Foreword to "Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe: The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency"

This publication aggregates materials related to The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency, organized in partnership with the collective-in-residence the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC)—an experimental school based in New York City—and with the support of the Simons Foundation. The twelve-month residency builds on the tradition of the program series called The Kitchen L.A.B. (Language, Art, Bodies), which ran from 2012–2020. Revolving around a specific artistic or cultural term each year, the L.A.B. series convened artists and writers across disciplines for hybrid panel discussion/performance events, during which the participants unpacked how the meaning of such terms shifts over time. The L.A.B. Research Residency expands this format by bringing together a group of creative practitioners for a durational period of research and dialogue around the shared reference of The Kitchen’s Archives. The 2022–2023 cycle of the residency set out to honor The Kitchen’s new media origins by focusing on the histories of art, science, and technology represented in The Kitchen’s archival holdings of performance recordings, program ephemera, posters, oral histories, and more dating from the year of its founding, 1971, through to the present. As the collective-in-residence and as partners in this investigation, the co-directors of SFPC brought with them their commitment to interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware, and critical theory through programs that challenge the capitalistic, heteronormative, and patriarchal canons of social and computer sciences.