Culture Lab was a multidisciplinary symposium series initiated and directed by Brian Boigon that ran from 1991 to 1994. Held in the back of a club in Toronto, each of the twelve iterations of the program prompted guests from diverse fields of cultural production to engage with a theme anchored in the history and theory of the digital. The events used the codes of the entertainment and nightlife industries to break from the confined parochialism of academia in a way that marked the wider migration of culture amidst the digital turn. Presented for the first time, the video recordings, planning notes, and computer graphics from Boigon’s archive offer insights into the Culture Lab ideation and impact. By rediscovering this pivotal moment in the evolution of digital culture, the exhibition reveals rich networks of intellectual connections across fields and provides an insightful perspective on the relationship between digital technologies, media, and architectural discourse.

Brian Boigon is an artist/data-architect and philosopher based in Toronto. He holds a bachelor’s of architecture from the University of Toronto and studied at the Ontario College of Art. Boigon is an associate professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where he runs the Inner Outer Space Lab. His work spans diverse disciplines, including quantum mechanics, locomotive dynamical systems, science fiction, cartoon animation, and computational script hacking. Boigon’s projects have transitioned from gallery to print, symposia, video games, film, and virtual environments. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as P3 Alternative Museum (Tokyo); Fodor Museum (Amsterdam); The Museum of Modern Art PS1 (New York); Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); Camden Arts Centre (London); and Kunstverein Stuttgart (Stuttgart). His published works include Speed Reading Tokyo (‎P3 Alternative Museum ,1990); Culture Lab 1 (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); We Have Impact (Memoirs Publications, 2014); and The Interopera (2017). Boigon is also the donor of the Culture Lab archives held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualize and simulate how algorithms, models, and notions of '“real time”' govern urban life. He is also director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation, and media. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research based and multimediatic. Lotfi-Jam's work has been collected by The Centre Pompidou and the Sharjah Art Foundation, and he is a recipient of the 2022 Architectural League Prize, The Architectural League of New York, as well as recent grants and support for his research from the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, M+/Design Trust, and The Shed, where he was an inaugural Open Call Artist. He has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture, MAXXI, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Seoul Architecture Biennial, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and elsewhere. His coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture is an international research center and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. The institution is a leading voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public understanding and expanding thought and debate on architecture, its history, theory, and practice, and its role in society today.