The Virtual Laboratory is a digitalization project devoted to the history of the experimentalization of life. Its main focus is the interaction between the life sciences, arts and architecture, media and technology. It consists of two related parts, an archive and the laboratory. As an archive, the VL offers numerous scans of texts and images concerning experiments, instruments, buildings, scientists and artists between 1830 and 1930 as well as categorized datasheets derived from this holdings. The laboratory constitutes a platform where historians of science, culture and technology as well as students can present their recent research on the experimentalization of life and explore new modes of writing history.
Joan Didion wrote in "The White Album," her book on the era, that "many people I know in Los Angeles believed the '60s ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969." Sketchy details began emerging that day from a gruesome murder scene in exclusive Benedict Canyon. The fenced estate had been the home at various times of Henry Fonda, Candice Bergen and, more recently, Roman Polanski, the hot young director of the previous year's film sensation, Rosemary's Baby