Syntonic Refuge: performing LabSynthE

ABSTRACT

LabSynthE is a collective of faculty and graduate students at The University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication. The lab is a framework for situated learning and collaboration at the intersection of art, technology, and poetics to create digitally-mediated social interactions. Our commitment to discontinuity and the refuge we have found in one another holds us together on a university campus where academic silos and individual expertise are preferred or awarded. In this article I perform two expressions of the voice in a side-by-side expository of the lab, inspired by Gregory Ulmer’s ‘mystory’ method of writing for discovery. In the left column (‘Syntonic Refuge’), my contribution takes the form of an essay centered on one recent LabSynthE project. The right column (‘Performing LabSynthE’) includes an autoethnographic narrative in which I reflect on my relation to the lab to describe its formation and ongoing culture. Together, these two columns advocate for art incubation labs in the university setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-regulation
• collaboration
• situated learning
• university laboratories
• academic silos

Acknowledgements / People to recognize

It is an honor to lead this lab with Dr. Frank Dufour, the founder of LabSynthE, who continues to work with us from his home country in France. Dr. Sabrina Starnaman, Associate Professor of Instruction in Literature from the School of Arts & Humanities joined us in 2018 and is an affiliated faculty member of the lab. She often advises students and brings her knowledge of literature and cultural studies to projects developed in the lab. The following students are lab members from 2016–2021 who worked on Syntonic Refuge (their degree plan in parenthesis): Letícia Ferreira (PhD), Sean Landers (PhD), Murilo Paiva-Homsi (MFA), and Emma Delight (BA). David Adelman (PhD) has also been with us since 2018. In 2019 and 2020 new students who bring their light to the lab include Maryam Ashkaboosi (MFA), Maedeh Asgharpour (MFA) Elmira Barghadezah (MFA), Sammi Gonzalez-Flora (PhD), Fiona Haborak (PhD), and Cynthia O’Neill (PhD).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I came to Ulmer’s process through Jan Rune Holmevik (2012), then worked my way backwards, through Ulmer’s 2015 Electracy to his 2003 Internet Invention (both appear in following notes).

2 Gregory Ulmer, Saper, and Vitanza (2015, 47).

3 Gregory Ulmer (2003). See Chapter 1, “Mystory,” which calls for an investigation in four areas of the popcycle—family, community, career, and entertainment.

4 Ulmer, 23.

5 Ulmer, 4.

6 Jan Rune Holmevik (2012, 18).

7 Barry Mauer and Venecek (2020).

8 Louis Sullivan (1896, 403–409).

9 Umberto Eco (1989, 83).

10 Nico Carpentier (2016, 3).

11 xtine burrough and Letícia Ferreira, see the project video at https://vimeo.com/xtineburrough/radium-girls, accessed August 14, 2020.

12 Jean Lave and Wenger (1991, 51).

13 Lave and Wegner, 53.

14 Mark Fleishman (2012).

15 Jeanne Jo (2009):

16 Alan S. Haas and Langer (2014, 21–34).

17 Pablo Helguera (2011, 14–15).

18 LabSynthE, Big Dada, Late Night Art Bytes event, The Dallas Museum of Art, November, 2016.

19 This was long before COVID-19 and before the rise of anxiety over contagion.

20 Fleishman, 29.

21 Bergson and Arthur 2011, referenced in Fleishman, 33.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

xtine burrough

xtine burrough is a hybrid artist who uses emerging technologies and remix to engage networked audiences in critical participation. Appropriation, juxtaposition, and computation are central to her practice. burrough’s work plays at the intersection of media art and digital poetry. burrough values the communicative power of art-making as a vehicle for exploring the boundaries between humans and the technologies they create, embody, and employ. She collaborates with diverse populations from students to senior citizens to virtual factory workers, and projects yield multiple layers for various forms of participation and collaborative meaning-making. burrough archives her work and process in articles, chapters, and books. She has edited volumes and portfolio sections for other artists to write, reflect on, expose, and archive their practices. burrough has authored Foundations of Digital Art and Design with Adobe Creative Cloud, 2nd Edition, edited Net Works: Case Studies of Web Art and Design, and co-edited The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, Keywords in Remix Studies, and The Routledge Handbook to Remix Studies and Digital Humanities. A professor and Area Head of Design + Creative Practice in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas, she is the Director of LabSynthE, a laboratory for creating synthetic and electronic poetry.