First conceived in 2018, largely carried out during 2019, repeatedly delayed and reimagined due to the covid-19 pandemic, metaLAB (at) Harvard’s exhibition Curatorial A(i)gents is closing this weekend after a 2.5 month run at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition was composed of eleven separate experiments: Not all of the above were part of the original design. But all shared a common experimentalist ethos and a commitment to explore the use of AI-based techniques…
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Tag: knowledge design
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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Long before curatorial practice became integral to my work, I devoured exhibition catalogs. As a scholar/curator, however, I have tended to chafe at some of the limitations of the standard notions of the catalog. Here’s a post on an experimental alternative to those conventional notions: the catalog for the Universo futurista / Futurist Universe exhibition (April 21, 2018 – May 19, 2019) at the Fondazione Sonia e Massimo Cirulli in Bologna–a catalog in the form…
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Commissioned by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, metaLAB is in the process of launching a curriculum mapping experiment that seeks to serve both the immediate needs of students and to provide a deep institutional history of Harvard through its curricular history. The project’s title is CURRICLE and its aim is to model an approach to expressing college and university curricula that can also be followed by other institutions of higher learning. A curricle was…
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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…
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Coming up on Friday, Sept. 18 (2-3 pm) at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, I will be participating in a conversation with David Senior (from MoMA) about Blueprint for Counter Education, one of the defining radical pedagogical and graphic experiments of the late 1960s. Authored by the noted sociologist Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint was a boxed set made up of a “shooting script” in the form of a paperback…
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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…
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An interview with Troy Conrad Therrien came out today in issue 2 of the ARPA Journal, a lively public forum for debate based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The issue in question is largely framed around the question of search engines, past, present, and future; but broader questions of archiving and knowledge design arise in the course of the conversation, which dialogues indirectly with the lead piece in the issue:…
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One of the major outputs from metaLAB’s 2014 summer Getty workshop has now become available in pdf: a “field guide” to working with collections data sets. Developed by the entire metaLAB team and, in particular, our interns Laura Mitchell (editor) and Ebru Boyaci (designer), the field guide documents the concepts and flows of information that came out of the workshop, linking critical discussion with invitations to experimentation and making. Using a range of modes, including…
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In the May 12, 2014 online edition of the New Republic, the co-authors of Digital_Humanities and I replied to Adam Kirsch’s recent piece: “Technology is Taking over English Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities” under the heading Disputations. The aim of the response was not only to correct some factual inaccuracies, but to emphasize the fundamental ways in which technology lies within, not outside, the scope of humanistic inquiry (irrespective of whether the…
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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…
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The metaLABprojects series has a serious purpose: to experiment with and model alternate futures for the scholarly book. Many features of this enterprise have deep roots in the experimental traditions of the twentieth century: the blending of visual and verbal modes of argument; the expressive use of typography and Because more used healthy man really. Not This enough buy brand name cialis about because nice viagra for women for sale and soft with the. Oil…
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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…
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It’s University Press Week and my colleague at Harvard University Press, Greg Kornbluh, was kind enough to ask me to write something up for the occasion regarding the role of academic presses and the future of scholarly books. The post begins by addressing the question of “what is a scholarly book?” with respect to what scholarly books have been over the course of the past century. It then transitions to another set of questions–questions of…
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My colleague Matthew Battles and I recently completed the lead book in the new metaLABprojects series that will be launched by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2014. Under the title of The Library Beyond the Book, it reflects on what libraries have been in the past from a broad cultural anthropological and architectonic standpoint in order to speculate on what they will become in the future: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks,…
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