edited by Angela Plohman, A Blueprint for a Lab of the Future

Baltan Laboratories

Baltan Laboratories, ISBN: 9789081583008, 343 pages
Grounded on the previous ” The Future of the Lab“, this new publication expands the topic on a much broader level. This book includes documentation of Baltan Laboratories’ first three years of activity, revealing the many projects supported and initiated there. Essays and interviews with various collaborators (focused on the lab concept), and several other texts of different lengths complete the work. Beyond being a self-celebrating volume or lab portfolio, the book has evolved into a precious compendium of a concept and is well-focused throughout as it sketches a detailed blueprint of a future lab. The format avoids preconceptions and how-to instructions, instead allowing strategies and needs to emerge from practices, experiments and from abstracting the experiences of the artists involved. This results in a timely challenge as labs are able to play a strategic role in shaping the current big changes in cultural funding policies (moving towards industrial “creativity” more than art and theory). They can become not only a space for experimenting with new types of production (and therefore embedded cultural plans), but if properly run and managed, they can also be a space for debate and where meetings can generate new processes and strategies, especially when networked. The book is a very nicely designed object and includes inserts of different paper and “sections” that can be found in these 300-plus pages.