Research
metaLAB research brings an array of perspectives and methods to bear on substantial domains of inquiry into the role and effect of technology in the arts and humanities. By combining traditional modes of practice—archival research, critical writing, and curatorial exposition—with such emergent methods as physical computing, data visualization, and participatory mapping and media, metaLAB research infuses scholarship with the playful, enterprising spirit of hacking, making, and artistic inquiry.
research
With networked media and information technologies proliferating in built spaces, the world of objects, and the natural environment, the texture of embodied reality seems to shift and change.What does it mean when goods, buildings, landscapes, and environments begin talking to us—and to one another? How does the irruption of data streams from everyday objects in the world offer new political economies, new aesthetics, and new historiographies? Do networks grant us more control over our environment, or do they begin to give parts of the environment a new kind of autonomy and participatory character in human affairs? Do networks offer solutions to the challenges of environmental, political, and economic decline and dissolution, or do they further complicate our possibilities for knowing the world and acting in it? Do sensors, barcodes, RFID, and other data sources promise a world of ubiquitous surveillance and compromised privacy, or can their data be hacked into open discourses for arts, the environment, and public life? More >
Our curatorial innovation initiative encompasses speculative design and curatorial projects lead by metaLAB affiliates; a theoretical investigative track into the changing nature of curation in the context of the open web; and an annual program that provides students with the opportunity to become engaged in collections-based research, curation and digital design. More >
Recently approved is the launching of a series entitled METALAB PROJECTS with Harvard University Press. The word “project” is being employed here in two complementary manners: to designate the documentation of existing high-impact research projects and in the sense of projecting outward and beyond. Whether a “remix” or an agenda-setting “projection” or a combination of both, each volume in the series would assume the form an extended essay that deepens and documents a given domain of practice and experimentation. Five books have been commissioned in for the series launch in 2013 as part of Harvard University Press’s 100 year anniversary. Other volumes are in preparation. More >
innovative approaches to the study, preservation, processing, and dissemination of archival corpora; linking intramural and extramural repositories across media; participatory/expanded models of curation and archival processing; zoomable map-based GUI designs; placing curated archival materials in dialogue with physical space by means of mobile devices
installation designs that conjoin media and physical objects; interaction design for exhibitions; digital extensions of physical exhibitions; the animation of built environments
media innovation
the creation of multilinear/multimedia documentaries built on databases that are performed by reader/viewers and navigated through a series of guided paths; the invention of new documentary production/distribution platforms and parametric authoring tools; the incubation of new interactive and collaborative documentary projects for broadcast and online contexts, with a particular emphasis on sonic exploration and ethnographic approaches; experimentation with new forms of citizen and community engagement through participatory channels
the development of 3d user interfaces and data visualizations as tools for collaborative humanities research, teaching and scholarship; visualizing interconnections between different categories of media objects by means of zoomable, user-controlled viewing angles; 3d object-centered interface and database development
the use and development of data mining and data visualization tools for purposes of cultural-historical research; the visualization of literary, musical and other cultural corpora; the use of optical character recognition techniques in the field of musicology
geospatial iterations of arts and humanities scholarship; multilayered cartographies; geospatial visualization of collections; imaginary or non-representational mapping of data repositories and cultural corpora; the distributed curation of physical landscapes
