The Critical Media Lab Basel (CML) is one of the two central labs of the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. The CML is an idea, a set of activities and a community of students & researchers working at the intersections of design, media, arts & technology. It is a space of possibility where a plurality of processes, practices, and resistances are channeled towards collective projects that revolve around critical media.
Takeover of the Critical Media Lab by the Master's programme during HGK Open House 2024. 
CML Colloquium session «More than a Feeling: Heavy Processing Methods for Trans-Feminist and Queer Research» with T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault in February 2024. 
Cover image for one of the regular CML Colloquiums (Sonic Amateurs Club, October 2024). 
Cover image for the book launch of «Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence» with editors Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting at CML, 2022.
Our understanding of critical media is broad, and it is empirical and relational rather than conceptual. Subfields of media studies, such as environmental or elemental media studies have radically expanded the field of what can count as ‘a medium,’ conceiving substances, plants, environments, bodies, and even the Earth as communicative substrates. Here, the concept of mediation is disentangled from specific content or media (such as television or algorithms) and reconceived as a function that something acquires or is relegated to. No media are critical per se—they become critical in a specific temporal and geographical context, and for specific groups of people.
The „critical“ in Critical media Lab means:
- indispensable, crucial, decisive, having an agenda
- of, relating to, or being a threshold, a turning point, an important juncture
- life-affirming: what’s needed, what’s at stake.
