Laboratory

Emily York delves into the fraught meaning and place of the laboratory in the cultural imagination, both as a powerful symbol of science and progress and as a rapidly evolving political space.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The laboratory stands as a powerful symbol in the public imagination: it is place for bodily dissections and monstrous creations, technological innovation and corporate secrecy, governments working in the public interest or government out of bounds, scientists as geniuses and saviors and evildoers, learning spaces from the 9th grade biology lab to the San Francisco Exploratorium, and more. But what actually happens in a laboratory, why does it have such fraught connections to our hopes and fears, and how does a laboratory relate to the ‘real world’?

Quintessentially associated with the scientific revolution, the laboratory came to be a space to study ‘facts’ as natural phenomena, isolated and separated from emotions and biases. Yet the laboratory is also intertwined with the messy ambiguity of the world and embodies the power and privilege of resources, expertise, and innovation.

Laboratory examines the contemporary laboratory and its relation to a host of existential concerns about science, technology, and the environment.