Chapter 13 Scrounging

Space

New labs rarely come into the world in their mature form, and perhaps not in their permanent space. But even if they are physically situated in a stand-alone building, labs are almost always contained inside some larger institution. The connective tissue between a given lab and these larger institutions (including, as Alan Liu points out in “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity,” culture itself) is their infrastructure. In her work on research infrastructures, Sheila Anderson (20–21) argues that for a new research project to come into existence, scholars need to learn how to interpret, engage with, and collaborate with the infrastructure of their respective institutions. This is always true, and it’s an often-overlooked aspect of scholarly work because it’s rarely if ever taught (or valorized), so it’s a difficult skill set to pick up unless a given individual learns it in the private sector or has excellent support staff.

Via interpersonal communication or gray literature (i.e., applications and paperwork), access to space and apparatus comes initially via gatekeepers at various points of control (PA): deans, department chairs, vice presidents of research, committees at various levels (including designated space committees and faculty or university research committees), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and commercial/private owners and landlords (ALW, CML). For this reason, lab directors who have spent service time in upper administration have a better understanding of how institutions apportion research space and may be more likely to succeed in securing it for their own work when they return to faculty positions (AL).

As Feder’s interviewees suggested and my own conversations corroborated, strong interpersonal communication skills and the ability to manage professional connections are crucial to the process of scrounging for lab space. Because many departments don’t have formal space policies, lab space can sometimes be obtained by simple conversation with a department chair, or by bartering with a space’s current users for access or to trade spaces (MAL). Occasionally, an underutilized room in a departmental footprint can even be “squatted” by the performative act of declaring it a lab (Wershler et al., 32). Of course, even civil conversations to secure lab space, let alone social engineering approaches, can and do lead to interfaculty conflicts over who has the right to use space, and for what.

Managing good relations with colleagues after obtaining a research space also requires strong interpersonal skills. Learning how to manage relations with other research units (whether neighboring or in the same shared space) can be crucial to the ongoing success of scrounging as a technique, not to mention to basic civility. Labs raise many special considerations relating to infrastructural needs and institutional policy, both in terms of what labs might produce as unwanted by-products of their research or what environmental and other conditions they have to contend with, especially in loosely regulated spaces or commercial zones (VHL, SL, ALW). Noise, fumes, and electrical hazards move in both directions. On campus, addressing such issues often involves renovations that scrounging alone can’t address (AL). Clever administrators interested in upgrading university facilities and generating outside attention will often negotiate with scrounging researchers over the availability of space if there is a good chance that the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) will fund a renovation of the overall infrastructure (ALW).

By design or necessity, university lab space is increasingly outside the campus footprint. Several of the lab directors have spaces that are partly or even largely outside the university ambit, located above retail space or in strip malls (ALW), inside a corporate innovation hub (CML), or partially in warehouse space owned by a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (PA). Off-campus locations can provide access to resources not available on campus that are necessary for some kinds of research projects, like large amounts of storage space for bulky legacy media such as celluloid film (PA). A space like an incubator may also offer proximity to, and interactions (including scrounging) with, other kinds of organizations not commonly found on campus, such as tech startup companies (CML). The intention behind such spaces is to act as what Peter Galison calls a “trading zone,” where practices and professional argots intermingle and change in the interest of solving shared problems. When this occurs, such spaces can provide rich scrounging territory and open up new avenues for research as a result.

Temporality

The temporality of scrounging is arbitrary and variable. Finding random pieces of equipment lying in a hallway feels nearly instantaneous, but scrounging does not always have that sort of speed. Building interpersonal relations with collectors and community experts, as well as with university bureaucrats managing purchases and acquisitions, takes time. One researcher offered to show me an email chain with university procurement services that grew into tens of thousands of words, all in the name of securing from an expert user a nearly impossible-to-find piece of equipment (a disc-cutting lathe). The inability of the university bureaucracy overseeing infrastructure to process the purchase efficiently resulted in the equipment seller being paid many months after the item had changed hands (AL). Another researcher described how obtaining one set of rare materials from a collector took nearly twenty years of discussion, hounding, and contract-drafting (PA). They also suggested that scrounging might be better thought of as an ongoing series of events—rejections and adoptions of objects by various parties over many years—and cited examples in their research of objects that had been acquired and discarded by various parties at least five times (PA).

Changes in a field’s standards for operating equipment can also be the occasion for apparatuses becoming available for scrounging. For example, a single piece of digital apparatus may now encompass the functionality of several older pieces of analog or digital equipment (PA), meaning that equipment can be downsized. Or again, some items that are still perfectly usable but not state of the art may wind up not in the trash, but to other labs. As a result, many labs regularly employ various pieces of anachronistic but perfectly functional equipment.

Apparatus

If apparatus designates the tangle of material technologies and practices inside a lab that allows it to conduct its research, it is also what made me first think about how scrounging operates, and to what end. Securing and maintaining lab apparatus seem to perpetually involve scrounging, regardless of the research field.

The lab apparatus of the people I spoke with is bewildering in its variety, ranging from computer code and robots (VHL) to Arduino boards (VHL, CML), forklifts (PA), penny-farthing bicycles and resin cows (CML), Edison Phonographs (AL), Scientology E-Meters and Minitel terminals (MAL), and embossing telegraphs and Korsakov machines (MAF). Most of this apparatus is operational, and all of it has figured in research projects at some point. Many odd things end up in the sorts of labs that I am discussing because, as working collections, they use these items at various times as both apparatus (the instrument you study with and through) and as objects of study themselves. As Lisa Gitelman indicates in Always Already New, this dual status of media as subject and object is characteristic of media history and related fields, and it also is part of what makes conducting such research difficult (Gitelman, 2–7). At any point, the arrival of some new piece of apparatus in the lab may occasion the need for even more esoteric supplementary devices to operate it.

The question of unforeseen needs for apparatus has much to do with a lab’s imaginary—how it sees itself, especially in relation to how it would like to be seen from outside. In his research on the Chinese typewriter, Thomas Mullaney (22–23) states that “the technolinguistic imaginary” is a vital component of the material infrastructure that makes it possible for cultural objects to function. This imaginary also links a technological object to larger infrastructures and assemblages, and/or to prototypes, clones, models, and analogs, so it’s important to take into consideration.

There is always a gap between a lab’s early imaginary (what the lab’s founders think it needs and can account for in an official startup budget) and what it actually needs to conduct research after the money has been spent and the researcher has been in place long enough to understand what is available in their specific institutional context (ALW). This difference creates a primary occasion for scrounging. It’s axiomatic that the eventual use of a given piece of media technology is rarely what its inventor intended because various publics imagine it in different articulations (in Stuart Hall’s sense that a given technological artifact can be articulated to different discourses and different ideologies and different times and places; see Grossberg, 53). Media labs seem to operate in a similar manner. As a result, scrounging for apparatus occurs both intrainstitutionally and extrainstitutionally.

The implicit question in intrainstitutional scrounging is ownership, which is complex. Some scrounged media is garbage—things for which no one wants to claim ownership or responsibility. One colleague pointed out that one of the reasons that scrounging is a successful technique in the U.S. context is because the United States throws away more media than most nations ever produce (PA). For the researchers I spoke with who are working with code, scrounging is a matter of course, and it always has been. Copying code happens routinely, sometimes following academic and programming citation protocols, but usually without notification if the purpose is noncommercial (VHL). The protocols for scrounging physical equipment, however, are somewhat different. The scientists whom Feder speaks with frequently scrounge decommissioned equipment from various U.S. government agencies and the military (Feder, 27). Sometimes, however, the government retains ownership of such equipment, which can lead to additional complications, like annual equipment audits (Feder, 28). Even when ownership has changed officially as apparatus changes hands, physical markings on the equipment, documentation, or even informal oral histories create a continuity of use that can go back for decades (PA) and become an important part of lab culture.

In Canada, research equipment purchased with federal grants comes from taxpayer dollars. The equipment policies of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) are clear: “All items purchased with SSHRC funds are the property of the university or organization administering the award. Any non-disposable items (including books, research materials and documents) must be formally listed in the university’s or organization’s inventory.” In practice, though, how universities manage apparatus varies widely once equipment has been purchased. Perhaps the most accurate description of the scrounging that occurs inside universities and similar institutions is that it is an informal redistribution of institutionally owned resources.

Within a university, equipment depots (universitywide and department-specific) are fruitful scrounging sites. Many faculty members are unaware that such resources even exist, but long-term support staff know how to access them. Several researchers whom I spoke with mentioned the importance of administrative assistants and other staff to the securing of space, apparatus, and research collections (MAL, AL, ALW). Depot managers know when the value of equipment has been amortized to zero and have developed informal practices for disposing of it (sometimes via email lists, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes by shipping them to universitywide storage facilities, or sometimes by placing it outside the door). In all cases, getting to know depot managers and personnel at all levels is the key to cheaply and quickly furnishing a lab with apparatus.

Other labs are another excellent source of scroungeable equipment. In many universities, placing superfluous equipment in the hallway outside the door is a sign that it is available for use by whoever feels moved to cart it away. The growing pervasiveness of practices for assigning unique serial numbers to equipment, and for tracking such equipment in databases, ties scrounged equipment via purchasing and accounting departments back to its original status as formally purchased and accounted-for infrastructure more firmly than has ever been the case historically. This fine-grained tracking may well make scrounging practices more difficult and uncommon over time (AL). But even in individual universities, there are different expectations of how equipment will be managed for different units. For example, research equipment may be handled differently (with more or fewer purchasing and tracking restrictions) than teaching equipment. Equipment purchased more than a few years ago may have no digital tracking associated with it, and, in some cases, there is no tracking at all.

Extra-university scrounging complicates the picture further because it is more likely to be a form of donation rather than theft. Some labs are lucky enough to receive so many donations that they don’t actually have to go looking for apparatus very often (MAL); but they are the exception rather than the rule. University labs may appeal to private companies, public institutions, and private individuals for apparatus at different times and in different ways. One researcher whom I spoke with is in the habit of walking into the local hardware store and the nearest architectural salvage yard, describing the lab’s current project, and asking for donations of everything from hammers and other tools to lumber (CML). In another instance, the researcher funded the construction of an arcade cabinet via a small donation from a local insurance company (CML). A second researcher described combing through Craigslist looking for classified ads from parents selling old video game consoles and computers (MAL).

Because humanities media labs often begin with the specific research interests of a particular scholar in an area that the academy has largely been unable to capture, it’s not uncommon for lab apparatus to be seeded from a privately owned collection—often the collection of the researcher themselves (AL). This is only one of the ways that private property becomes intermingled inextricably with institutional property in lab apparatus. The researchers whom I spoke with described a whole spectrum of scenarios, from extremes where the entire lab apparatus is fully privately owned by the director because they have purchased everything themselves (MAF, SL) to fully university-funded apparatus (VHL). But in most cases, the ownership of the apparatus is usually a mix of public and private, especially in the lab’s early days.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the importance to the functioning of many labs of online auctions and third-party sellers like Alibaba/Aliexpress, Etsy, and third-party sellers on Amazon (and associated payment platforms like PayPal). This bears both on establishing working collections in labs and sourcing odd bits of apparatus on an ongoing basis. I am including these sites as a form of scrounging because, despite their reasonably long lifespan and assured role in world culture, they retain a whiff of disreputability that make them difficult to use or justify in an academic context, especially in conjunction with institutional credit cards.

There is now a substantial cultural studies literature about eBay, but there is very little literature on its utility to academic researchers seeking lab equipment, and most such discussion pertains to the sciences (Greenslade, 512; Ledford; Schneider et al.). As searchable digital bazaars, such sites provide lab directors with a huge network of potential sources of apparatus not obtainable elsewhere, or obtainable for a much lower cost than would otherwise be imaginable. Further, research relationships with online sellers can also emerge because they will often have items not listed that might be of use, and they may even make donations to the lab (MAL). Information about unlisted holdings and other useful kinds of information can come out of conversation only after establishing a relationship with online sellers, usually as a result of buying something and providing favorable ratings.

Buying from online sellers can also afford entry points into amateur expert communities that might not otherwise be visible to an academic researcher. One of my colleagues referred to these communities as “cultures of dissemination and distribution” (PA), and another pointed out that these amateur expert communities and the links between them were also an important kind of infrastructure (SL). And it can be the only market for the niche, hand-built, and specialized electronics that are core to emergent practice in subfields like DH and media archaeology. For these reasons, several of my respondents mentioned eBay and other online sellers in our discussions, but they also pointed out that gaining authorization to make purchases with a university credit card through PayPal can take some effort (AL, MAL, VHL).

Personnel

Labs often find themselves searching for people who are particularly skilled in scrounging for apparatus. Such people are often deeply embedded in expert amateur and professional networks on both local and global levels, via online discussion groups on a variety of platforms. They have experience in operating specialized and even obsolete equipment and know where to source it because of their interpersonal connections (AL). This can make them invaluable to any lab, especially when knowledge about how to operate the apparatus in the lab may have all but vanished from the general population. But there is generally no mechanism in university procurement systems to make possible the kinds of apparatus purchases that such individuals can arrange.

Interested individuals or small companies not affiliated formally with the lab or its larger institutions can also act as intermediaries in the process of scrounging (AL, MAL). In this case, the lab personnel search for ways to establish relationships with such individuals, who then scrounge on behalf of the lab. When someone has done some work for a lab and is registered as a company, it is easier to register the company in the university accounting system as a vendor, which then makes it much easier to pay them for equipment that they source from eBay, fairs, flea markets, collectors’ meets, and other events designed for collectors and enthusiasts or elsewhere (AL, MAF).

In some cases, individuals acting as second-order scroungers for labs will be collectors of the sort of apparatus that the lab requires; in others, they may be donating materials that have long been in storage or belonged to a relative (MAL, CML). In still other cases, hobbyists, enthusiasts, and philanthropists who are familiar with a lab’s mission may begin actively seeking materials to assist in lab work (MAL, CML, ALW). Sometimes a box of stuff just shows up at the lab’s door, and the contents may or may not prove to be useful (MAL, MAF, ALW). These relations can be one-off or ongoing, but many labs now list donors, regularly advertise for equipment they need, and publicly elicit donations via events (MAL, ALW).

Affect

The final topic that I want to discuss is affect—the emotional charge that circulates around scrounging as a practice. The deep difference that I noted at the outset between British and U.S. definitions of scrounging is affective in nature. I was thus not surprised to find a wide affective range in the ways that my colleagues talked about scrounging.

On one end of the spectrum, a researcher described their relationship with university accountants—their home institution’s infrastructural guardians—in terms of shame. Having to justify the purchase of apparatus that might seem like frivolous toys to people outside their field, they reflected, was a function of an imbalance in power across university disciplines. In the sciences, CFI-funded purchases would normally come from suppliers of laboratory equipment and would have criteria like a warranty, a certain number of years of projected use, and others; in the DH and media arts, there are not always such institutional markers of legitimacy on equipment purchases (AL).

On the other end of the spectrum is the joy that results from feeling personally empowered by securing and then learning how to operate complex and potentially dangerous apparatus (PA). Joy can also come from pushing the envelope of what constitutes academic research within an institutional context (CML).

Somewhere between the affective extremes of shame and satisfaction is frustration. Almost everyone whom I spoke with expressed some degree of frustration with university bureaucracy, but some also expressed frustration with anonymous donors for using their labs as a kind of charity drop-off, leaving boxes of random technology on the lab doorstep for them to sort through (MAL, ALW), or frustration with being unable to source specific pieces of equipment because of postpandemic supply chain issues (VHL). The researchers whom I spoke with also pointed out that the frustration that lab denizens can experience from having to work with randomly donated, semifunctional equipment can be transformed into satisfaction though Marcel O’Gorman’s notion of “crapentry” (xi) or crudely hacking things together in a process that requires lab members to spend intense reflective time with materials, reclaiming them and turning them into something new. Because the ultimate goal of crapentry is discursive—to get the students to write about the experience—flaws in fabrication can be forgiven because failure and flaws are part of the process (CML).

Scrounging is orthogonal to university infrastructure. This was my working hypothesis for this chapter, and it was confirmed by the researchers whom I spoke with; one said, “Being invisible to the university is important, in some ways. Not invisible to the people that are interested in us, but invisible to the structure of the university” (MAL). Others spoke about how the labor of carefully piecing together funding for a lab manager’s salary was quite essential to them—and to the actual human occupying the lab manager position—but was apparently invisible on “the faculty level or the university level, some level above us” (ALW). Another way of phrasing this, and what I hope this chapter demonstrates, is that scrounging is what Slavoj Žižek (after Donald Rumsfeld) calls an “unknown known”—something that everyone does but many disavow; something that is essential to the functioning of research labs across all fields, but largely undocumented and invisible; something that allows small labs to function economically but that university accounting is often functionally incapable of addressing. In such a case, Žižek argues, the challenge is to recognize and undertake the technique without denying it (Žižek, 95).

This is not the same as saying that scrounging should be formalized somehow. The power of scrounging lies in its ad hoc nature, what one of my colleagues calls a “positive, shared sort of leakiness” (AL). Another observed that they were able to accomplish what they had precisely because of the lack of formal support from the institution, which required them to look into options that would not otherwise have been available. At the same time, they made it clear that they didn’t want to doom future generations of material media researchers to doing everything by the seat of their pants (MAL). Scrounging functions at its peak in the spontaneous moments of generosity and brashness that occur when someone recognizes what they actually need to launch or maintain a research trajectory, rather than what they think they are supposed to need, and then figures out how to get it.

What scrounging requires is tolerance. As technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging allowing for the databasing of all university equipment become more widespread, scrounging is increasingly difficult to do. But it remains utterly necessary for the existence of the sorts of labs that the university wishes to see—labs that have the capacity to document some hitherto undocumented space of knowledge production. If university infrastructure is going to function more efficiently, sometimes its guardians need to look the other way for a moment as a researcher scoops up a box of heterogeneous oddities from the floor of a back corridor and scurries away with it, scarcely believing their luck.

Interviews Conducted for This Chapter

For convenience, the interviews conducted for this chapter are cited by the parenthetical initials prefixed here (e.g., “AL”):

(AL)

Jason Camlot (director of AmpLab East and the Spokenweb Network, Concordia University). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 29, 2022.

(ALW)

Karis Shearer (director of AMP Lab West, University of British Columbia Okanagan) and Emily Murphy (assistant director of AMP Lab and director of (Re)Media Lab, University of British Columbia Okanagan). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 24, 2022.

(CML)

Marcel O’Gorman (director of Critical Media Lab, University of Waterloo). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 23, 2022.

(MAF)

Stefan Höltgen (former curator of Media Archaeological Fundus, Humboldt University, Berlin). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 31, 2022.

(MAL)

Lori Emerson (director of Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder) and libi streigl (lab manager of Media Archaeology Lab). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 23, 2022.

(SL)

Stefan Höltgen (former curator of Signal Laboratory). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 31, 2022.

(PA)

Rick Prelinger (founder of Prelinger Archives). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 25, 2022.

(RL)

Emily Murphy (assistant director of AMP Lab, University of British Columbia Okanagan). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 24, 2022.

(VHL)

Florian Sprenger (director of Virtual Humanities Lab. Ruhr Universität Bochum) and Thomas Nyckel (Research Assistant at Virtual Humanities Lab). Zoom conversation with Darren Wershler, August 5, 2022.

Notes

1. 1. Wershler, Emerson and Parikka, 80–81.

2. 2. Star, 380.

3. 3. “Scrounge,” Merriam-Webster; Dictionary.com; Collins English Dictionary.

4. 4. “Scrounge,” Cambridge Dictionary; Collins English Dictionary.

5. 5. See http://residualmedia.net/.

6. 6. Interviews are cited in a separate section of this chapter’s bibliography. The Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of labs, centers, and other entities associated with the interviewees are cited separately in the main part of the bibliography. Interviews are not made available publicly because to allow interviewees to speak freely, they were conducted under the express condition that video recordings and transcripts would not be shared in full.

Bibliography