“Performance” is the second of three exhibitions developed to accompany the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympic games in one of the world’s most unique exhibition spaces: the Trento Tunnels (Le Gallerie di Piedicastello). It was preceded by “Records” (Jan. -Dec. 2024) and will be followed by “Competitions” (Jan.-Nov. 2026). All three are supported by the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino (FMST); the second was organized in collaboration with the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Working with a…
 
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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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In today’s La Lettura supplement to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera I published a brief intervention, alongside Francesco Casetti and Christine Macel, on the subject of how art objects are (or aren’t) framed and flanked by wall labels. The English version of the text reads as follows: Over the course of recent decades there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in the forms of life that are compacted into physical objects: their affordances,…
 
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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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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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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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