ModLabs

Abstract

This chapter extends from research on the genealogies of modernist laboratories (aesthetic, scientific and corporate) and their relationship to the formation of contemporary digital-humanities and new-media laboratories and collaboratories. The trajectory of this project, broadly conceived, leads from the modular principles of early twentieth-century industrial design and avant-garde aesthetics, to the implementation of modular architecture in the construction of mid-century corporate science labs, to the modularization of markup languages, interoperable digital tools and collaborative and cross-disciplinary lab environments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, Irvine traverses the conjuncture of multiple modularities and disciplinarities-from architecture, art and industrial design to markup languages, source code and digital tools-in the historical contexts of cultural, industrial and postindustrial modernities.