Once upon a time, prior to the formation of the Integrated Arts Media Lab in Craigie Hall (1994), both Music and Art had their own small computer labs — Art in AB 611 and Music in CH F206.
Inspired by the Artists they studied, the Art Department lab identified their computers by name. Those names were:
- Alberti
- Bernini
- Cellini
- Degas
- Ensor
- Fuseli
- Giacometti
- Hieronymous
You’ll note a pattern there: the names chosen started with the first 8 letters of the alphabet.
In 1993, the Faculty of Fine Arts (which included Drama and Dance as well) decided that they would be better off combining their resources to make one good lab to share instead of continuing to fund separate departmental labs. And thus, the IAML was born. It open in the Fall of 1994 in Craigie Hall F208, where the Music Resource Centre had been located.
But when the IAML opened, Art still kept around the computers they had in AB 611 so that students didn’t have to hike all the way down to Craigie Hall F Block to just use Photoshop, for instance. This lab was technically a part of the new IAML operations, but most of the day-to-day support was done by Jim Williams, the Photography Technician. The station naming convention stayed the same. When a ninth station was added, it was dubbed Ingres, keeping with the same tradition. The Art Building lab was filled with “hand-me-down” computers, now being handed down from the IAML Craigie Hall lab. So if you wanted the good computers, you still needed to go to Craigie Hall.
The Faculty had always planned for a second IAML lab, and by the early 2000s, it was clear that this was necessary, as Drama started teaching Computer-Assisted Drafting in the Art Building Lab because there were scheduling conflicts in the Craigie Hall lab. To help meet this need, a 10th station was added, which we named “Johnston” (both as a hat tip to the artist from the Group of Seven as well as the late Professor Emeritus of Music, Richard Johnston) and upgraded some old machines to tide us over until we could fund that lab better. At this point, the IAML staff started doing more of the setup and support, with Jim being the point person in the building.
The New Era
In 2004–5, the Faculty of Fine Arts directed their Development Officer, Ian Warwick, to put together a proposal to build a proper second Lab in order to approach potential donors for funding and naming rights. This effort was successful in getting the support of NBC Universal Canada to fund what became known as the NBC Universal Multimedia Lab or NUML. The 10-seat lab in the Art Building now became the high-end lab, to be used for more intense computing tasks, but also for the classes that had been using the hand-me-down lab prior to this.
Because this new lab was clearly no longer just for Art students, the idea of attaching Art-centric names to the stations didn’t seem right. Some thought went in to changing some of the names to performing artists in consideration of those other disciplines, but in the end, the decision was made to simplify them back to their core: just letters of the alphabet. While we could have also just changed them to more numbers, keeping the smaller lab as letters seemed to be a way to both distinguish the space and keep a small nod to its history.
When the donor naming rights agreement expired and no subsequent donor was found, we changed the name of the NUML to the IAML Small Lab, the name of the IAML to the IAML Main Lab, and the name of the combined operation to the Integrated Arts Media Labs. But the reason the Main Lab stations use numbers (like the Craigie Hall lab did) and the Small Lab stations use letters is all about the history of the the two labs.
