Being Trans, and Under the Radar: Tales from the ACTlab”. One key component that I took with me (and which was already part of my thinking) was the central, large table. In HUMlab those tables often turned out as seminar-like tables (used for all kinds of work though), but I recently advised a US initiative about a new lab and mentioned the rough surface of the ACTlab table then – a workshop kind of engagement. Things like that matter. HUMlab was not an art space/studio in the same way as the ACTlab, but there were clear correspondences. I think another early inspiration (again through Torbjörn) – which also demonstrates that lab building is about ideas – was the Santa Fé Institute. Although I went there once, I do not think the space itself influenced us but rather some of their ideas and key thinkers. Torbjörn was also inspired by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory in Chicago (and co-founder Dan Sandin came to visit us). When I became the director of HUMlab I took all of that with me, but I also had a particular interest in articulating and building on a strong intellectual-material engagement, and actively resisting some established models (technological and institutional). Over the years, we had lots of visitors, and also I visited environments all over the world.

In terms of technological infrastructure, one particular interest of mine is screens and screen scapes and I think these parts of HUMlab’s infrastructure were a reaction to CAVE-like environments, where you are surrounded by what is given to you and expected to be immersed. The screenscape in HUMlab-2 (an expanded area of the lab built in 2008) was in fact in some ways the opposite to a CAVE – many separated screens around, peripherally placed (allowing for the central table), and edges and frames were important etc. It was also about interrogating things like attention, orientation, perspectives, multiplexitivty and context. I also think HUMlab was a reaction to standardized lab spaces at the time. I had worked with some computer labs at the School of Humanities and we had also struggled to find adequate spaces and platforms to do early projects such as the Virtual Wedding Project. Torbjörn and I both thought it was important to have accessible, multi-functional spaces that could accommodate unplanned meetings and creative, non-controlled work, and that also had the best technology (not necessarily off the shelf) available. We wanted to have a friendly space with a great team, where (as I say in Big Digital Humanities) curatorship and empowerment were important strategies. I also have a strong personal interest in architecture, lamps, rugs and other things that co-developed with HUMlab (to the degree that I had one of the designer lamps in the lab – a Louis Poulsen Collage 600 in pink – at home too, which was somewhat uncomfortable – you do not want too much overlap).

Virtual wedding project work (1999) – early experimental educational project.

Much of the early work was based on my and others’ interest in creating a meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology. We wanted key intellectual discussions and technological explorations (small and large) to happen in the lab, and we wanted some of the best people of the world to be around for some of those discussions – often physically, but we also experimented consistently with different types of remote participation. This shaped the design of the lab and here an important source of inspiration was progressive humanities center-like institutions (although I did not know about them when I started at HUMlab, I now think of them as related infrastructures). I also worked very closely with architects and interior decorators from early on – this was one way I learned that I cared about the small details as well as the larger context of humanities labs. I started to write up material-intellectual sketches from the very beginning as a document I could use together with experts and stakeholders in building processes, and this is a practice I have continued to develop over the years. Such work must build on extensive conversations with people inside and outside the operation and it must consider goals, visions, challenges and material opportunities while having a clear direction.

Emerson: What do you think characterizes a unique humanities infrastructure or lab space, one that distinguishes itself from science, technology or engineering labs? Given your answer above, it sounds like in your experience humanities labs have the potential to explore a flexible design space that facilitates or is even response to many different kinds of interactions and modes of academic exploration – is this right?

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An Interview with Professor Bo Reimer of Medea Lab

March 2018


1)   What is your lab called and where is it?



It is called MEDEA LAB MALMÖ, and it is located in Malmö, Sweden, as part of Malmö University. It started in 2009. It grew out of the work conducted within the School of Arts and Communication, which started in 1998 when Malmö University was inaugurated.

2)   What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?



We deal with societal challenges through experiments and interventions. The focus is on what we term collaborative media, [as well as] on design, and public engagement. We combine critical and theoretical work with design and arts based practices.

3)   Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?



It is primarily a research lab. About 30 researchers from Malmö University are involved in the work. Researchers come from fields such as Media and Communication Studies, Media Technology, Interaction Design, Design Theory, Computer Science, Comparative Literature and Art History. The work is carried out in collaboration with students and with researchers from other universities, and with people from outside academia belonging to public sector organizations, civil society organizations, the culture sector, and the creative industries.

“Living Archives”: opening the process of archiving so that it embraces contemporary practices associated with open data, social networking, mobile media, storytelling, gaming, and performance.

In addition to research, there is an outreach part of Medea. We have by now arranged more than 40 public lectures in our Medea Talks series, and more than 20 podcasts in our Medea Vox series. Speakers include Dick Hebdige, Lucy Suchman, Nick Montfort, Joanna Zylinska, Jay Bolter and Susan Schuppli.

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An Interview with Diego Cavallotti of La Camera Ottica Lab

An interview with Dr. Diego Cavallotti, Post-Doc Researcher, University of Udine, La Camera Ottica

03/2018


What is your lab called and where is it?


Our lab is called La Camera Ottica. It is part of the Department of Humanities and the Cultural Heritage – University of Udine. It is located in Gorizia (Italy), a small town on the border between Italy and Slovenia. Our director is Prof. Cosetta Saba and Lisa Parolo is the head of the “video section” while I’m currently the head of the “film section.”

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?



We are specialized in two main fields. Firstly, we focus on the preservation of small-gauge films (mainly 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm and Super8): this means that we work mostly on amateur films and home movies (more broadly, on the local/regional film heritage) and on experimental films. Secondly, throughout the years we developed specific skills regarding the preservation of analog video (from the open-reel formats to U-matic, for instance): in these cases, we deal with video-artworks, performance art, etc.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?



The lab is mainly used by our researchers in order to have a solid “material” ground to work on when we talk about film history, video-art history, or media history projects. Of course, we also use the lab for teaching purposes: we have two courses and a workshop on preservation practices that take advantage of the practice-oriented trainings that the lab can offer. Moreover, we encourage students to apply for an internship in our lab – more specifically, students from our MA classes – the International Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies (IMACS).

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?



The knowledge we produce is often channelled through essays, books, and documents in which we describe the protocols we have developed throughout the years. These protocols regard technical repairs and digitization for small-gauge films and analog videos. Moreover, we elaborated a protocol for the digitization of 35mm films through a photographic scanner (the so-called “Neri protocol”), which we have disseminated during conference presentations and essays.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?



Yes, we have a designated space which is a six-room space: the back-office, the digital archiving room (we use LTO tapes), the technical repair room, the digitization room (for small-gauge films), the digital restoration room and the video section. As you can see, every room refers to a specific task.

What sorts of support does the lab receive?

As a part of a university department, we receive support from University of Udine. That being stated, our annual budget is mainly (self-)financed through external sources (preservation/digitization projects we develop in collaboration with our partners and customers, and so on). Furthermore, the lab represents an invaluable asset when our department or research group applies for European or Italian programs: of course, that is another way in which we can receive more funding.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?



First of all, our research group has always had strong interconnections with the so-called “School of Bologna” (Nicola Mazzanti, Gian Luca Farinelli, Michele Canosa, Leonardo Quaresima, etc.), which, throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, represented a touchstone for film preservation/restoration and film philology. More specifically, we refer to Leonardo Quaresima, who funded the film and media studies research group here in Udine/Gorzia. Alongside Leonardo Quaresima, another key reference for us is Alberto Farassino, who taught “Film History” in Trieste.

Moreover, a relevant touchstone is (of course) the domain of Media Archaeology: we got in touch with it through the essays of Wanda Strauven and Thomas Elsaesser. Later on, we extended our research interests, studying the works of Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka, Erkki Huhtamo and Annie van den Oever/Andreas Fickers, and organising workshops for the “Media Archaeology” section of our annual “FilmForum” MAGIS Spring School.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?



I could refer to some restoration projects we worked on in the last years: for instance, the Vincenzo Neri Collection project (a neurological film collection of the early 20th Century) or several Italian video artworks of the Seventies (ASAC-Biennale and Palazzo dei Diamanti [Ferrara] collections, and so on). Apart from that, in my opinion, our major accomplishments regard the protocol we developed for small-gauge film (see, for instance, Gianni Caproni film collection) and for analog video restoration.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?


Our goal for the next 3-5 years is to hybridize in a deeper fashion the epistemic tools and instruments we have developed as well as those coming from media-archaeological studies and expertise. More specifically, we would like to build a media-archaeology lab using the old “analog” technologies we have recovered.

What makes your lab a lab?

First of all, I think it is the infrastructure itself: we have all the material tools and instruments a small lab should have. Secondly, it is the expertise of the people that are working in it – most of all, our technician Gianandrea Sasso, who is one of the most skilled technicians in this field. Thanks to him (and his assistant Mary Comin) we are able to collaborate with several European and Italian institutions – mainly film and video archives, other film and video labs, etc.

In regards to the students, we can offer them a practice-centred lab experience, which is, in my opinion, something unique for the Italian university community.

An Interview with Andreas Treske of Bilkent Media Archaeology Lab

02/2018


What is your lab called and where is it?



Our lab is called Bilkent Media Archeology Lab. It is located at the Fine Arts, Design and Architecture Faculty of Ihsan Doğramacı Bilkent University in Bilkent, Ankara.

The lab is one of the newest extensions of the Department of Communication and Design’s studios and production facilities called BITS (Bilkent Iletişim ve Tasarım Studuyosu or in English: Bilkent Communication and Design Studio). “BITS” was setup in 1999. Today the studio facilitates two sound stages, a Foley studio (which is under construction), a stop-motion studio, post-production facilities and a multi-camera production setup at the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra Hall.

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?



Right now the lab is collecting obsolete analogue and digital devices from all over the university, which means rescuing various video tape players and recorders, as well as older computer models and audio-visual devices from being trashed.

In the centre of the lab is a conversion or transfer setup to convert various video formats from analogue sources to digital file formats.

Most of the equipment reflects the department’s 20 years of history since it foundation in 1998, and the development of low cost media production tools.
The Bilkent Media Archeology Lab also collected and still collects various tape-based archives like Bilkent’s own PASO Student Film Festival Archive, the Bilkent Turkish Cinema Archive by Dr. Ahmet Gürata, the FADA Animation Archive, the Bilkent University Institutional History Archive, etc.

Undergraduate and graduate students volunteer in their spare time to check and register tapes of various formats from 8mm video, to Low-Band U-Matic, Beta, VHS, and Beta SP, and convert/transfer them to a series of digital formats with the goal of making them public and accessible again through servers hosted by BCC, the computer centre of Bilkent University.

Some students of the department have already started to curate screenings of Turkish student short films from the early 2000s on campus.

The MFA graduate program in Media & Design, also run by the department, uses also older computer platforms collected in the lab to review and exhibit obsolete CD-ROMs in an exhibition series on campus at the FADA gallery called “On Display”.

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An Interview with Piotr Marecki of UBU Lab, Poland

20/10/2017

What is your lab called and where is it?

UBU lab, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

1. Researching creativity in the digital age (e.g. Digital experiments, Demoscene, electronic literature, media art, creative computing, digital genres, DIY approaches to the platform).

2. Producing advanced digital works (mostly highly computational works).

3. Teaching digital cultures.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

The space is primarily meant for collaboration between researchers, artists and programmers. The exception is the creative computing summer school (10 students took part in the first edition.) The lab is also a place for selected classes, on digital genres or digital culture, for example. Lectures are organized on [a] regular basis, and one of the lab’s aims is [to create a] community of scientists, students, artists.

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

The lab primarily produces digital works that can function in a few fields of the demoscene: electronic literature, video games and media art. Our research focuses on, among other things, local phenomena in the digital media field [such as] strategies for cloning platforms in Central and Eastern Europe (especially the 8-bit computer ZX Spectrum), as well as digital genres and their specific features in Central and Eastern Europe.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

Our lab consists of five parts:

1. A retro space (with 10 workstations + retro hardware with contemporary peripheral devices: ZX Spectrum 128k Plus + Divide 2k11 + Wonder AY, ZX Spectrum 48k Plus + Divide 2k11 + Wonder AY, Timex 2048 + Divide 2k11 + Wonder AY, ZX Uno, ZX81 + ZXpand interface, ZX Evo 4Mb + Neo GeneralSound + TurboSoundFM + SD, ZX Delta, ZX Spectrum 48k + Divide 2k11 + Wonder AY, Atari 520STE + Ultrasatan, Atari 1200 XL + Side2 Compact Flash Interface, Atari 130XE + diskdrive, Atari 65 XE + SIO2SD (SD/SDHC), Atari Falcon 030 + GOTEK HXC-2001, Amiga 500 1Mb + GOTEK HXC-2001, Amiga 1200 +Blizzard 1260, 2 x Commodore C-64 + 1541 Ultimate, Amstrad CPC + GOTEK HXC-200, Apple II, Macintosh SE, Apple PowerMac)

2. A VR space (with a cave + 2 workstations, HTC Vive VR headset with VR ready PC workstation and Lenovo Phab 2 Plus augmented reality (Tango Project) smartphone.)

3. A workshop area (10 workstations)

4. A games corner (couch, consoles, coffee maker, consoles Atari 2600, ZX Spectrum Vega, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Pegasus – Nintendo NES / Famicom clone, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable (PSP), Soviet portable games Электроника (Elektronika), Sega GameGear)

5. An office (2 workstations)

What sorts of support does the lab receive?

The lab is financed by the program of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education’s “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” for the years 2016-19. Our hardware and the lab’s library [is] also supported by the programme Ars Docendi, financed by the President of the Jagiellonian University, as well as Austria-based The Patterns Lectures project.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

One of the most important approaches [we apply] is Platform Studies, [which takes] into account the role of material platforms in the digital media field. This methodology is very helpful in the area of creative works done in the lab, as well as [for] research projects that focus on studying original approaches to platform, especially cloning the original platforms and researching the demoscene or digital genres. [Our] research can be also seen in the context of the Decentering Digital Media trend present in today’s digital media.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

The lab’s most significant accomplishments are probably the following: our pioneering research on the demoscene; research on the ZX Spectrum platform and its clones using the Platform Studies approach; the selected works produced by the lab, e.g. “Platform game Mysterious Dimensions” by the demosceners Yerzmyey and Hellboj for the ZX Spectrum 128K & ZX Spectrum 48K, AGD, Assembler platforms; or the iPeiper application by Jan K. Argasiński and Piotr Marecki, created thanks to the iBeacon technology in the Java SQLite programming languages presented at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Portugal 2017.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

[We will be] producing digital works and technical reports [as well as] doing research projects with the help of collected tools. [We will also equip our] lab with [necessary] hardware (local consoles, platforms), [and build our] software archives.
[We will also initiate an] intensive development of the works already in production including [a work of] interactive fiction [called] In nihilum reverteris by Yerzmyey & Hellboj (in Assembler, c/c++ for ZX Spectrum 128K & Linux); “smog poem,” a web app by Leszek Onak in JavaScript; and an augmented reality work [called] Stilleben by Kuba Woynarowski [and] Jan K. Argasiński (in C#, Javascript, Java na PC VR & Android).

What makes your lab a lab?

People, space, [and] a lot of hardware and experiments!

An Interview with Jake Harries from Access Space, UK

18/10/2017

What is your lab called and where is it?

JH: We’re called Access Space, and we are located in the city centre of Sheffield, UK

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

JH: We have three strands to our work: arts, education & technology. Usually our work is a mix of two or all three. We also have a maker space. Our main focus is maker skills education, creative technology workshops to help artists develop new practice mediating technology into the arts, work with the wider community in Sheffield (including those at risk of exclusion such as people with autistic spectrum disorders), partnering with universities for research projects, and helping entrepreneurs develop small scale prototypes.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars, the wider community?

JH: We have a wide range of people using the space for different purposes. Hypothetically anyone can use Access Space, but it is mainly for creative people to learn new skills and develop ideas. Currently we welcome the public in on Wednesdays for Repair Days where we help them to intervene in product life cycle and give their possessions longer life (keeping them out of land fill).

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

JH: We’re not great at producing publications! Probably because we’re too busy. We have produced two books: Grow Your Own Media Lab (how to create a media lab from recycled and donated computers) and CommonSense (writing and art about the commons). We occasionally give presentations, but now our main focus is social media.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

JH: We have had the same space in the city centre for 17 years, and in 2011 we expanded it to create our maker space, Refab Space. We also now have two more small spaces on the other side of the city centre for exhibitions, meetings and offices. As far as staffing structures go, we try to be as non-hierarchical as we can.

What sorts of support does the lab receive? 

JH: Access Space is an independent UK charity. We apply for funding every year to various bodies including the Arts Council England and various small trusts and charitable foundations. We also have had success partnering with universities on research.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

JH: Open source, knowledge sharing, re-use/recycling, diverse community participation, the value of the arts in creating a more empowered society, the importance of the permeable boundaries around technology and the arts.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

JH: When we closed temporarily for a period of transformation in 2015, we had been the longest continuous internet inclusion project in the UK. We have remained inclusive for all the years we have been open.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

JH: We are currently planning to move to a larger space as audiences to our events have often been at capacity, and we want to expand our maker space to include a welding shop.

What makes your lab a lab?

JH: The creative and enquiring activities people carry out here.

An Interview with Marcel O’Gorman of Critical Media Lab

19/06/2017

What is your lab called and where is it?



MO: The lab is called Critical Media Lab. It is located in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, amidst a burgeoning tech hub with multiple tech incubators and a Google headquarters. The lab is off the UWaterloo campus. Kitchener and Waterloo are technically one urban area, but for political reasons, each city has kept its distinct name. Waterloo is traditionally a university town. Kitchener is a grittier place rooted in a history of manufacturing.

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?



MO: In the lab, we create digital projects that reflect on “the impacts of technology on society and the human condition.” That is not entirely accurate, however, since we study more than mere “impacts” (e.g., the human is always-already technical) and more than “humans.” Still, this is what we tell the public. We create projects that are somewhere between digital art and hardware hacking experiments: sensor-based environments, public video projection, small gadgetry, software, wearables. Often, we will take an off-the-shelf kit or product and hack it to make an argument. In general, we create projects that embody specific concepts from media theory and the philosophy of technology. I have called this Applied Media Theory in my published work (see Necromedia form 2015 or “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys” from 2010). I often use the term “objects-to-think-with.”

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?



MO: The lab is used for graduate seminars, research by grad students and faculty, workshops, public exhibitions, and public speaker events. Students have their own cubicle/workbench space in the lab, so they are the main occupants. We have relationships with community arts and culture groups, including a local makerspace called Kwartzlab. The lab hosts regular exhibitions, and so it is also a gallery of sorts.

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

MO: The lab produces objects that get shown in exhibitions (some we own, some are elsewhere) and discussed at academic conferences. We also publish about our work in academic journals, the press, and in social media.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?



MO: Space has always been key because I wanted to be off campus. This has caused many problems, including the problem of moving four times. The lab started in my office in 2007, then moved to a glorious building across from City Hall in Downtown Kitchener in 2008. The building was a bank for several years, and before that it was the Public Utilities Commission building, which first brought electricity to the city. Unfortunately, rent was too high for our Faculty of Arts to manage. In 2009, we moved into a space at the local museum of ideas called THEMUSEUM, but that only lasted for one year due to security issues that limited our access to the space. In 2010 I signed a lease with the City of Kitchener for an unused retail space with a highly visible storefront on the main street. We were there for three years until the building was condemned. I decided to stop signing shady lease agreements, and worked with the university to find a more sustainable location. We ended up at what the city calls the Creative Hub, which is in an old mail sorting facility. We share space with several start-ups and some arts groups.

The problem with moving so many times is that each move destabilizes the culture that was developed in a space. It is difficult to get things to “stick” when you keep shaking the petri dish.
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An Interview with Caroline Bassett and Sally-Jane Norman at the Sussex Humanities Lab

Interview by Niki Tulk

11/2017

“We plan to maintain our breadth across performance/music media arts, history, everyday life and mediated life, critical theory—but/and we also want to push our critical edge. So much work in DH hasn’t been critical in orientation, and we do many of us, in different ways, come out of that tradition. So we’re intending to keep asking questions about gender, power and digital technology, automated epistemologies—and their supposedly ‘neutrality’, and to integrate those into our more material work more deeply.” – Caroline Bassett and Sally-Jane Norman on the future goals of the Sussex Humanities Lab, UK

NT: What is your lab called and where is it?

We are the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL), based at the University of Sussex, in the Downs outside the City of Brighton, UK. We are a research centre/programme and we span a series of Schools of Study—with a strong base in media and film (School of Media, Film and Music), and in HAHP (History, Art History and Philosophy) also in Education schools and in informatics and engineering (E&I) (computer scientists). ‘We’ are (i) the programme (SHL), (ii) the named and supported members of the team—academics at all levels, technical support people, project manager, admin (iii) we have a physical ‘lab’ space – we call this the ‘Digital Humanities Lab’, It is at the heart of our work, although its not always where we do things…

NT: What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

We are initially funded for four years—so this means our tempo needs to be pretty rapid. We are tasked with providing enough evidence of some form of sustainability at the end of that time, to become a permanent research centre within the University—in some shape or other. We don’t necessarily think we should simply seek to ‘do the same again’, at the end of our project time. We have a bunch of official KPIs (performance indicators) and the plan we bid for the funds with also sets out a series of targets (for engagement, impact—look up the UK meaning of that term…, and for grant capture). Those are rather official though. I would expand all that to say that we want to:
*Generate new forms of thinking and new forms of research—both in the humanities in general (where digital transformation produces new possibilities and opens new perspectives) and in relation to the computational as the subject of inquiry. That’s the big goal really. To do that we need to:
Intervene into the fields that together constitute digital humanities (lower case), by which we mean both traditional DH areas and also cultural, media, digital media, code studies, areas which have been exploring digital transformation in different ways for an equally long time. We think DH can become broader, more diverse, more multi-mediated—and that it needs to become more critical. We recognize the tension between critical theories of DH that can just produce abstraction, and the need to engage materially with new possibilities and new methodologies arising through big data, various forms of automation, and other new computational technologies. We think it can be productive—and that it’s fine if it sometimes produce antagonism. Actually in our lab we argue all the time. We are superb at arguing … including about our name: we deliberately adopted the “Sussex Humanities Lab”—rather than “Digital Humanities Lab”—name, precisely to demarcate ourselves from technical servicing- oriented DH bodies that have spread over the past couple of decades. The frequent mobilisation of big digital infrastructure funds as a rationale for developing (otherwise poorly supported) humanities research has resulted in a lot of projects where the (funded) tail wags the (confused) dog. We did not want to be identifiable with these countless, very similar organisations that have jumped onto the DH/ “cyberinfrastructure” bandwagon (e-science in the UK), simply to
develop new kinds of insufficiently conceptualised and critiqued demonstrations of technical prowess and gimmicky computational affordances doomed to swift obsolescence. We want the dog to wag its own tail – happily and excitedly, and in ways that can energise and contagiously enthuse others.
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An Interview with Professor Meredith Martin of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Interview by Melissa McDoniel

17/11/2015

“…while the global digital humanities community is constantly defining and redefining itself, we embrace an inclusive understanding that respects and investigates the myriad of ways that digital methods and technology are opening an avenue to research, and the human experience.” – Meredith Martin, CDH Princeton

Melissa McDoniel: Can you say a little bit about your role in Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, and how you came to be involved with DH and also the Center?

Meredith Martin: This is the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton’s second year with a physical location. We started last year officially, but before that, we were an initiative that I started with a number of faculty colleagues as well as colleagues from the University Library and from our Office of Information Technology. We began as a discussion group, bringing together faculty from across all divisions of campus — from computer science, from sociology, from all of the humanities departments. These discussions began in September of 2011. Over the course of the 2011-2012 school-year, we developed four focus groups after holding a a day-long meeting in January 2012. We decided collectively that we wanted to do some research on what Princeton could offer and was already offering, since we are so resource-rich. We wanted to investigate whether we needed to have a Center at all. The preliminary meetings in the fall of 2011 were primarily to talk about what other peer institutions had and what kind of possibilities there were to support digital work at Princeton. We talked about collaborative and interdisciplinary possibilities across campus. Then we thought about how we might develop a kind of white paper that we aimed to complete by the end of the spring term of 2012. We also started thinking about a mission statement for the initiative itself at that January meeting.

After our January meeting, we broke into those four focus groups that met separately over the course of the spring 2012. These were defined by the group as “teaching and research,” “infrastructure,” “funding,” and “programming.” Programming meant basically inviting people to campus to give talks, but also offering workshops Princeton wasn’t already offering. Infrastructure was tasked with thinking about what Research Computing, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, the Library, etc., was already doing. At the end of that spring the four focus groups turned in a separate section of a vision statement to a steering committee that we had assembled. That vision statement was then put together by the steering committee over the course of the summer of 2012.
With the advice of what we called an “executive committee” including the Chief Information Officer, the Deputy Dean of the Faculty, the Executive Director of the Humanities Council, and the University Librarian we turned the vision statement into a document asking for a Center. This was their strong advice.
Over the course of the fall 2012 we revised the document and submitted it, and then I worked closely with the Provost over the course of that year, approved officially sometime in early 2013. In that approval process we were approved to hire an Associate Director, which is the first thing that we wanted so that it wasn’t completely grassroots, faculty run with all of us doing this volunteer work that was not recognized service.

Basically 2012/2013 was revising the proposal, and 2013/2014 was the year of the search for the Associate Director, and that was also the year that I was officially named the Faculty Director of the “Center”; however we didn’t yet have a physical Center. I spent most of that year (13/14) fundraising, and I raised half of the total operating budget with support from 25 different departments and divisions as a three-year commitment with a substantial amount of that support coming from Princeton’s Humanities Council. I took this broad-based campus support to the Provost’s Office and the new Provost (the former Provost had been named President) were very supportive when they saw the work we had done. The University Library took the Center for DH as an administrative home at the University and funded the search for the Associate Director, as well as helped us to become a fully-fledged academic unit (the first in the University Library). Being an academic unit rather than an administrative unit at Princeton means that we can have faculty teach, support research grants for graduate students and stuff like that. Jean Bauer was hired in the academic year in July of 2014, and 2014/2015 was her first full year, and now 2015/2016 is her second year.

We now have a temporary (they call it “swing”) space that we were given at the beginning of last year, Fall 2014. It’s in the former psychology department. Some of our offices are converted observation rooms that are more like small closets with one-way glass. We put some particleboard up so that they don’t look so horrible, but we have equipment, we have space, we have our stuff there. We’re in our official third year as a Center, but we didn’t have any physical space except the last two years so we really think of this as our second official year.
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