LABORATORY SERIES. No.22. DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office (BTO).  Launched in April 1, 2014, the BTO is charged with exploring the intersection of biology, engineering and computer science to harness natural systems for national security. “Biology is nature’s ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.21. Cross Examination (2005, 5:40 min) Josh Weinstein interviews strangers on the street by asking them what they think of him. Video Courtesy of Josh Weinstein.

LABORATORY SERIES. No.20. Valve Corporation Handbook for New Employees, 2012. “Why does your desk have wheels? Think of those wheels as a symbolic reminder that you should always be considering where you could move yourself to be more valuable. But also think of those as literal wheels, because that’s what they are, and you’ll be […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.19. Aerial image of the XB-70 Valkyrie crash site 12 miles north of Barstow, CA. Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert has been the test site and crash site for military aircrafts since the 1940s.Though the military recovers as much from the wreckage as possible, the landscape still bears evidence of […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.18. Abandoned greenhouse on the Biosphere 2 campus in Tuscon AZ, 2008. Biosphere 2 researchers sampled vast swaths of landscapes from Venezuela, French Guyana, Baja California, the Everglades, and the Yucatan, and sealed them inside the three acre enclosure along with eight humans from 1991-2. Photo Courtesy of Janette Kim.

LABORATORY SERIES. No.17. Lunchbox Laboratory by Futurefarmers + the Biological Sciences Team, National Renewable Energy Lab. Algae is considered a viable form renewable energy with the potential to produce biodiesel. However, the very abundance of it makes it tedious to determine which strains are most productive. Lunchbox Laboratory is a prototype for a research tool […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.16. Model Replica of Stanley Kubrick’s War Room from the Stanley Kubrick Retrospective at LACMA, 2012-13. Fortified within a concrete bunker, the War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” imagined cold war political strategy as a giant poker table around which world leaders […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.15. Left: Diagram of the Stanley Milgram Experiment. Conducted at Yale University in 1961, the experiment examined the relationship between obedience and authority. The test involved two actors, one test subject and an electroshock generator: the experimenter (the figure of authority), the teacher (the test subject) and the learner (the accomplice). In this […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.14. Stanford Prison Experiment application for approval of non-medical research involving human subjects, 1971. In an attempt to study the psychological effects of institutionalized power in the prison system, the experiment randomly assigned twenty-four male students (all of which were deemed the “most” healthy and stable) roles as prisoners and guards. Beginning with […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.13. Sissel Tolaas’ scent archive and laboratory, SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin. Funded by International Flavors and Fragrances, Inc., the lab contains a library of over 7000 smells and 2500 scent molecules. In an attempt to categorically rewrite the vocabulary of olfaction, Tolaas has developed a new “nose-language” called NASALO. Photo Courtesy of Frank Paul […]