Jessica Noble

Starlab

Starlab NV/SA was a multidisciplinary, blue sky research institute established to serve as an incubator for long-term and basic research in the spirit of Bell Labs, MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its primary headquarters was based in Brussels, Belgium from 1996 to 2001. A second base of operations, Starlab Barcelona, was established in 2000 and remains in operation. A recent spinoff, Neuroelectrics, commercializes several innovations developed at the lab. Starlab was intended as a "Noah's Ark," a utopian environment for some of the world's most brilliant and creative scientists, researchers and engineers. Its research mottos included "Deep Future" and "a place where one hundred years means nothing." At its peak, Starlab employed over 130 scientists from thirty-six nationalities. Starlab projects included art, artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics, intelligent clothing, materials science, protein folding, neuroscience, new media, nanoelectronics, quantum computation, quantum information, robotics, stem cell research, theoretical physics—e.g., the possibility of time travel—transarchitecture and wearable computing. These research lines were grouped under the acronym "BANG," or Bits, Atoms, Neurons, Genes, later adopted by MIT Media Lab in 2002. The lab sponsored and collaborated with other labs and universities, organizing several international conferences and open research symposia.