Darren Wershler is Concordia University Research Chair in media and contemporary literature, cofounder of the Media History Research Centre, and Director of the Residual Media Depot in the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal. Wershler’s other books include Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg; The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting; and FREE as in Speech and Beer: Open Source, Peer-to-Peer, and the Economics of the Online Revolution.

Lori Emerson is associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is founding director of the Media Archaeology Lab and author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minnesota, 2014).

Jussi Parikka is professor of technological culture and aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and founding codirector of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research unit. He is visiting professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, as research leader for the project Operational Images. He is author of A Geology of Media; Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology; and The Anthrobscene; coauthor of Remain; and editor of Digital Memory and the Archive, all from Minnesota.

Contents

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