Amongst the projects we publicly declare here on the Laboratory blog, there are probably x2 others that we don’t. We plan to change that ratio henceforth.
These are our “non-battery” powered projects. By that I mean that they are not traditional technocultural things — those things that have come to define the laboratory, from Flavonoid engineered prototypes to industrially fortified data vizualization software to game controllers for pets to studies in curious interaction rituals.
But, they are projects and they reflect the more complete aspects of the Laboratory as a practice. They are a reflection of our additional interests, curiosities and explorations. Some of them are exercises of a more proto-professional nature, to explore ways of studying the world around us, short probes into a field of practice about which we want to understand by doing rather than by idle observation. In sum, they represent ways that the Laboratory is always curious, always learning, never set or fixed in what it does and how it does it. This makes me understand the Laboratory as a practice. A bit like a studio. But, I understand now even more as we grow and as more people join in, that it is better to communicate the multivalent character of the Laboratory through more aspects of what we here do.
There are no “side projects” in this practice. There are we all who are always following our curiosities.