Some images from Albert Schwichtenberg’s 1962 paper “Space Medicine and Astronaut Selection”.

From an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist:

I then, in ‘99 with Barbara Vanderlinden, brought science back into the exhibition, and we did Laboratorium, which investigated how studios and labs are more and more inter-related. And we investigated the notion of the laboratory in the late 20th, early 21st century. Laboratorium was a transdiciplinary project searching the limits of the places where knowledge and culture are made. It started as a discussion that involved questions such as:

What is the meaning of Laboratorium?
What is the meaning of experiments?
When do experiments become public and when does the result of an experiment reach public consensus?

We installed many laboratories all over the city:

A laboratory of doubt
A cognitive science laboratory
A highway for choreographic investigation
An existing artist studio
The first laboratory of Galileo

One of Bern Porter’s Founds on display at Ubu in collaboration with the MOMA exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Bern Porter (1911–2004) contributed to some of the most important scientific and artistic innovations of the twentieth century. He worked on the development of the cathode-ray tube (for television), the atomic bomb (with the Manhattan Project), and NASA’s Saturn V Rocket. When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in 1945, Porter walked away from his position with the Manhattan Project and, disappointed with his work as a physicist, turned his attention to artistic pursuits. In the aftermath of World War II, a flood of visual information spread across the United States. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines and on billboards and television promised an easier and happier life through the purchasing of products. For his collages, which he dubbed “Founds,” Porter gathered the waste of this new culture—advertisements, junk mail, instruction booklets, scientific documents, and other material—and turned it into art. In addition to his books of Founds, Porter authored treatises on the unification of science and art (what he called “Sciart”) and books of experimental poetry. He published work by major figures in art and literature, such as Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Dick Higgins. Also, as the self-proclaimed inventor of mail art, Porter was an active participant in a vast international network of artists who shared their work with each other through the post.

From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s “Structure of the Mammalian Retina” Madrid, 1900.

They attract each other. They’re caught where, for instance, art has a history that goes back to the cave people. The thing that we call art is so old that you really can’t know its origin, whereas science began years ago. So it all seems primitive in relation to art; the ideas of science help feed the art that I have to give. Because art is always fit for any ideas that people have.

–Paul Laffoley on the relationship between science and art

DUSEL: Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab.

Sandia’s Z machine normally works like this: 20 million amps of electricity pass through a small core of vertical tungsten wires finer than human hairs. The core is about the size of a spool of thread. The wires dissolve instantly into a cloud of charged particles called a plasma.

The plasma, caught in the grip of the very strong magnetic field accompanying the electrical current, is compressed to the thickness of a pencil lead. This happens very rapidly, at a velocity that would fly a plane from New York to San Francisco in several seconds.

At that point, the ions and electrons have nowhere further to go. Like a speeding car hitting a brick wall, they stop suddenly, releasing energy in the form of X-rays that reach temperatures of several million degrees — the temperature of solar flares.