On September 5th Angela Plohman from BALTAN Laboratories will participate in the panel “Labs as repair shops?” as part of the Pixelspaces conference at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz.

“If labs want to continue to lodge a claim to design excellence that they have rightfully earned, we’ll have to deal with the world around us. Incessantly progressing global warming, the widening of the so-called digital gap between urban areas and regions with lower-grade infrastructure and between industrialized and developing countries are just a few of the scenarios on which labs are expected to take a stand. The labs of the future will (have to) deploy their entire creative potential in order to utilize technology as a means of bringing about advances in other sectors (like social welfare and education) that have a major impact on culture.”

With Horst Hörtner (AT), Angela Plohman (CA), Masa Inakage (JP), Zachary Lieberman (US) and Gary McDarby (UK).

For more information, see: http://new.aec.at/repair/en/program/future-factory/pixelspaces/#post-1257

BALTAN Laboratories launches its new publication The Future of the Lab, a collection of essays and statements that challenge and debate future strategies and forms of the laboratory (or media lab). Stemming from the international expert meeting The Future of the Lab held in Eindhoven in 2009, the book highlights some of the issues raised during those sessions and continues the conversation, acting as a context for future connections and action.

The publication features contributions by Andreas Broeckmann, Eyal Fried, Nik Gaffney, Eva De Groote, Horst Hörtner, the LABtoLAB network, Melinda Rackham, Joost Rekveld, Edward A. Shanken, and others.

In collaboration with 2018Brabant Cultural Capital of Europe | Candidate

Opening remarks by Geurt Grosfeld
Culture broker, Breda, 2018Brabant Cultural Capital of Europe | Candidate (NL)

With an introduction by Angela Plohman
Director, BALTAN Laboratories, Eindhoven (NL)

And a toast by Floor van Spaendonck, Director, Virtueel Platform (NL)

Location: E-CULTURE FAIR 2010
Dortmunder U – Centre for Art & Creativity
Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse
D-44137 Dortmund
Germany

The book launch is part of the BALTAN Laboratories international Future of the Lab presentation at the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010.

Flux/S takes the transformation of Strijp-S from the former – restricted access – Philips industrial estate to a cultural and dynamic city centre as its inspiration for a cross-disciplinary arts manifestation. To mark the first ten years of this long-term development of 27 hectares of dismantled industrial heritage and wasteland, Flux/S invites artists to respond to these developments through visual arts and performance, interventions and dance, architecture, music, new media and poetry & literature. The developments on the site reflect the topical emphasis and practical ‘playground’ nature of the place, resulting in an ever-changing arts festival.

In the second episode in 2010, Flux/S will focus on draft structures, choices and proposals in the broadest sense. As the conceptual and architectural aspects are becoming less abstract in the development of Strijp S, the contours of projected social behaviour point to the basic interpretation of essential conditions. Flux/S – Drafts Establishing Future examines the how and why of these conditions, their underlying mechanisms and the shapes they might take. Invited artists offer alternative approaches, factual and fantastic structures and models, and unexpected opposites, correlations and influences.

BALTAN Laboratories is pleased to collaborate with Flux/S in the presentation of 12_Series by Telcosystems, developed at BALTAN Laboratories under the umbrella of BALTAN’s Poeme Numerique programme.

Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann

On Wednesday, 25 August 2010, ISEA2010 RUHR presents an extensive excursion programme. The conference programme pauses for the day to offer all participants the opportunity to take part in these excursions. One of the excursions is hosted by BALTAN Laboratories in collaboration with 2018Brabant Cultural Capital of Europe | Candidate.

Registration at: http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/programme/excursions

This one-day excursion introduces participants to the history and contemporary context of creativity and technological innovation of the Dutch Brabant region. The excursion will take place at two locations in Eindhoven: Strijp-S, a 66-acre former Philips industrial terrain, once known as the ‘forbidden city’ and now the largest urban development project in the Netherlands; and the High Tech Campus, an R&D ecosystem of more than 90 companies and institutes, and more than 8,000 people. It is an opportunity to get a sampling of a number of unique projects and developments from around the region, ranging from an ambitious experiment with RFID technology by the STRP festival in Eindhoven to the CAD/CAM residency programme of the European Ceramic Workcentre in Den Bosch to the open innovation context of High Tech Campus Eindhoven.

Schedule:

Morning

Short presentations at BALTAN Laboratories by organisations such as the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Incubate Festival (Tilburg), STRP Festival (Eindhoven), Digitale Werkplaats (Den Bosch), Edhv (Eindhoven), European Ceramic Workcentre (Den Bosch), MAD Emergent Art Centre (Eindhoven), e-pulse festival (Breda) and others. These presentations will be followed by a guided tour of Strijp-S and lunch on the terrain, with live music by Lunapark.

Afternoon

Visit to the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, with an introduction by Frans Schmetz, Managing Director of the HTC, and presentations by Koen Snoeckx and Lindsay Brown from the Holst Centre (an independent open-innovation R&D centre that develops generic technologies for Wireless Autonomous Sensor Technologies and Flexible Electronics), and Professor Emile Aarts and Dorothea Seebode from Philips Research.

We end the day with a drink at the HTC before heading back to Dortmund.

Registration

There are reserved seats only. For all excursions registration is obligatory.
Please register online until 13 August 2010 at excursions[at]isea2010ruhr.org or from 20 to 24 August 2010 at the ISEA2010 RUHR Registration Desk.

Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann

On a hot, hot day in Eindhoven, BALTAN Laboratories and workshop leaders Wendy Van Wynsberghe and Peter Westenberg (Constant, Brussels, BE), with Julien Ottavi (APO33, Nantes, FR), hosted Angela de Weijer, Olga Mink, Danielle Roberts, Jan van den Dobbelsteen, Mini Smulders, Sarie Hermens, Sarah Matot, Niels Bergmans and Lucas van der Velden for a one-day Electro-Magnetic Field (EMF) Orchestra Workshop.

After a morning and good part of the afternoon spent building and designing and winding and soldering their own EMF antennae (and a number of trips to the electronics store to remedy a slight technical difficulty with the amplifiers), participants took to the city for a collective intervention on a walk between Strijp-S and the centre of Eindhoven.

Wendy van Wynsberghe made a number of sound recordings during the intervention in Eindhoven that day:
http://sound.constantvzw.org/EMF_at_Baltan_Eindhoven/

[SND] EMF_50hz.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:07 785K -> this is an add display in which the image switches by turning around, just in front of PSV
[SND] EMF_PSV.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:25 531K -> this was an rfid scanner (to enter) next to the doorbells of PSV -> while hearing the emf someone of the group also pushed on some doorbells…
[SND] EMF_camera.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:10 1.1M -> the first group EMF recording of the camera of Peter
[SND] EMF_cash_machine.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:13 3.5M -> what does taking some cash out of the wall sound like
[SND] EMF_parking.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:22 1.1M -> the sound of the place where you pay your parking ticket
[SND] EMF_tunnel.ogg 05-Jul-2010 17:28 5.3M -> the longest group recording, where everyone participated, in the tunnel with the escalator going to the motorbike/bicycle parking. The sound you hear is mostly the sounds of the lights

Julien Ottavi also made some great recordings:
http://www.apo33.org/records/doku.php?id=electromagnetic_recordings

In the evening, participants came back for more in-depth presentations of the work of  Wendy, Peter and Julien. We were also joined by almost 40 participants of the Autonomy Summer School hosted by the Van Abbemuseum and Onomatopee in Eindhoven. Jane Hardjono wrote up a report of the evening on her blog The Dossier.

For more images from the day, see Constant’s gallery:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=33280

Or more from BALTAN Laboratories: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baltanlaboratories/sets/72157624436217798/

Thanks to Wendy, Peter and Julien and to all of the great participants! And thanks to Clare Butcher for bringing all of the wonderful summer school participants to BALTAN!

As part of the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010, BALTAN Laboratories is organising and hosting a presentation of Dutch, Belgian and German media art laboratories, brought together around three shared themes. This is an international presentation of BALTAN’s Future of the Lab research and one of the 12 projects from the Netherlands at the ECF. The labs presented at the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010 include: BALTAN Laboratories (Eindhoven), Constant (Brussels), FoAM (Brussels), Labsa (Dortmund), OKNO (Brussels), The Patching Zone (Rotterdam), timelab (Ghent), the Urban Reality Lab of the Waag Society (Amsterdam), and V2_Lab (Rotterdam).

The E-CULTURE FAIR 2010 will be showcasing innovative projects in the cross-over fields of creative industry, research, education and media art from August 23 – 25 on the second floor of the Dortmunder U – Centre for Art and Creativity. It is the first step of the envisaged long-term cooperation between the three partners, namely Virtueel Platform of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, BAM of Ghent, Flanders, Belgium, and medienwerk.nrw of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, organised by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (Dortmund, DE). In line with previous events held in the Netherlands since 2000, the E-CULTURE FAIR is being presented for the first time in Germany as a partner event and cooperation project of ISEA2010 RUHR, 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art.

For many years now, digitization and networking have been changing our social interactions, the working environment, cultural exchanges and ways of making and engaging with art. By now the possibilities of digital media are integrated as a matter of course into daily life.
Topical examples of this common electronic culture are social networks like YouTube or Facebook, the widespread use of platforms like Twitter and the ubiquity of smartphones. Based on these examples, the E-CULTURE FAIR can be envisioned as a communicative laboratory, a workshop in which in an experiental manner new ideas are presented, which may soon become well- known concepts for many people. The E-CULTURE FAIR is aimed at professionals in the field of new media, as well as to anyone who is curious about what electronic culture will look like tomorrow.

During the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010, in an exhibition and trade fair environment – in workshops and through live presentations – international creatives and artists are presented with an opportunity to showcase their latest works and to anticipate future collaborations in the context of electronic culture. The intention is to display the various creative applications in the digital feld, and to debate social and cultural transformations and the current state of their artistic refection. The E-CULTURE FAIR 2010 can be experienced in a playful manner while also fostering an in-depth exchange in discussion forums between creative industry, research and media art.

As a follow up to the international expert meeting The Future of the Lab held in Eindhoven (NL) in 2009, BALTAN Laboratories hosts a session at ISEA2010 RUHR around the changing and future roles and forms of the media lab. In order to build on the experiences and challenges shared during the meeting in Eindhoven, this session will take a number of specific key issues that were raised and delve more deeply into them at ISEA2010 RUHR. Five representatives from media art labs around Europe have been invited to respond to these themes. Following their statements, session participants will break into smaller working groups led by the respondents to further explore the proposed topics. The results of these working groups will take the shape of recommendations or proposals for action to pursue in the next steps of The Future of the Lab research, aiming to facilitate continued knowledge sharing between labs.

In collaboration with 2018Brabant Cultural Capital of Europe | Candidate.

Please note: this session is aimed at people who work in, for or with labs.

Location: Volkshochschule Dortmund, L 102b
Dortmund, Germany

Topics

1) Knowledge sharing & working within a network of labs
(keywords: LABtoLAB, resources needed for knowledge sharing, documentation, working within an ecology of labs, strengthening capacity through resource sharing, ownership)

Respondent: Attila Bujdoso / Kitchen Budapest, HU
Attila Bujdosó architect, research supervisor at Kitchen Budapest. He is member of KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre, organizer of Pecha Kucha Night Budapest. Formerly he worked as an architect for ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd] on the CET Budapest project. He graduated as an architect but he wants to design not only buildings but the whole world. He is especially interested in the field where technology, culture and society meets and interacts, a field that he describes as webitics. Attila never likes to be bored. He is addicted to coffee, large cities and the Internet.
www.bujatt.com/
www.kitchenbudapest.hu

2) Communicating artistic research to a wider audience & the significance of cultural mediators
(keywords: translation, transformation, accessibility, communication, mediation, teaching, sharing, “a lab is not a mini-fort”, dissemination of lab research)

Respondent: Victoria Tillotson / iShed, Bristol, UK
Victoria joined iShed in 2008 to take on the role of Project Manager. She has since produced a number of projects that support creative technology research and development. Highlights include R&D commissioning scheme & publication Media Sandbox (2009); the Creative Technology Network; and a host of events that seek to enhance discourse around technology and creative practice. Victoria graduated in Fine Art and began her career as New Media Coordinator at Ffotogallery. She has a passion for artists’ moving image so in her recent spare time, worked with Safle and artist Jennie Savage to curate the Portable Cinema Project (2008). Victoria has also worked as an Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University and is currently on Ffotogallery’s Board of Directors.
http://installtechnicalculture.tumblr.com/
www.ished.net

3) On issues of space and openness
(keywords: “openly agnostic towards technology”, temporality, fluidity, passing on, “open doesn’t always mean accessible”)

Respondent: Nik Gaffney  / FoAM
Nik Gaffney is a founding member of FoAM, where he operates as a tangental generalist, designer, programmer and sous-chef. He prefers breadth-first searches and bottom-up design; randomness as a strategy, and depth where required; dynamic to static; Lisp to C; realtime rather than recorded; and complexity over the complicated. He is also part of ‘farmersmanual’, a pan-European, net-based, multisensory disturbance conglomerate.  {buzzing, clicking, destructuring and ecstactic flickering}. Partially Luminous.
www.fo.am

4) Transforming conditions & new ways of working: on the relationship between artists & the lab environment
(keywords: have conditions changed significantly?, how can labs best respond to artists’ needs?, mutual benefit, residency formats, from hardware to (human) software, flexibility)

Respondents: Lucas van der Velden / Geert Mul, BALTAN Laboratories
Lucas van der Velden is a Dutch artist and director of the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam. Van der Velden studied Image and Sound at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and currently working and living in Rotterdam. He is a founding member of the audiovisual collective Telcosystems and a member of the artistic board at BALTAN Laboratories since 2007, a new facility for artistic research, located in Eindhoven
www.sonicacts.com
www.telcosystems.net
www.baltanlaboratories.org

Geert Mul studied at the Academy of the Arts in Arnhem where he eventually specialised in computer animation. To become financially independent, in the mid-90s, Mul started to create video screenings combined with pop music, which marks his first steps as a VJ performer. These events grew into interactive video and audio environments in a variety of settings: museums, pop festivals, public space and concert halls. From 2000 on, Mul made site-specific installations and artworks in Holland, U.S.A., Italy, Spain, India, Japan, China and South Africa. Geert Mul is represented by gallery RONMANDOS Amsterdam, and is a member of the artistic board of BALTAN Laboratories, Eindhoven.
www.geertmul.nl

“You are 4.3 billion kilometres away from the nearest human, what would you like to do?”

Naked on Pluto is a text-based multiplayer game on Facebook. You are stranded on the planet Pluto, naked, alone. Your world is empty except for fragments of data, objects relating to your past life on social networks – but seen through the distorted lens of the game world. You can explore this world, at first alone and later in the game you’ll be able to invite and interact with friends. You can add and manipulate objects you encounter, interact with others and bots. Once you enter deeper into this world and web of data, you become aware of increasing complexity, characters appear you may recognise – are they friends or animated bits of data? Information is substituted and modified in subtle ways. Is it possible to remember what was ever real in the first place?

The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go. Story and play are combined with an investigation on how exposed we are on social networks, and how our data are being used.

The project will be developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboratories and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. They will be in residence at BALTAN Laboratories in October 2010. The project is licensed Copyleft. The research and development process will be documented and can be followed at http://pluto.kuri.mu

Naked on Pluto will be presented as part of the Funware exhibition at MU in Eindhoven in November, at HMKV in Dortmund and as part of the Piksel festival 2010.

Biographies

Dave was raised on an early education in weaving, bell ringing and 8bit computers, and is now dedicated to changing the world with free software, live animation and noise. He works as a self employed artist/programmer, mainly working with the FoAM art laboratory and performs as part of slub – a livecoding band. He creates installations, open source software and teaches workshops around the themes of games, music and the lisp programming language. Past work includes computer graphics for games, feature film special effects and machine vision research for Sony’s EyeToy group.

Marloes de Valk (NL) is a Dutch (software) artist. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theatre and narratives of digital processes. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Europe, teaches workshops, gives lectures and has published articles on Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture and art (a.o. in the Contemporary Music Review and Archive 2020. Sustainable archiving of born digital cultural content). She is editor of FLOSS + Art (OpenMute, 2008) as well as the Digital Artists’ Handbook (folly and GOTO10, 2008). She is a former member of artist collective GOTO10, and has helped develop the puredyne GNU/Linux distribution and make art festival. She is currently collaborating with Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths on a social gaming project.

Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician and media researcher. In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS+Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production. Since 2009, he is mentor and co-supervisor of study for the networked media branch of the Media Design and Communication Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL). Aymeric is also an MPhil/PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, researching online art and design communities, free culture licenses and resources, and distributed collaboration.

On June 30th from 18:00-20:00, we will take a look at the results of the EMF Orchestra workshop taking place during the day, with workshop leaders Wendy Van Wynsberghe and Peter Westenberg from Constant in Brussels, as well as participants from the workshop. Julien Ottavi, from APO33 in Nantes, will also join us to reflect on this workshop in relation to his electromagnetic spectrum research, as well as participate in a discussion around copyleft practices with Wendy and Peter.

Location: BALTAN Laboratories, Glaslaan 2, SWA building, 8th floor, Strijp-S, Eindhoven, NL
Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Entrance: Free

Biographies

Wendy Van Wynsberghe
Wendy Van Wynsberghe works with open hardware, conductive textiles, recycled electronic materials and a DIY approach to interactive installations and audio works. She studied Germanic Philology and electroacoustic music composition. She developed the radio programme ‘storing’ on FM Brussel and produced several independent sound works. Within Constant vzw she mainly focusses on Linux audio (among other things) and on the electronic recycling workshops “Ellentriek”.

Peter Westenberg
Peter Westenberg creates collective performances, short films, audio walks and multimedia projects. His intervention series Routes + Routines researches the conditions of public space, social, virtual and urban networks. He studied Art History as well as Visual Arts. At the moment he is working on the Schaarbeekse Taal (the language of Schaarbeek), a series of local audio interventions and radio broadcasts in Schaarbeek / Brussels. At Constant vzw his focus is mainly on Open Source Video.

Constant is an interdisciplinary workspace, established in Brussels in 1997. It is dedicated to the culture and ethics of the Web and electronic media. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way in which technological infrastructures, data exchange and software influence our daily lives. Core areas of work include free software, alternatives to copyright and (cyber)feminism.
http://www.constantvzw.org

Julien Ottavi
A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and body performances. Since 1997, he develops a composition work using voice and its transformation through computer. Active developer of audio/visual programs with Puredata, he has also developed since many years DIY electronics (radio transmitters, oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, video transmitters…etc) in the perspective of knowledge sharing on technological development. Main developer for the Gnu/Linux operating system APODIO for digital art and A/V & streaming diffusion. His practices is not limited to the art spheres but crosses different fields from technological development to philosophy / theoretical research, biomimetic analysis & experimentation. Since many years he reflects on the relations between experimental practices and collective practices within the creation of autonomous collective groups, putting in question the authorship strategy of the “art ideology”.
http://www.noiser.org

Workshop leaders: Peter Westenberg and Wendy Van Wynsberghe, Constant vzw, Brussels

Participants: 15 (maximum)
Fee: 20 Euro (lunch, drinks and material will be provided)

To register: please send an email to griet[AT]baltanlaboratories.org by June 23rd with the subject line: EMF Workshop.

Location: BALTAN Laboratories
Glaslaan 2, SWA-8
5616 LW Eindhoven
The Netherlands

A workshop in two parts led by Wendy Van Wynsberghe and Peter Westenberg, two core members of Constant, a Brussels-based organisation for art and media. During the first part of the workshop, participants will build their own EMF antennae that make electromagnetic fields audible. After that, participants will perform a collective urban intervention in the Eindhoven city centre.

WORKSHOP AGENDA

10:00 – 13:00
Building EMF antennae.
The day will start off with a presentation and introduction to EMF to contextualise the walk and the workshop.
Then each participant builds his/her own antennae.
Materials will be provided.

13:00 – 14:00
Lunch

14:00 – 17:00
EMF Orchestra: Collective performance in Eindhoven.
Experience the city as an electromagnetic audio landscape. Cars, wires, cables, street lights, security installations, and many other electronic devices saturate our urban environment with electromagnetic fields. Walking through the city, we will scan and make these fields audible. Dissonant harmonies will be improvised through the combination of different antennae.

18:00 – 20:00
In the evening, the workshop leaders and participants are invited to share their experiences from the workshop with the public during a BALTAN Session at the lab. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

(Images courtesy of Constant)

BIOGRAPHIES

Wendy Van Wynsberghe
Wendy Van Wynsberghe works with open hardware, conductive textiles, recycled electronic materials and a DIY approach to interactive installations and audio works. She studied Germanic Philology and electroacoustic music composition. She developed the radio programme ‘storing’ on FM Brussel and produced several independent sound works. Within Constant vzw she mainly focusses on Linux audio (among other things) and on the electronic recycling workshops “Ellentriek”.

Peter Westenberg
Peter Westenberg creates collective performances, short films, audio walks and multimedia projects. His intervention series Routes + Routines researches the conditions of public space, social, virtual and urban networks. He studied Art History as well as Visual Arts. At the moment he is working on the Schaarbeekse Taal (the language of Schaarbeek), a series of local audio interventions and radio broadcasts in Schaarbeek / Brussels. At Constant vzw his focus is mainly on Open Source Video.

Constant is an interdisciplinary workspace, established in Brussels in 1997. It is dedicated to the culture and ethics of the Web and electronic media. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way in which technological infrastructures, data exchange and software influence our daily lives. Core areas of work include free software, alternatives to copyright and (cyber)feminism.

More information: http://constantvzw.org