How We Got Here

The actlab was founded by professor Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone in 1992, with financial and logistical encouragement from the Radio-TV-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Now the interesting stuff.

We're more interested in stuff like:

Technology as Narrative

How does technology affect the concept of narrative? How is technology itself a narrative? How does narrative work in virtual space? How can we use technology (not only computers) to make narratives more powerful? What counts as a story when the storyteller is a computer program? Are there existing narrative techniques that work in powerful ways in New Media, or do we invent new ones?

Technology as Art

How do technology and art inform each other? How can we use new technologies to focus attention, evoke emotion, raise passion, change lives? How do we, in Brenda Laurel's words, use computers as theatre? Is there a creative vocabulary for New Media? Are we reliving the inception of motion pictures or television, or are we doing something completely different, or neither? What experiments can we invent to find out?

Technology as Culture

What stories do powerful new technologies tell about the dense social networks within which technologies "mean"? Who gets to control the meanings technologies generate, and who gets to control the meanings of technology? How do we get technologies to reveal the stories by which they become powerful, and later, become ubiquitous? Are technology and culture even separate terms any more? Are technology and human separate terms any more? How do we use technologies themselves to tell those stories?

Technology as Politics

How does the idea of technology itself alter the ways power works? What gets done in the name of technology? How does technology change oppressions, free us from some, create more? Can we use art and technology to make political statements? If so, for whom, and why? What do we say? Who benefits, who suffers?

Technology as You

Okay, you suddenly find yourself in an actlab class. Who are you likely to meet?

Since its inception, the actlab has been a focus and attractor for unusual, talented people from every discipline. Students from Architecture, Computer Science, Dance, the Fine Arts, Biochemistry, Latin-American Studies, Library and Information Science, Speech Communication, Anthropology, Political Science, and Business meet and mix in the actlab. Visiting scholars from institutions worldwide sometimes participate in actlab seminars, though we don't promise anything at any particular time. Sparks fly, ideas rise and sink again, things get impossibly boring, then suddenly the heavens open and something unimagined happens. We can't predict what that might be or when it might appear, but we can and do provide the space and the forum for it. Fortune, after all, smiles on the prepared.

Actlabbers are a strange breed. It takes something unusual to lever someone out of their nice disciplinary specialty and send them questing after odd ideas that might get them in trouble back on their home turf. One student called actlabbers "The rejects, the misfits in our chosen disciplines". He was right. Being misfits is our strongest asset.

For example, one of our ongoing projects is the New Studies initiative. Its basis is that you can't analyze New Media with old disciplinary tools...you can try, and you will evince data, but you won't really learn anything worthwhile. You need new tools, new methods, new disciplinary languages, and you won't find them waiting inside traditional disciplinary forms. We want people who don't fit in, because they see things that other people don't. Just remember that exploring new territory and finding a language to describe it is risky business. So wear your epistemological hard hat.

Now what do you do?

Make Something!

No matter how much we talk, everything comes down to doing, making, showing. You choose your method and your technology, and remember in the actlab, human interaction itself is also a technology to be exploited for narrative gain. That sacred old technology, storytelling, is still at the bottom of it all. Maybe you'll create a virtual world, set Italo Calvino to images, study a chat room (and then make one that works differently), create a powerful dramatic form out of bits and pieces of technologies. Or maybe you'll be the rare person who writes a pure text whose topic is some aspect of New Media, and who never uses technology beyond your word processor. (Yes, a very few people do that, and we sometimes let them get away with it.)

And while you're making, think about how what you're making could make a difference -- in technology, in art, in culture, in politics, in...

The Stonely Slant

Sandy Stone's take on New Media is one of the steering principles in the actlab. In her own work she's following up on the idea that traditional modes of representation are exhausted, insofar as describing or fully working within New Media is concerned. Currently she's going through an atavistic period based on the idea that the individual body grounds all experience and representation. This has led her to take up performance as her current medium of choice: The body as signifying technology and generator of language. Identity is continually performed, dynamic rather than fixed, both for oneself and one's social system, and understanding performance -- particularly as it manifests through gender, desire, and communication technologies -- is a way to understand identity and consciousness. Whether this approach is The Answer, we don't know, but it's one model of how to do the ACTLab adventure. And tune in tomorrow to see if she's still doing it, or is experimenting with something else. And what about you?

Our Strange Bedfellows

The actlab has ties with organizations like the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, with whom we are constructing a joint Web project, and with The Lanning Organization, with whom we are studying advanced techniques for K-12 networked education. The actlab is also host to the home site for the International Conference on Cyberspace, now entering its ninth year. Here's a link to some of the other organizations that do similar kinds of work. Actlabbers show their stuff at such prestigious events as Ars Electronica, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Cyberconf, and at institutions like ZKM, The Banff Centre, DMG, The Wexner Center, The New Museum, The Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum, ICA, The Architecture Institute School of Architecture, CalArts, and The Getty Center. And if lucre is an issue, rest easy. Actlabbers go on to work at (some say infest) such places as Human Code, Frog Design, Sun Microsystems, MonkeyMedia, Digital Space, Apple Computer, The University of Helsinki, The University of California, Renssalaer, The University of North Carolina, The University of Padua, and The San Francisco Art Institute.

So don't just read this. Drop in and visit. Come to jeer, stay to whitewash. Sign up. Make something. Make a difference.

And while we're busy issuing orders, clean up your room. Chew your food well. Call Mom. The current ACTLab website was completed as a project for RTF 331P "The Challenges of New Media," by Eleanor Friedberger, Kenneth Mok, and Scott Lee