Skip to Content

Tag: interactive media


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
 
Read more

- January 15, 2022

In the wake of this summer’s Beautiful Data workshop, held at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, the metaLAB core team gathered together for a weekend retreat in Woodstock, Vermont. The occasion was intended as an opportunity to reflect on our first four years of work together and to craft a revised mission statement that better reflects our sense of: a) how we fit into the larger universe of experimental practice
 
Read more

- December 31, 2015

The Boston showing of metaLAB’s documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design took place in early February of this year, but we are now preparing for the film’s European premiere in Paris. The presentation will take place at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, September 30, in the Petit Auditorium, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Quai François Mauriac, within the setting of the conference Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure du numérique?. The
 
Read more

- September 16, 2015

After several iterations of the Library Test Kitchen design studio (including a detour to SXSW), the publication of The Library Beyond the Book (whose final chapter assumes the form of a screenplay), and a spring 2014 Humanities Studio dedicated to analyzing, mapping, documenting, and interpreting the Harvard Depository, metaLAB is pleased to announce the Boston premiere of its documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE on February 6 at 3:30 pm in Piper Auditorium at Harvard’s Graduate School
 
Read more

- January 6, 2015

Every now and then metaLAB holds a public event to showcase some work in progress, hack a device or two, resuscitate a multimedia piece or two from the vaults, and to start up some fresh conversations. In the past, such openLAB events have featured social games that make creative use of thermal receipt printers, Kinect-based gestural systems for remixing tracks on vintage vinyl recordings, an Arduino-armed book as an interface for navigating libraries. What’s an
 
Read more

- April 30, 2014

This coming summer, metaLAB will be hosting a two-week workshop for art historians, scholars of visual culture, and museum professionals at all career stages on the topic of Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the workshop will introduce participants to the concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital
 
Read more

- January 17, 2014

Studio-based teaching has long represented the foundation stone of training in arts, design, and engineering fields, but far less so in the core humanities disciplines: this for an array of reasons that have privileged the theoretical and mental over the applied and “hands on.” There are some good reasons for this traditional bias but there is also a good deal of artifice, particularly so given the emergence of digitally inflected project-based forms of arts and
 
Read more

- November 25, 2013

Today my colleagues Matthew Battles, Pablo Barria and I presented the Curarium project to this year’s class of Berkman Center fellows, as well as a lively group of Berkman friends and Berkmaniacs. Curarium is a platform designed to leverage the power of the crowd in order to annotate, curate, and augment works within and beyond their respective collections, with the aim of constructing sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as
 
Read more

- September 24, 2013

Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in several projects that explore the limits of the World Wide Web as a support for live multi-sited performances as well as the potential for network latencies to become expressive features of such real-time performances. Instead of being understood simply as the enemy to be overcome in order to achieve a “live-like effect,” network latencies become a necessary, even desirable feature to be interpreted
 
Read more

- June 8, 2013

In order to test the beta release of the new simplified Zeega editor, I thought it might be interesting to attempt a remix of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 experiment Un Coup de dés. Mallarmé’s pioneering poem waited a decade and half before achieving publication. Despite its author’s meticulous attention to page layout, his expressive balancing of “empty” spaces with “full” word strings, and the delicate drift of a syntax no less suggestive than elusive, the work
 
Read more

- May 28, 2013
All rights reserved
© 2013 Jeffrey Schnapp