Syntonic Refuge: performing LabSynthE

Abstract

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.