The Integrated Arts Media Lab (singular) began in 1994, when the units within the Faculty of Fine Arts (Art, Music, Drama, Dance) decided that they should pool their resources and have a shared digital facility that was better than any of them could build on their own.
The original Main Lab was located in Craigie Hall F208 in the space currently occupied by the Doolittle Theatre (the current entrance at F206 was the entrance to the staff office and server room). The digital work Music had done in F206 was superseded by this new Lab. Art kept a small lab going in AB 611 with older computers, mostly for digital photography. Eventually, when demand began to grow for our facilities, the Lab in AB 611 became a secondary lab, used by Drama to teach drafting in addition to its Art uses.
All this changed in 2006, when we moved into our current facilities. Since there was clearly a need for concurrent spaces, we developed one Main Lab and one Smaller Lab with similar capacities to our previous spaces in Craigie Hall and the Art Building. These new labs occupied spaces previously used as the Art Department Office (Small Lab) and Slide Library (Main Lab). This move gave us much-improved networking within the building (although it would be a few years before the link to the campus network sped up) and the opportunity for research-level work.
The scope of what the IAML does has grown greatly over time. We now focus a lot on services, such as photo printing and equipment loans. It’s still our job to make certain that the Labs run well for classes and drop-in use, but the breadth of apps we support continues to grow. We don’t know what the IAML will look like over the next 25 years, but we suspect it will still focus on providing Arts Technology services, particularly in the Apple space, to students and faculty.
