Keynote by Darren Wershler: Milieux and the Extended Laboratory

This talk considers the Milieux Institute in terms of the Extended Lab Model in Darren Wershler, Jussi Parikka and Lori Emerson’s THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 2022). The Extended Lab Model was developed, in part, with Milieux as a core example; on Milieux’s 10th anniversary, this talk considers what has changed in both the model and Milieux.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Despite their sudden visibility due to the burgeoning of the digital humanities, media labs have a surprisingly long history. As part of the historical avant-gardes, media arts labs were the sites where the new materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed. They often share a common ideology, tied not just to the neoliberal drive to privatize, innovate and disrupt, but to long-standing modernist ideas about creative destruction, quantification and the value of scientificity. The Lab Book will thoroughly document and explicate this significant cultural force.

📖 Learn more about the Lab Book

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Darren Wershler is Associate Professor at Concordia University, where he holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature and is cofounder of the Media History Research Centre and director of the Residual Media Depot. Darren is author of several books, including Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Dr Wershler specializes in media history and media archaeology, with a particular interest in the material culture of analog and early digital technologies.

🗓 November 6, 2026

3:30-5 PM

Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705