Curating Sonic Laboratories

http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.4

Laura Plana Gracia UAL – LCC - CRiSAP London [email protected]

Bruno Latour’s essay Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World (1983), describes the laboratory as the place in science and technology where innovation happens. From the depth of the lab, the society is so directly modified. This essay examines the power of the laboratory to transform society, or of rebuilding the system in which it is embedded. Following such reasoning, this essay will make a case for how transformations in culture, capital and society that occurred during the 1990s are part of the history from which to explain the emergence of laboratory spaces such as hackerspaces, media labs and the lessfavoured sonic laboratories. Nevertheless, there are qualitative as well as quantitative differences between such places. Since their appearance, sonic laboratories have been aligned, for example, with critical and alternative practices, thus indicating a separation from the neoliberal economies of private sector galleries and established cultural institutions in the public sector (Jaron Rowan, 2015).

Reacting against these, the sonic laboratory is often characterised by using open source and digital media and focuses on radically transforming production denouncing how capitalistic market speculates with the value of art objects. The sonic lab offers a

confrontation with the methods of capitalistic technologies, becoming its production more affordable and also, provides models of collaborative practices which encourage experimentation and creativity in the curation of sound arts. The sonic lab offers practices of instrument making that make production more personal but located in a community. Such labs can address new institutional opportunities in humanities to engage with practice-based knowledge creation and extend their mission to include tools, techniques and a new curatorial scope.

Hackerspace, media lab, science, technology, sound art, sonic laboratories.

1. INTRODUCTION: LABORATORIES IN THE sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina studied a ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY NETWORK. biochemistry laboratory in Berkeley and looked into the informal, practical reasoning of researchers in a The most common and well-known definition of work situation. According to Andrew Pickering “laboratory” is related to science and also, through (1992), LS analysed science as both “practice and laboratory studies (LS), which emerge as a mix of culture”, as opposed to the study of scientific science and sociology. LS study the lab but from a theories and ideas. Nonetheless, a laboratory is sociological point of view. LS analyse the context of also a place of scientific production but the laboratory’s production and how it affects and is insufficiently explored. The laboratory is a sort of related to society. LS reached a turning point with standard organisation of “knowledge society” with the works of Latour, Lynch and Knorr Cetina. the ability to act on the world of objects. Its Latour and Woolgar who researched in a dynamism arises from its capacity to reconfigure biochemistry laboratory-made critical contributions entities from the natural to the social world. to the network of laboratory studies. Following, Dominique Vink (2007) defines the Latour and Woolgar were based at the Salk laboratory as a reconfiguration space and so Institute in southern California, while Knorr Cetina coincides with Latour, who remarks the worked at the University of Berkeley. Latour, who transformative capabilities of the lab, from nature to seemed unaware of the sociology of science and society. Also, Vink defines the laboratory space as who never seemed interested in science, adopted a an active system. Laboratories are made up of “naïve” ethnographic approach to understand human groups that are more fluid than the laboratory activity. Differently, the German industrial and bureaucratic organisations. As

Verena Kuni (2005) observes, the laboratory through texts and inscriptions. What is interesting constitutes the “framework for the scientific here is how the strength is gained in laboratories to examination of a phenomenon” and also a “place of transform and displace societies. To understand transgression”. the reason why people pay so much for laboratories which are ordinary places is that these Following Bruno Latour (1983), it exists a division are places of technological devices that invert the between organisations, institutions, public policy, hierarchy of forces in society. Making instructions on the one hand, and scientific disciplines on the readable and visible, permits the accumulation of other. So, a lack of understanding of different knowledge, and that is a condition for acceleration opinions leads to extreme internalism in science. in society. Latour’s position is to demonstrate that laboratories are built to destabilise the difference between Latour defines the way we approach science and macro and micro, inside and outside. In this how sociological science ignores the transformative manner, Latour studied the reception and success capacity that labs have. Because laboratories make of Pasteur’s laboratory in 1881, which made more the relevant changes to happen, we may remember progress and set up “in-site”. Then the laboratory as well that is the universality of society which “in-site” was transferred back to the workplace at permits this construction of social change. That is Ecole Normale Superieure. Since then, the scientist why Latour (1983) expresses the sentence “Give in this lab talked with more authority, becoming an me a laboratory and I will move society”. imposition to the other lab’s needs, and amplifying Lab in science identifies as a place for doing the interest of external agents. “Suddenly people experiments which resemble reality. However, from were manipulating new objects and so acquiring the 1970s, a surge of the interest in the notion of new skills in a new idiosyncratic ethic”, says Knorr lab sets it as a space in the culture. With its Cetina (1981). Pasteur’s laboratory applied what is production, culture constructs society. What the known as imitated variation. The success of it is laboratory does is to erase this complicated because of a double movement, from the lab to the difference between inside/outside and works to site, and from the site to the lab, adding the reshape society in innovative conditions. That is manipulation of new materials. However, how can what gives prestige to the labs and makes grow the laboratory practice be extended? Only by their economic potential, which at the same time extending the laboratory by itself. Extended into a grows technological capabilities. Moreover, the village, from the lab to the site, to the city, it is an production of written instructions transforms the lab extension of the lab to the outside. However, for the into a place of culture with literature instrumentation media, it was not seen as a practical movement; it that allows interfering socially. was a prophecy. What the press validated was the inside/outside relation, but in reality, there was a step after step, an event that was possible, but not 2. THE EMERGENCE OF DIY LABORATORIES a miracle. Mystified versions of scientific activity come from overlooking at it. Such displacement of The transformations in culture, capital and ecology laboratories became a national miracle when it was in the late 1990s contextualise the history for the not. emergence of do-it-yourself (DIY) laboratories, However, Latour states that the lab is a moment in hackerspaces, media labs, and sonic laboratories. a dynamic process. The laboratory modifies all From the depth of the lab, the society is so directly other actors, including society. In the beginning, modified and defines the power of the lab to there was distrust in science because of the transform society, rebuilding the system in which is separation and differentiation of the inside/outside. embedded. As Latour (1987) says in Science in However, now, there is no differentiation. In Action, there is a division of labour between science and technology, innovation happens in the scholars studying organisations, institutions, public laboratory. From the depth of the lab, the society is policy on the one hand, and people studying inside so directly modified. This states the power of the scientific disciplines on the other. Therefore, is why lab to transform society, rebuilding the system in this lack of connection in between humanities and which is embedded. The transformation of society scientific process in the laboratory lead towards a operated in laboratories, which are places that also highly scientific-technological society based on renew politics, alter the composition of society models of unsustainable development, because of the very content of the trials made representing the last phase of techno-capitalism, within their walls. ideologically alienated with neoliberalism. What Latour proposes here is a definition of the Although, since the 1990s, certain practices aligned laboratory, which relapses in its transformative with critical and alternative practices indicating social capacity. Labs have political strength, and separation from the neoliberal economies of private sociological studies have found that what makes sector galleries and established cultural institutions science so successful is the way it expresses in the public sector, as Jaron Rowan defends in Cultura Libre de Estado (2015).

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Reacting against the privatisation policies, boom of festivals, art centres and institutions during laboratories are often characterised by using open- the 1980s. Thus the media lab is closely linked to source and digital media and focus on radically the academy, but it is also a generator of the media transforming the production denouncing how art practices. capitalist market speculates with the value of art According to Romero-Frias (2017), media labs exist objects. These laboratories offer a confrontation in a university environment. These are spaces for with the methods of capitalistic technologies, digital and social innovation. Media labs are a link making the production more affordable, and between society and academy, spaces of offering models of collaborative practices which cocreation and collaboration. Their character, encourage experimentation and creativity. educational and promotional, highlights the Following Joasia Krysa (Media Art Histories, 2016) investigation and experimentation in new “such labs can address new institutional methodologies for education. One example of opportunities in humanities to engage with practice- media labs and laboratories’ origins in academia based knowledge creation and extend their mission was in 1896 when John Dewey founded the to include tools, techniques and a new curatorial Laboratory School, a school linked to the University scope”. of Chicago in which experimental approach lead The techniques used in these laboratories depend educational innovation. Dedicated to to a great extent on the free distribution on the experimentation with technology and social Internet, and also, the open-source community that mediation, and thanks to the rapid democratisation favours the use and clone of programs publishing and access to technology, labs such as MIT tools and hardware schemes. Open software uses developed in the mid-1980s. However, Ruiz-Martín techniques such as a fork. According to Pete and Alcalá-Mellado (2016) state how other Bratach’s Why Do Open Source Projects Fork? activities link to lab development but not connected (2017) open-source software projects start with the to academia: intention of creating technology, used for the greater good of the technical and global "Pioneering labs to other previous initiatives in community. At times like this, project participants the sixties were: Experiments in Art and start thinking about a fork. Also, in hardware Technology (EAT) (New York, 1963), Center for Advanced Visual Studies (Cavs) development and musical instrument creation, the (Massachusetts, 1967) and Generative Systems publication of schematics and instructions on how (Chicago, 1968)”. to create your own instruments are available to all on the Internet and also in publications such as Atau Tanaka (2011), Professor of Media Nicolas Collins, Handmade Electronics (2006). Computing at Goldsmiths, states how the rapid democratisation of technology has made the media labs’ technological profile to adopt a social 3. MEDIA LABS, LABS IN ACADEMIA AND perspective. Tanaka continues stating how the COUNTER-LABORATORIES university media labs are intended to serve as a link between society and academia, becoming a The lab in the academic environment differs from space for co-operation and citizen collaboration. the scientific and the artistic laboratory. The Closely related to teaching and dissemination academic lab has existed mainly since the 1980s character, media labs serve as a twoway channel with the example of the MIT Media Lab in through which citizens and researchers influence Massachusetts. The lab in academia arises from each other and share knowledge. Tanaka the need to merge research and science, but in highlights the research profile of university media turn, opens the possibility to research arts and labs, being an engine of educational, social and humanities. digital innovation. The media lab in the academic The role media art will play in the diffusion of the set up profiles itself as the ideal place for lab in academia will also extend the role of the experimentation, testing of new methodologies and laboratory not only in the academy but also in the educational formulas with citizen participation. social level, expanding the laboratory to the According to Tanaka, various forms of media lab structures of art institutions and also citizenship. have emerged and distinguishes the following: One can also link the laboratory in academia to the media lab. Since the 1980s, the technical advance (i) Industry labs. Labs based on the model of of the computational tools, for example, the ARPA research and development (R&D) network in American universities, made possible laboratories maintained by companies. For and necessary the investment in new media example, Bell Labs and IBM. through research. These two factors are crucial in (ii) Media art labs. Laboratories where artistic the emergence of media labs: research and experimentation develops through innovation. So, the work with new technologies technology. Including European projects finds much support in the media art sector with a such as Ars Electronica Futurelab (Linz)

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and ZKM Centre for Art and Media the same equipment as institutional laboratories, (Karlsruhe). counter-laboratories adopt strategies of survival, (iii) University labs. Laboratories generated in which include for example the so-called open- the university environment focused on source hardware (OSH) and open-source software innovation and entrepreneurship. One (OSS) practices. example of them is Experimental Media and Open-source practices greatly influence the maker Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the movement, as well as the emergence of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New hackerspaces, contributing to the defiance against York. capitalism. DIY artists, hackers, makers, and critical (iv) Citizen labs. Laboratories with social agents reflect on the technology’s role in reshaping involvement and based on citizen the world’s economic and ecologic horizons. participation with a DIY philosophy. One of the primary examples is the Medialab Indeed, the ecological, personal and social Prado in Madrid, referent in Spain. relationships become an integral force and a critical proposal to promote alternatives to the More new forms, such as hack labs, maker spaces, technocapitalist industrial society, following fab labs, city labs, are added to the complex Guattari’s Three Ecologies (1989). laboratory landscape. Under the name "lab", we can find proposals with very different values. Therefore, some laboratory practices which do not Tanaka points out that the changes undergone by rely on the institutional model are considered an European universities, following the Bologna alternative proposal for the transformation of the process, have promoted the emergence of centres industrial process, which is also happening in with a more experimental nature. Some examples individual entrepreneurs. of university lab are Medialab Helsinki (Aalto However, in this same context of late-capitalism University) or Paragraphe (Université Paris 8). (tardo-capitalism logic, or techno-capitalism), any Another centre is Nebrija Medialab (Facultad de alternative practice is also subsumed in the Comunicación de la Universidad Nebrija). economic system, as Lazzarato (2004) expresses From an academic perspective, the place of these through concepts of precariousness, intellectual centres generates problems when placing them work, immaterial labour, and new subjectivities within institutional structures, although the origin is which are totally under the influence of cybernetics in disciplinary spaces such as departments and and computer control. There is almost no anti- faculties but in search of an institutional capitalist approach because this requires the legitimation. The same happens in the context of structural organisation of political and economic other public institutions, such as Medialab Prado systems founded on networks, servers and other and the difficulty of its ascription within the city technological deployments. Technology created council of Madrid, as manifested by its director, under a scrupulous dependence on the scientific Marcos Garcia (2015). objectifying of hyperstructures (technoscientific laboratories, for instance) is extremely hard to The development of the media labs in the university disbelieve, doubt, dissent. It leaves the confronters environment generates new opportunities for impressed, without power and resources to contest innovation, incorporating the hacker spirit, and dispute its authority, as Bruno Latour refers in according to Himanen (2003). Digital the definition of counter-laboratories and science- transformation, openness and social involvement in-action. take on a new infrequent dimension in higher education institutions. The media labs coexist with Also, Jonathan Kemp (2013) states: other management approaches that prioritise “thus makes alternatives subsumed to capital”. processes of quality assurance, generating, in some cases, a bureaucratic burden that hinders However, there is still an in potentia within the innovation and experimentation. Media lab can fulfil capital for cultivating rival forms of production the role of "hacking" in the university structures to based around what is called “commons-based peer present alternative models in subjects that require production” (or “social production”). Indeed, more a more flexible development, such as the independent productions still use hacking and relationship with citizenship and new open-source methodologies, but with their methodologies and epistemological models. arguments consistently failing to surmount the Following, there exist another model of the lab. structural similarities with late capitalism. Then, as Counter-laboratories also experiment and develop the efforts and end-products of cooperation and through hacking practices. These labs result from collaborative production can be readily the setting up controversies to dispute specific appropriated and framed by capital, and it is again scientific experiments. Independent and sometimes an expression of a new form of labour rather than a precarious, facing hard difficulties in appropriating rival to capital itself. So, any rival form ultimately operates in a manner subsumed under capital's

25 Sonic Laboratories Laura Plana Gracia organisational arm. Although subsuming processes engineers began to approach artistic structures in tardo-capitalism, individuals are using their newly such the Ars Electronica Linz. expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate Later on, the emergence and the autonomy of the with others, in ways that improve the practised artist arrived thanks to the fragmentation of the experience of democracy. So, critical culture and market on the internet and other social conditions, community develop fair models of business and such as liberalisation of the academy, facilitation of laboratories using free software / open-source artists’ grants, and R&D governmental programs. hardware to share collaboration and self- Nowadays, a multitude of artists and developers, organisation, as declared by Yochai Benkler musicians as well, are established as autonomous (2006). In this regards, the collaborative practices creators favoured by cultural policies of at the intersection between art, science and entrepreneurship and autonomy. technology and making use of hacking and DIY methodologies are also set to criticise the The sonic laboratory can be the place in which phenomena of planned obsolescence produced by different strategies from music, to sound art, Information and Communication Technologies experimental art and science are successful. The (ICT) companies and the dynamics of desire sonic laboratory operates in this direction, offering towards technological devices by consumers. practices for developing collaborative participation Entering an age of mass extinction brought on by in networks using, for instance, online technologies. excesses of industrial production and consumption, Moreover, sonic laboratories have seen the technological obsolescence becomes a development of tools improved thanks to transformative agent in the system. Economically opensource culture. The instruments makers enjoy and ecologically, the technological processes face a more personal production process, and the artists disruption from one hand, but disasters on the have more guarantees to produce the instrument other. If obsolescence makes new devices to they need. Moreover, the sonic laboratory offers a appear in the market, the same disruptive economy confrontation with the methods of capitalistic implies a massive environmental catastrophe, technologies, becoming its production more which involves affecting the actual climate regime (I personal and affordable. use this concept instead of climate change invented by according to Frank Luntz, in the place Sonic laboratories share many features with media of “global warming”) as technology and innovation labs but have their character, independence, and a directly connect to resources exploitation. marked idiosyncrasy. Sonic labs are liminal but increasingly important spaces in many Though being alternative practices to industrial contemporary settings. They appear in universities production, happening in individual entrepreneurs and colleges, between traditional departments and who enabled incubators and accelerators leading faculties, as well as media labs, or hackerspaces the movement of “mass entrepreneurship”, there is which also appear in basements, warehouses, strip a significant difference between hubs and DIY malls and squats. As Jussi Parika and Lori culture in hackerspaces (and counter-laboratories, Emmerson (2016) write in What is a Media Lab? too), because of the differences between open Situated Practices in Media Studies, media labs are culture and mass culture. Entrepreneurs have stable to varying degrees; many have long-term assimilated innovation and technology to a addresses, with an itinerant roster of occupants. capitalist economy and the rise of new Some pop up in one location for a few days and industrialism. These transform their objects in then relocate to another. Sometimes they are even capital exchange, meanwhile, in DIY / open culture, in mobile trucks in the streets, bringing tools and the transformative possibility to change capitalism expertise to children in schools and the general relies on the ideology of activating the process, and public. As clusters of tools and talent streamlined to in the participation of building and sharing produce economic value, labs sometimes align with knowledge. the most ruthless of venture capitalists; in other cases, they are free and open for all to use, disdainful of all commercial motivations. 4. THE HYPOTHESIS OF A SONIC LABORATORY Progressively the democratisation of labs takes place, freeing technology, through open-source Around the mid-1990s, the sonic laboratory evolved helping to form the actual sonic laboratory, which is almost at the same time the media lab was born, currently closely related to individual artists’ during a particular period of consolidation of media practices but connected to the community. practice-based education when projects like the Following DIY Instruments and White Label MIT Lab were born with origins in the military; also, Releases by Amit D. Patel (2016), the DIY a period when new digital technologies started to electronic music instrument’s maker community become institutionalised. Moreover, through the wants to differentiate from utilitarian society and integration of media labs in art institutions, science mass-produced items and draw a new experience and technology merged with art and music, and on sound. Other features that the author appoints

26 Sonic Laboratories Laura Plana Gracia for DIY culture are self-reliant, anti-systemic, appearance of the lab has its contextual history in counter-cultural, and, self-sufficient. These features this economic movement that separates from are an example of what is the bases of the sonic neoliberalism and searches for other possibilities. laboratory. That is why some of the academic laboratories, media labs mainly, and some sonic laboratories The author highlights how DIY instruments are too, are sponsored by universities. For example, provocatively made to be low cost and often out of Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC, University of throwaway materials. As Patel writes: Belfast) and Locus Sonus (École Supérieure d'Art “This could be considered a materialist approach d'Aix-enProvence) are experimental laboratories in the DIY electronic music-maker scene. The developed in an academic context and related to maker scene and benefits of creating a DIY the production of the sound works. The first is a instrument are a challenge, learning new skills, sonic laboratory for the listening experience in live finding intellectual curiosities and exploring the concerts, the last, a lab for production and relationship with objects. There is also a focus dissemination of sound artworks. on doing something and creating something new.” Many laboratories are placed to the arts creative industry such as Laboratorio de Investigación y DIY is cheap, limited and, self-contradictorily, as Producción Musical in Argentina. There is another well as accessible and exclusive. tendency to fund sonic labs inside the art institutions such in art centres like BANF, Canada, Despite the sudden visibility of sonic laboratories, and Hangar, Barcelona, but these sonic labs they do have a surprisingly long history. As part of structures’ are around an autonomous economy the historical avant-garde, labs were the sites to which facilitates the expression in music-making develop the new materials and aesthetics of and the making of sound devices. technological modernity. They often share a prevailing ideology, tied not just to the neoliberal Being aware of capitalists’ industry and neoliberal drive to privatise, innovate and disrupt, but to long- market, some labs such Aurality Media Lab in standing modernist ideas about creativity, Australia, make their subject of enquiry the quantification and the value of scientificity. ecological and sustainable practice of sound, being this an active resistance in the arts. One example is the historic Bell Laboratories, a big lab with origins in the XIX century, which set its hegemonic establishment as the possible origin of the sonic laboratory in a proposed history for the 5. AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT. THE laboratory studies in the sound art context. CURATORIAL ROLE IN THE SONIC LABORATORY Sonic labs could also find an origin in radio development, for instance, in the Reeves Sound The consequences of an approach of art, science Laboratory (1946) founded by Hazard Earle and technology in different areas, such as the Reeves, university and the artistic involve a liberalisation in the production of musical instruments thanks to the Jr., an American pioneer in sound and electronics. approach of science, engineering and music, which It was the most significant sound service laboratory sonic laboratories have contributed to developing. in the East and produced a variety of products This is why certain sound art practices are related including tape, film, discs, wire cable, television to the so-called DIY movement, emerged from the tubes, cameras and precision recording equipment. Also, the Reeves-Ely Laboratories specifically 1970s as a reaction against the techno-capitalist manufactured a hardened crystal for the U.S. Army deployment. With influences of the underground Signal Corps while researching advance gunfire vanguard movements, the handmade culture control systems and computers, radar and tracking currently sets as an exponent of what is the open- systems, guided missile controls, and aircraft source culture and movements such as hacker and control instruments. maker, identified as well as with sonic laboratories. The results of these practices involve an Indeed, sonic laboratories operate influenced by interdisciplinary connection between art, science DIY, as seen in the recently inaugurated and technology that improves the creative aspects Laboratorio de Sonido, in LABoral, Gijon, the new of contemporary cultural production. media centre for the production, dissemination and exhibition of technological sonic art. Moreover, sound art practices enrich interconnection with music and engineering. To Academic practice links with sonic laboratories, highlight the DIY practices in front of the capitalist because of the emergence of a new sector born industry represents an immediate change in the discouraged by the rise of the neoliberal market prototyping of musical instruments, audio devices which has proceeded to privatise culture and and sound objects that have effectively set as a transform art into a creative industry. The significant creative impulse in our century.

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Nowadays, DIY practices are highlighted versus contextualised as objects of solemn contemplation, capitalist industry, promoting a substantial shift in and placed as works of art in the museum context, the creation of prototypes, musical instruments and these transform into consecrated objects, when sound objects. This new paradigm of production they are in reality ready for interaction, inviting to has evident parallelisms in the aesthetic territory. touch, hearing, engaging, and breaking down the separation between performer and audience. This shift happened because artists began developing using methods based on technological Indeed, the transformative economy of art innovation, engineering and computation. From its institution does not rely on the exhibition, but in the beginning, new media artists have taken the new force of activating through performance. Then, media art as material to develop, implement, passive audiences disappear, changing the pillars improve and criticise the social context which of classical aesthetics, based on the Kantian surrounds them. ideology. Contrary, the art market establishes barriers that have not been operative in the control Nowadays, the growing use of DIY in instrument of developing experiences properly human and making and the creation of sonic prototypes drift dictating the force of the market as a medium to away from the type of instruments already survive. Instead, DIY economies propose a categorised in the music industry. Artists and mechanism of production based in processual theoreticians who comprehend the practice of order that appoints to obsolescence and extinction sound art inserted in new media take references as some fatal errors in the capitalist system. The from technological developments to recreate new transformative capabilities of DIY do not rely on apparatus and ways to understand the sonic objects’ placement in the context of a museum and technologies. This intersection between sound art exhibiting them with an emphasis on the visual, just and media art is absorbing, and it brings new because musical instruments and other sound significance to the development of art and constructions have the potential to function a little technology. differently from other sorts of creative arts. So, aesthetically considering sound devices, their Promoting participation in workshops, the sonic appreciation and value lie in the practising of laboratories dissociate from the institutional space performance because once exhibited, the objects of the museum, allied with passive and transform themselves into a fetish commodity. contemplative aesthetics. Although many museums However, why musical instruments and handmade are nowadays aware of this, the use of sound device transform into a fetish commodity? contemplative practices roots them in classically According to Jonathan Sterne (2014), fetishes forged aesthetics. Recently Tate Modern has allow visualising what is unknown. So, when its offered more interactive and dynamics works in the appearance judges music instruments, they acquire exhibition, but the transformative function of the a magical dimension. Music and musicianship are laboratory could change the museum into a mystified and separated from everyday life, non- learning machine. As the lab’s communitarian considering the lived experience of most practice bases on shareable knowledge and instruments. This is because a tendency in pedagogic aspects, it will be necessary to include instrument-making hides the machinery, the these parameters in the contemporary museums, functional control and efficient operation of the which is happening using new media art practices instrument. This attribution of magic comes when a and audience’s participation. moment of distance is given to instrumentality, Moreover, the practices developed in the sonic lab either at the time of observation when practical enhance the new media curating, for instance, knowledge is not available. setting the exhibition space as an experimental The moment of distant reflection adds a spiritual sonic laboratory. The labs’ forms are those of the dimension to the instrument because, in music studio, the studio where artistic experiments observation, there is a lack of practical functions, co-live along with various practices and machines, so the object becomes mystified, fetishised. Sarah electronic synthesisers, films, audiotapes, and Ahmed (2006) writes about technologies which are plenty of other apparatus, as well as sound objects, no longer ready for action. An experience of being coding practices, algorithmic calculations and unable to use a thing, or distance at the moment of software development. use, leads to the attribution of properties, qualities The procedural way in which sonic laboratories and values to the thing itself. engage with creative work is a dynamic, an open This is a failure in the symbolic consideration at the process in transdisciplinary experimentation. To moment of non-use of the object. The exhibition approach these manners of working into the and exposure of musical object contribute to exhibition space recreating and re-enacting sonic transforming into a fetish commodity. Based on laboratory practices in an exhibition will conduct observation and experimentation, separated from results understood as exhibiting the lab. However, the context of musical practice and performance, how useful it is? Is this the site of display and the

28 Sonic Laboratories Laura Plana Gracia site of production? Is it possible to expose the work DIY practices in music-making devices and sound in process? objects. One of the exponent practices resembling what is called curating the sonic laboratory is the maker 6. REFERENCES fairs, that exhibit audio devices, DIY instruments, and modular synthesiser. Another example is the Ahmed S. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Sonar Festival that adopts expositive practices of Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University the prototypes developed by artists, engineers, Press. 2006. musicians, and others, in a hybrid way between the exhibition, the showroom, and the live Artaud, A. El Teatro de la Crueldad. Ciencia, demonstrations that are not live concerts. A Poesía Y Metafísica. Editorial La Pajarita De showroom where the audiences can experiment, Papel. 2019. learn and enjoy new trends in electronic music, but Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: favouring products created from DIY ethics, but Yale University Press. 2006. [Online] Available also connecting within the science and technology at network linked to the industry, indeed http://benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks. contradictorily. pdf [Accessed: 15-7-2019]. The sonic laboratory offers new opportunities to the Bratach P. Why Do Open Source Projects Fork? exhibition in the art gallery, transforming it into an 2017. [Online] Available at experimental laboratory where applied arts https://thenewstack.io/ open-source-projects- mediated through interdisciplinary work with fork/ [Accessed: 14-06-2018]. science, produce experiments able to be repeated and measured. This is a socially constructed Collins, N. Handmade Electronic Music. The Art of structure that permits to give answers to new Hardware Hacking. London & New York: creative developments. Following Bruno Latour, in Routledge. 2006. the lab, art, science and technology confuse with a Dyson, F. Sounding New Media: Immersion and critical and cultural activity, becoming the lab a site Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. CA: of mediation, in between theory and practice, University of California Press, 2009. discursive and non-discursive. Latour notes that labs in the art approach to the science lab, extend Fritz, D. Grey Area, Zagreb. [Online] Available at the material practices into the exhibition place, and http://sivazona.hr/start [Accessed: 20-02-2018]. proceed to experimentation, work in process, and García, M. (2015). Medialab-Prado: retos del an open-ended process to build knowledge. presente. LabMeeting 2015. Medialab Prado. The result, the exhibition research lab, is present in Madrid. 2015. [Online] Available at many other labs, from maker spaces to fab labs, https://www.medialab-prado.es/noticias/lab and in the so-called sonic laboratories, increasingly meeting2015-madrid-documentacion-audiovisual abundant. So to address the role of electronic arts, [Accessed: 23-12-2016]. sonic arts, audio arts, and sound arts in the space Guattari, F. The three ecologies. London: of the lab critically, positions the role of the sonic Bloomsbury Academic. 2014. laboratory in the network of media labs, hacker zones, maker spaces, humanities labs, fab labs, Kemp, J. The Crystal World: Executing a New tech incubators, innovation centres, hack labs and Media Materialism. PhD Dissertation: University media archaeology labs. of Westminster. 2013. To sum up, sonic laboratories in the art scene are Knorr-Cetina, K. The manufacture of knowledge: an mainly places for production, not adopting essay on the constructivist and contextual nature strategies from the industrial process (which also of science. Oxford New York: Pergamon Press. includes processes of distribution and execution). 1981. So, if the process of the exhibition can transform Krysa, J. Exhibition as Lab. Erkki Kurenniemi in the music device in fetish commodities, curating the 2048, Documenta 13. Media Art Histories. 2016. lab is a solution through exploring and [Online] Available at http://pl02.donau- experimenting. It can be an integrative process of uni.ac.at/jspui/ handle/10002/746 [Accessed: 27- the production and exhibition without becoming part 06-2018]. of an industrial process. This happens in certain curatorial practices when the exhibition transforms, Kuni, V. Abstract for the lecture within the and instead of contemplation, participants in the conference Screening Science. 2005. In exhibition can interact and explore the works as if Johannes Lenhard, Warhols Factory - A they were in a lab. So, curating the lab will be the Laboratory. [Online] Available at end of a research process which investigates about http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/142943/ warhols- factory-a-laboratory [Accessed: 28-082017].

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