SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

By Johanna Drucker

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge.

            Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780226165097

Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker is an artist, writer, critic, historian, and theorist internationally known for her creative and scholarly work in digital humanities, history of the book, visual poetry, and artists’ books. She began making letterpress editions in the 1970s in the context of the Bay Area poetry scene, where language writing and book arts were flourishing. She has lived in Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, on the island of Santorini, New Haven, Charlottesville, and Dallas, and has held faculty positions at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Virginia, and UCLA, among other institutions. Her work as a book artist was the subject of a retrospective in 2012, Druckworks: Forty Years of Books and Projects. She has published more than a dozen scholarly works and as well creative writing titles including: The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson, 1994), Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard, 2014), As No Storm (Rebis, 1975), Italy (The Figures, 1980), Dark Decade (Detour, 1995), Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), and Fabulas Feminae (Litmus Press, 2015). Her text, The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary 1995), is considered the definitive work in the field. She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL the books I never wrote or wrote and never published.

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