How to Fail at Laboratory Work

How to Fail at Laboratory Work (2026) is a multimedia installation currently in development by Julian Chehirian, in collaboration with D. Graham Burnett. The work excavates the origins of attention research through a reconstructed 1890s experimental psychology laboratory. Choreographing a reconstructed late-19th century psychoacoustic apparatus, tuning forks, oscillators, tachistoscopes, and arrays of analog instruments, the installation interrogates the modern scientific regime of attention and its impulse to parse perception into ever-finer measurable units.

Credits

• Artist — Julian Chehirian
• Collaborating Artist — D. Graham Burnett
• Sound Cage Production — Jason Ressler
• Residency — Pioneer Works, NYC

Supported by the Strother School of Radical Attention and the Institute for Sustained Attention.