Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka: The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022)

“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.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, March 2022
ISBN 9781517902179, 1517902177
x+333 pages

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Janneke Adema: Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (2021)

“Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema’s proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn’t cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.”

Publisher MIT Press, August 2021
Leonardo series
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262046022, 0262046024
xiii+335 pages

Interview with author: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Dariah Open, 2021).

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Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard (2020)

“Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard proposes a politics of transparent production in the arts, whereby heated negotiations and mundane budgets are presented alongside documentation of finished gallery installations.

Readers follow the behind-the-scenes work that is required to produce interdisciplinary art projects, from a commission at MoMA to a self-organized, international barter network with over 20,000 participants. With contextual analysis of the political economy of the arts, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID pandemic of 2020, this book suggests that artists can bring studio-based sculptural techniques to an approach to art-making that emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue.”

Foreword by Patricia C. Phillips; introduction by Caroline Woolard; texts by D. Graham Burnett, Alison Burstein, Stamatina Gregory, Larissa Harris, Leigh Claire La Berge, Stephanie Owens, Cybele Maylone, Steven Matijcio, Sheetal Prajapati, Caitlin Rubin, Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, and Caroline Woolard; interviews by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve and Tina Rivers Ryan.

Publisher Onomatopee, Eindhoven, November 2020
Creative Commons BY-SA License
ISBN 9789493148345, 9493148343
568 pages

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