Media Lab Europe

» see medialabeurope.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In July 2000 the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, opened a research laboratory inside a disused Guinness warehouse in the Liberties, the oldest quarter of Dublin. The tenant was Media Lab Europe, a European twin of the MIT Media Lab, and the Irish state had put 35 million euro into starting it. It was meant to anchor the Digital Hub, an urban renewal scheme designed to pull digital media companies into a part of the city that had not had an industry since the brewing left.

The lab ran the way the Cambridge original ran. Researchers were hired and then left alone to build things with no product plan attached. EEG-driven brain-computer interfaces came out of the Dublin building, and so did the Iso-phone, a telephone you wore as a helmet while floating in a tank so that nothing existed except the call. Two Media Lab Europe projects took honorary mentions at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004. In four and a half years the researchers published 142 refereed works.

The board had a celebrity problem that solved itself. Bono sat on it at the start, then stepped down in 2002 in favor of The Edge, whose technical interests fit the place better and who, unlike Bono, actually attended the meetings. By 2004 every board paper was a financial paper. The original model assumed corporate sponsors would carry the lab once the state money thinned out, and the sponsors were not there. The dot-com collapse had removed the budget line that was supposed to pay for speculative research in Europe.

In 2000 I was sixteen, getting online over a 56k modem on TTNet, and a state-funded research institute in Dublin was never going to reach me. That is less about geography than about category. Media Lab Europe never shipped anything you could download or sign up for. The only way to encounter it was to read a paper or a news story, which is how I encountered it, twenty years after it closed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the accreditation fight ~

MIT would not accredit degrees earned at the Dublin lab. Irish academics had flagged that as a problem in the Wall Street Journal as early as 2001, and when the Irish government made accreditation a condition of any renewed funding in 2005, MIT refused again. That refusal is the technical reason the two stakeholders never settled on a second funding model, and the failure to settle is what the board cited when it closed the place.

~ what the liquidator found ~

On Friday 14 January 2005 the board announced voluntary liquidation. Ernst and Young took the file and recorded something odd in the declaration of insolvency: a surplus of 325,000 euro. The lab did not run out of money in the usual sense. It ran out of a next sentence.

Nicholas Negroponte told the Irish Times that the research in Dublin had been "beyond my wildest expectations" and that many visitors thought the Dublin work was edgier than Cambridge's. He put the blame on European companies for refusing to sponsor research and called the financial model "freakishly untimely". The reports the government commissioned when the lab first wobbled were less generous. They noted that the patent count through 2004 was very small, and anonymous accounts of the working environment reached for words like "chaos". By closing week the press was pricing the whole episode at 130 million euro.

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