Experimentation as attitude and the idea of the lab

This paper introduces ‘the idea of the lab’ as an experimental notion; part of the trajectory in contemporary thinking involving extended notions of art practices. I present the idea of the lab as an as experimental attitude and media, a somewhat asomatous idea, with correspondences to ‘the idea of painting’ in the expanded field. However, I discuss this concept with reference to experimental attitudes specifically being materialized in novel Biotech art and the show ‘Visceral The Living Art Experiment’. Significantly I propose that the exhibition itself exemplifies the idea of the lab as both an embodied experiment and asomatous idea. It is a permutable, transformative site of expanded experimental attitudes as practices. The idea of the lab encapsulated in Visceral the exhibition is presented as a recombinant notion of experimentation as attitude. Being ‘rhizomatic’ it is characterized by pending states of experience, understanding and material expression as an unfolding/refolding condition. Recombinance is an anticipatory condition and pending event, the experimental substance/medium and process that is an expanded experimental idea of the lab