Excerpts from the Universal Lab (travel pod #1)

University of Chicago alumnus Dan Peterman made this sculpture from materials that have deep connections to both the Smart Museum and the University. These spheres contain objects that were scavenged from the University’s laboratories and loading docks by a group of amateur scientific researchers who set up their own private laboratory―the Universal Lab―within a local warehouse. When the Lab closed and the contents were to be discarded, Peterman and others helped rescue much of this material. he gave some of it new life in sculptures that memorialize the spirit of independent, idiosyncratic research fostered by the Universal Lab.

Peterman has sorted Universal Lab detritus into new groupings inside “travel pods” that recall museum display cases, laboratory carts, globes, sci-fi machines, or time capsules. Their mobility echoes the nomadic nature of the materials they contain: these things have had many lives and have taken on new meanings in each context.