protonumerique

Hace unos días volví de Madrid, donde participé en el taller Interactivos?’ 10 en el medialab Prado, y bueno, bastantes cosas quedan por contar.

EN>> I just arrived from Madrid, taking part on the Interactivos?’ 10 workshop at the medialab Prado, and well, there are many things to tell and infos to share.

El medialab es un espacio abierto con bastantes miembros y proyectos allegados en la ciudad así como en el mundo. La gente asiste en buenas cantidades a los talleres y presentaciones, y la estructura interna del laboratorio es simple y sólida. Con poca burocracia y un equipo de producción exigante así como eficiente, resulta motivante trabajar allí.

EN>> The medialab is an open space with many members and relative projects around the city of Madrid and the globe. People assist in copious amounts to their workshops and presentations, and the inner structure of the lab is simple and robust. Very little bureaucracy and a demanding as well as efficient staff, makes it motivating to work there.

Como es normal es problemático desarrollar un proyecto organizándolo por el camino, lidiando con personal + presupuesto + convivir con diversos tipos de gente en el mismo espacio, tratando de terminar algo bien hecho en 2 semanas. Sin embargo, los resultados fueron satisfactorios y algunos proyectos encontraron una infraestructura bastante sólida par seguir su desarrollo (2 ejemplos):

EN>> As usual, there are lots of issues when developing a Project, between organizational stuff and personnel + budget + many different kinds of people trying to get something done. Results where nevertheless very attractive and some projects got a rather solid infrastructure to keep their development going (2 examples):

http://solares.medialab-prado.es

http://www.re-tag.org/

Enmarcando todo el taller, hubo una interesante dimensión de trabajo en red que unió equipos de proyecto de diversas latitudes pero tambien representantes de otros medialab, dorkboters, la gente de platoniq, y un gran número de artistas/activistas latinoamericanos (Sólo para subrayar su/nuestra mayoría). Desde ésta configuración al menos algo bien interesante surgió: Un canal de colaboración entre gente conspirando desde perspectivas sureñas en una red social “underground”: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/22816/lsl-lab-sur-lab/ Algunas otras iniciativas de trabajo en red entre laboratoristas resultaron poco claras o muy elitistas como para ser tomadas en cuenta…

EN>> On top of the whole thing there was a rather interesting networking layer that joined project teams from different latitudes but also other Medialab representatives, dorkboters, people from platoniq and a great number of latinamerican (Just to remark on their/our majority) artists / activists. From these configuration something interesting emerged> A collaboration among people working on a southern perspectives on an underground social platform: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/22816/lsl-lab-sur-lab/ Other initiatives remained rather unclear or too elitist to be taken into account.

Por el lado personal, otras buenas noticias fue el desarrollo de mi proio proyecto que estará en el post siguiente.

EN>> From a personal side, the other good news were my personal project that will be on the next post. Cheers.

Posted under ENGLISH, ESPAÑOL, EVENTS, INTERACTION, NEWS, SUBCULTURE

Lukas Vojir made a site where you can publish your own freaky Creatures done with Processing. If you’ve ever played with or done something with this programming environment, then it’s a good place to transform some of your sketches or even plan something new, and show it to the world.

I added this one last week, even though it was changed to fit the site’s requirements…here’s the one as I sent it.

Posted under CODING, ENGLISH, INTERACTION, PORTFOLIO

hills-eyes-poster

On 1977 Wes Craven released his second film, where a family of mutants capture, torture and dismember everyone who unluckily pass by their house on the hills. The slasher genre fans never stopped making flicks with similar arguments, and even a remake of this film under the same name popped out in 2006. I’ve always liked the title, perhaps because it suggests charmingly the “gaze of the thing” (Lacan-Zizej) in figure of an ever observing landscape. An uncanny contrast between the bucolic and the monstrous.

This idea originated a project that came out of the fascination for reactive structures and graphics I was undergoing at the time: If you could have all those squid or amoeba-like creatures trembling in response to data stimuli, or abstract imagery following someone through a screen in response to light, I was wondering if somehow these were foundational possibilities for a kind of environmental application, a way to interact and be aware of surveillance flows within the city in a rather subtle way.

Because video surveillance and data capture constitute a big, though hidden dimension of our lives within the urbanscape, I found that there was a lot to do around that unnoticed though unavoidable gaze. The idea, simply put, became that of generating reactive simulations out of surveillance data, and use them to provide a dynamic visualization of activity on a public space. Then, observing one of those very usual landscapes that decorate waiting spaces, offices or eating places, it seemed as good material to get hands on and explore a hybrid, pictorial, generated memory of the activity of the observed place. So  Labscape emerged as a way of exploring the basic possibilities on this direction.

I guess the idea was present since those Xerox labs and all the ambient interfaces they planned for ages in Computer Science faculties. Anyhow, the basic appropiation of a common deco object might integrate itself better into contemporary architecture, without pretending to change life itself but to reconfigure the presence and roles of information in our daily lives.

Posted under ENGLISH, INTERACTION