For 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.
CASE STUDY PRESENTATION BY MELINDA RACKHAM (RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA)
Melinda Rackham, formerly the director of the Australian Network for Art & Technology, and now curator of Emerging Art Forms and professor of Media and Communications at RMIT University (AU), gave a first case study presentation on lab models in Australia and the Australian art & technology landscape. To frame this presentation, Melinda stressed that full disclosure is important: in addition to successes, how can we share the knowledge of challenges faced and project failures? Her presentation delved into some specific cases and what was learned.
There are five major models that exist in Australia: the three-week model, the three to four-month model, the one-year model, the three year model and the Symbiotica model. ANAT has run a three week labs for 20 years, and three to four-month residencies for 15 years, in a partnership model – i.e. utilizing other organsiations venues and resources. In the three year-model, an artist with a PhD goes into a science-lab for three years to work on collaborative research. The three-week hothouse-model includes interdisciplinary work such as performers with computer scientists for example. And there’s a one year of initiated collaborative projects where you, for example, get funding from the government to do a project with more experimental or edgy content. And there are the Symbiotica research laboratories. Melinda focused on the three year-model, the three to four-month model, and the three week model.
Fishbird was a project in collaboration with the Australian Research Council and the Centre of Field Robotics. An artist worked with three robotic scientists to create a technological Greek fairytale in which a fish and a bird fall in love. They started out on this three-year project to make art and to do research into artificially intelligent robotic systems. In the resulting installation, two people could enter a space and two wheelchairs in the installation would follow them around and interact, although not entirely successfully. The major outcome of this project was a new series of networked artificially intelligent control mechanisms for the disabled and elderly in wheelchairs. But in Melinda’s opinion, the artwork itself was disappointing and counterintuitive: people don’t want to interact with wheelchairs, they just want to sit in them. However, the artist was given a contract after the project at the Centre for Social Robotics at the University, thus embedding the artist into the institution.
The second project Melinda highlighted was a wearable technology lab, a hothouse media lab that ANAT ran in 2007. It had many partners (ANAT, the Australian National University School of Art, the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA) and Craft Australia) and a high profile in Australia. It connected 20 participants from all sorts of areas: object and textile designers, sound artists, computer scientists, etc, and six facilitators. Everyone lived and worked together for three weeks. It generated a lovely sense of community. Some people made great prototypes, but not all the outcomes were fabulous as the timeframe was very short. The work itself has resonated for years afterwards, and the group of participants have formed a very tight community. Another longer term outcome was an exhibition, for which other people raised funds.
In its three to four month model, ANAT initially sought out artists and sought out labs, and put them together. This was not entirely optimal because the artists and scientists in the labs spent about two months working out how to talk to each other. The labs can misinterpret what the artists go there to do. Speaking each others language, and educating the scientists are difficult things. In the end, ANAT modified the program so that the artists and the labs had to apply collaboratively. It is important to open up the area of research to other people besides artists: social scientists, humanities researchers, anthropologists, etc.
The last project featured by Melinda was around climate change and reengineering old technologies, bush mechanics. It was difficult to get funding for this project, because it was not new or edgy scientific research. These kinds of projects are very important because you can connect the community with art-science collaborations, away from the gallery, away from the educated public. The openness and accessibility of the lab is very important because a lot of work is quite isolated from society.
A number of questions were raised after Melinda’s presentation:
Q: What were the expectations of the outcomes of ANAT?
The expectations were to build a bridge between art and science, to give artists access to research facilities, to get access to other funding models rather than art funding, which is very tight in Australia. Basically, to start the dialogue between art and science. The first example was the most successful, because it was a three year embedded residency, although the art as outcome has a different focus because it’s often over-engineered.
Q: Is the concept of innovation a realistic goal or expectation?
Innovation is so hyped in the funding procedures. The process of setting up a lab, to make a space where you throw in different resources, people and information, to see what comes out of that, that’s innovation. It’s a random conjunction.
Q: Is the buying in into the language of innovation a self-defeating trap?
It is a trap. I like to use the term emerging art form to describe new little organisms that are forming and that are not known yet. Twenty years ago, we took up the language of innovation, of industry and economics. We used the term creative industries to leverage funding opportunities in the arts however it is a trap because the art outcomes then become products.
Q: How have things changed in the last ten years in Australia?
Art science is much more acceptable and thus more visible. Symbotica for instance, is now being consumed by the University-system to provide an art science degree and facility in the University. Media labs models, initially set up by ANAT twenty years ago, were very experimental, now they are run by the Arts Council. Art science is becoming less experimental, everyone is looking for a way to innovate. The art is often getting lost in this.
