If one projects a MONDRIAAN painting on the wall, and use a computer to generate the depth lines according to the position of the viewer (tracked by a sensor), a virtual depth will be visible.
The case of TESLA – Report from The Future of the Lab Day 1
January 28th, 2010In October 2008, the TESLA-Berlin association organised a workshop in Berlin called Labs for Art and Media. They invited a number of international media labs to come to Berlin to share three days of discussions around how artistic practice is changing today in relation to media, and how art labs, workspaces, production spaces and art institutions can best support artists in pursuing their work. In the context of The Future of the Lab, BALTAN invited Andreas Broeckmann, member of the TESLA curatorial team, to reflect on the outcomes of this workshop and on the experience of TESLA in Berlin from 2005-2007.
CASE STUDY PRESENTATION BY ANDREAS BROECKMANN (U-CENTRE FOR ART AND CREATIVITY, DORTMUND, GERMANY)
The idea of the TESLA Media Art Lab in Berlin was, essentially, to create a space where artists could work. We had some funding and a building, and we opened up for residencies (lasting from a few weeks to a year) to work on specific projects which were proposed by the artists directly. TESLA informally looked at the proposals, and then invited the artists. From the residencies, we created the core of our public programme, running four days a week. We were, in retrospect, surprised how much we could do in three years. One of the big projects was a series of symposia and performances with the artist Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, who is interested in the history of electricity connected with Nikola Tesla, which made it a perfect key project for the TESLA lab. After two and a half years of operations, TESLA had to close down: the funding was pulled and the building was taken away. Read the rest of this entry »
Learning from past models – Report from The Future of the Lab Day 1
January 28th, 2010For three days in November and December 2009 BALTAN Laboratories was pleased to have 35 participants from media art labs and programmes from around the world join us here in Eindhoven for the expert meeting The Future of the Lab to challenge and debate future strategies and forms of the laboratory (or media lab) and the importance of research and production spaces for artists and creative professionals working with technology. It was a unique opportunity to bring all of these initiatives together, existing and emerging structures as well as diverse stakeholders from a number of sectors, to evaluate how we can strengthen our network and evaluate our practice.
The program for the meeting was intensive and allowed us to touch on a number of themes in depth over those 3 days through a keynote lecture, short case study presentations, a mapping session and working groups [download pdf program brochure 5.4 MB]. Questions we addressed included: What are the current conditions shaping the way we work and share our knowledge and experience with others? What does openness mean to future labs? How can we make research accessible and exciting for a larger public? What can we learn from research culture, both past and present? How can we most effectively work across disciplines and sectors? The diversity of participants and contexts, goals and experiences presented a broad spectrum of perspectives and this was a fruitful start to coming to new forms of collaboration, knowledge sharing and a stronger network of practitioners to better support the creative people working in this field.
After a first introduction and a tour of the Strijp-S terrain (thanks to Robert Klinkenberg, Trudo, BROET, and the Machinekamer), we brought everyone together for a first plenary gathering around the history of the media lab and past models, looking at two specific cases: Australian lab models as presented by Melinda Rackham and the TESLA Media Art Lab in Berlin presented by Andreas Broeckmann. Read the rest of this entry »
Mapping Session – The Future of the Lab
January 25th, 2010As part of our reporting and documentation from the expert meeting The Future of the Lab, we’re delving into the participatory mapping session that took place on the second day, organised by the Social Spaces research group. The goal was to explore the future of the media lab. Participants were asked to discuss how the lab was changing, how these changes could be pushed in an interesting direction and how the collaboration between different labs could be facilitated. The research group devised an open and extendible set of icons allowing participants to make their thoughts explicit in a visual, verbal and tactile way in the form of a map situated in space and time.
Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann
Liesbeth Huybrechts and the Social Spaces research group put up an extensive report on the mapping session here. Below you will find video of the final summaries of the 4 mapping groups.
Flick Flock at Campus Party Brazil
January 22nd, 2010Flick Flock, by Wendy Ann Mansilla and Jordi Puig, developed last year at BALTAN Laboratories in collaboration with Piksel, will be shown at Campus Party Brazil in Sao Paulo from January 25-31, 2010.
Campus Party is an annual event that brings together thousands of participants with their computers from all over the world in order to share their concerns and experiences and carry out a whole range of different activities related to computers, communications and new technologies.
View on Vimeo.
