by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2022, 328 PP.
PAPERBACK, $30.00
ISBN: 978-1-517-90218-6
In The Lab Book, authors Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka have developed a deeply researched and critically complex conversation that combines a historical overview of lab thinking with a sustained argument for the value of the hybrid media lab within the contemporary university. They propose a heuristic, the extended lab model, to orient the multiple analytical categories that they have identified with respect to labs and lab culture, including the ways in which labs can (or might endeavor to) describe themselves. These include lab space (working from Henri Lefebvre and others), apparatus (in the sense of the objects and activities that rightly belong in a lab), infrastructure (or what supports the development of labs), people (including diverse communities), the imaginary (centered on lab rhetoric and discourse), and techniques (the abstract as well as material aspects that structure the knowledge-production activities of labs).
The insistence on the situated and spatial nature of lab practice is particularly worth-while, presenting an invitation as well as a map to future methodological and instructional innovation. The book is also accompanied by a useful companion site on the Manifold platform, which includes an evolving crowd-sourced glossary of terms, images, interviews, and short essays that help to contextualize the book. The Lab Book therefore has value both as a pedagogy handbook for those who run or wish to develop their own media labs and as a historical guide and account of lab culture across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The Lab Book situates hybrid media labs against more “orthodox” science laboratories, beginning with a case study of the obscure Middlebury College French-Language Lab in Vermont in the 1920s. The book goes on to examine the emergence and significance of the lab to academic research, with a deep focus on media labs in the humanities in the context of the United States, UK, Australia, Germany, and Canada. (The authors note that this is not a representative sample but rather a reflection of their particular—and considerable—expertise.)
The discussion is not just about lab histories or the oddities that are media labs, many of which, as the authors describe, could easily be discounted from being labs at all. Much of the book is dedicated to carefully unpacking the discourses and imaginaries of labs in higher education and research contexts, using the work of Bruno Latour, Henri Lefebvre, and others to explore the ways in which certain visions of lab life have become dominant, to the exclusion of alternative lab imaginaries. The examples include the expected (Menlo Park, MIT Media Lab) and the less well-recognized though no less carefully treated (e.g., Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone’s experimental art and community ACT Lab, founded at UT Austin in 1993). [End Page 107]
The authors recognize the lab as a kind of stand-in or bellwether for many changes that have taken place in research institutions—for good and for ill. Alongside an exceptionally rich historical account, the authors are robustly critical of “innovation lab” rhetoric and the perceived dominion over labs and lab culture by the hard sciences. At the same time, they are pragmatic about the state of the modern university, including both the role of acute funding concerns and the ongoing devaluation of technical knowledge production generated in arts and humanities disciplines. They argue that media studies, media archaeology, and adjacent disciplines need to claim the lab imaginary for themselves if they are to develop more active and cutting-edge research practices. Hybrid media labs are unlike scientific laboratories, the authors argue. They are contextualized within a wider fight for the legitimacy of disciplines that focus on media, history, culture, creativity, and qualitative analysis. The authors argue that hybrid labs—as ad hoc experimental spaces for hands-on research practice and technical engagement—can serve to build community against needless conflicts over the legitimacy of knowledge domains, serving social and epistemic aims that are often overlooked in more traditional science labs.
Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka perhaps undersell the criticality of what they are doing until the final two chapters, however. For example, though they critique the hype of the MIT Media Lab, it is one of the central cases that is discussed throughout the book. Lesser-known and more critical lab spaces are also included (like Hyphen-Labs’ interaction studio and their NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism project), but these examples do not receive the same emphasis as more well-known cases. Despite this, there is a sustained (if sometimes suppressed) politics here, where the hybrid lab is presented as both model and method for an alternative innovation culture. The authors ask us to support feminist or antiracist labs, transform teaching and experimentation in lab spaces in the humanities, and repurpose (rather than perpetually reinvent) the existing dynamics of lab life to imagine futures differently. I’m persuaded by the speculative argument that troubles what a lab is, does, and might do (what the authors describe as the lab beyond laboratory walls) without needing to invest in the cynical practice of inventing the future for profit (attributed to the MIT Media Lab and others).
The Lab Book is no small undertaking, and it is possible for such a work to be overwhelmed by detail. For someone familiar with media studies, cultural theory, and communication studies, there is an impressive array of familiar concepts and works—I found myself remembering texts that I hadn’t read in years and that I will now happily revisit. The focus makes a lot of sense, since many of the more esoteric labs are media labs, and for a reader like myself the interdisciplinary breadth of the field is an unexpected treasure trove of media and cultural theory that has been underutilized in recent scholarship. However, at times the richness of the underlying material might presume too much of the reader, and with such diverse historical context there are things that might be considered general knowledge in media studies that are mentioned and then moved past without explanation for a more general academic audience. Of course, this is also a sign that the reader is really learning something, and despite the vastness of this project, authors Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka masterfully reveal the interdisciplinary intricacies underlying the situated practices (borrowing from Donna Haraway) of the extended laboratory model. The Lab Book very successfully makes a complex and compelling case for a new understanding and appreciation of labs, as well as their value in media studies and beyond. [End Page 108]
—Emma Fraser, University of California, Berkeley