The history of Olympic sport is written in records. Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence. Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against…
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The classroom is conventionally understood as a space of contemplative retreat where conversation and intellectual labor occur in a world apart: the world of learning. What if, rather than being cut off from public view, the world of the classroom, particularly those privileged classrooms that lie at the heart of elite universities, opened up on the main square? Not at every moment or during every lecture, discussion, and debate, but at special moments of saliency…
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I don’t do much self-chronicling but, between 1980 and 1983, I was involved in an intellectual adventure that I’d like to believe left some enduring traces in the field of cultural studies: the launch of a scrappy, serious, militant publication entitled Tabloid: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life. Opposing both the acritical, celebratory tone of studies of mass cultural phenomena then emerging from within the field of American Studies (and, in particular, from…
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After more than a decade of operation from our physical base at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and institutional base within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, metaLAB (at) Harvard has opened a new metaLAB in Berlin in partnership with the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin. This exciting new venture, metaLAB (at) F.U. Berlin, was launched in early 2022 and reflects a circumstance that was present from the outset: that…
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On February 5th, 2021, I presented the lead lecture for this year’s in trasmissioni lecture series at AGO Modena Fabbriche Culturali, which was recorded. As the AGO site described the lecture: “L’intervento di Jeffrey Schnapp sarà dedicato al tema del codex, per ricostruire le tappe dell’evoluzione del libro dalla pagina allo schermo (e viceversa), segnalando i cambiamenti tecnologici, le pratiche estetiche e i mutamenti nella comunicazione della ricerca connessi all’avvento del “libro elettrico”. Una storia…
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Two years back, I was approached by the Germanist Wolfgang Straub and the photographer Peter Köllerer who were working on a book on the 33 Fascist-era ossuaries and sacraria that were erected by Mussolini’s regime along the front between Austria and Italy to house the remains of Italian World War I soldiers. Elegantly produced, the book came out in late 2020 with the Viennese publishing house Sonderzahl and contains over one-hundred splendid color photographs of…
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A couple of years have passed since the last book in the metaLABprojects series came out with Harvard University Press: Tara MacPherson’s award winning Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (2018). Since that time, the series migrated to MIT Press and I am pleased to announce the publication of the first volume in the relaunched series: Idea Colliders – The Future of Science Museums by the founding director of BIOTOPIA Naturkundemuseum Bayern and…
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I get interviewed quite a bit as well as doing my fair share of interviewing. Beyond the realm of immediate practice, I have long harbored an interest in dialogue (dialectic) as a mode of philosophical inquiry and puzzled over its relative rarity within the contemporary academy. Perhaps it appears too “unprofessional,” too tainted by the literary and the ludic, the matter of fact and the improvisational, to be taken seriously as a form of scholarship.…
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L’archivio animato – Lavori in corso // Work in Progress. An Animated Archive opened at the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna, Italy on November 23, 2019 and will run until May 17, 2020. I developed the concept for this somewhat anomalous exhibition and served as a consultant during the curatorial process; my long-time collaborator, Daniele Ledda (the founder of xycomm, Milan), did the design work. Rather than following conventional museological models, the exhibition…
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The Thing Tank is an exhibition of design fictions currently on display on the ground floor of Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It was developed within the setting of a spring 2019 seminar/studio that I taught structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th century Italian artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertainment. Though…
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Redundancy has a bad name. Already in antiquity redundantia implied excess: literally, the superabundance of a resource (such as water); figuratively, an overflowing stream of words as in the Ciceronian “illa pro Roscio juvenilis redundantia” (Or. 30: 108). In the era of industry and post-industry, the word retains a ring of inefficiency. If something is redundant, by definition, it is something to be trimmed, something that is misaligned with history’s headlong rush into the future.…
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Isaac Asimov’s 1950 classic I, Robot is remembered for many things, but especially for its formulation of the “Three Laws of Robotics” (sometimes referred to as “Asimov’s Laws”). They run as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect…
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For several decades philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and education theorists have contested once prevalent accounts of human intelligence as a single, unified or monolithic thing, arguing instead for plural models that accommodate some degree of multiplicity in thinking/learning/knowing modes. The result has been controversy, particularly between advocates (like Howard Gardner) of expanded definitions of intelligence and those who propose instead more restrictive, measurable definitions that push various skill sets outside the bounds of “intelligence” proper.…
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A celebration of the Piaggio Group’s 130 years of history was held on March 23rd in Milan’s Teatro Vetra with an emphasis on its present and future plans. Speakers included Roberto Colaninno, president and CEO of the IMMSI holding company, to which the Piaggio Group belongs, and Stefano Belisari (“Elio” of the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese). The centerpiece of the celebration was the limited edition volume FuturPiaggio (though the tantalizing presence of…
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On the fiftieth anniversary of R. Buckminster Fuller’s appointment as architect of U.S. Pavilion at Expo ’67 Montreal World’s Fair, I am releasing the bulk of a hitherto unpublished hourlong interview that was carried out with the late dancer-choreographer, Merce Cunningham, in his New York City dance studio, on November 22, 2004. The context for the filming of the interview was a research and exhibition project undertaken at the Stanford Humanities Lab in close collaboration…
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