LABORATORY SERIES. No.12. James Watt’s attic workshop. Locked and untouched after his death in 1819, the workshop was described by biographer JP Muirhead as an industrial shrine to the Steam Engineer, “where no profane hand had been allowed to violate the sanctities of the magical retreat.” Moved piece by piece from his home in Heathfield, […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.11. Memo from the Assistant Secretary of Health to the Director of the Center of Disease Control ordering the termination of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 1972. Conducted by the US Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute starting in 1932, the study tracked untreated syphilis in 600 African American males. Without informed consent and […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.10. Iron Lung Ward at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center during the 1952 Polio epidemic. The Iron Lung was developed as a temporary respiratory aid for polio patients unable to breathe on their own. Subjects, primarily young children, were confined to the airtight chamber from the neck down. Acting as an artificial lung, […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.09. VLF and Stealth Object Tripods in Mono Lake, CA, 2012-13. Devices conceived as part of a portable media-rig for Venue, a sixteen-month expedition that surveyed and recorded overlooked sites across North America. Inspired by images of early trekking missions, the toolbox re-imagined a standard set of topographic tripods from a glow-in-the-dark Durer […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.08. Artist Rod Dickinson’s The Milgram Re-enactment, in collaboration with Graeme Edler and Steve Ruston, 2002. The three and a half hour live performance re-staged Stanley Milgram’s Yale University experiment, “Obedience to Authority,” using an exact replica of Milgram’s laboratory, including original electro shock equipment from the 1960s. A video accompanied the piece, […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.07. Installation view of Roxy Paine’s Control Room at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St, 2013. Steel, wood, automotive paint, glass, 12′ 5″ x 18′ 2 3/8″ x 13′ 7.” Part power plant, part space-race agency, part recording studio, Control Room’s dashboard is an index of different operating and monitoring devices. It is timeless, […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.06. The Scatalog by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & James King, with the University of Cambridge iGEM Team, 2009. Imagine that in 2039, you can go to the supermarket and buy a simple probiotic yoghurt for cheap, personalized disease monitoring. The yoghurt drink contains E. chromi bacteria, which establish a colony in your gut. They monitor […]

LABORATORY SERIES. No.05. Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, China. Researchers train Giant Pandas to be released into the wild by mimicking the conditions of their natural habitat. Photo Courtesy of Ami Vitale.

LABORATORY SERIES. No.04. Google Creative Lab Five Application. Only the best and brightest need apply. The Creative Lab concept is simple: put a bunch of creative professionals together and separate them from the daily trappings of corporate clutter. Photo: Google Creative Lab Five.