Madrid Digital Research Project #1

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 — posted by lorna

Buenas Dias!

Tiffany Adams, sampad’s Education Coordinator, and myself, Lorna Hirst, sampad’s Marketing Officer started our two-week placement at Medialab Prado in Madrid yesterday.

We will be joined by mac’s Visual Arts curator, Craig Ashley later this week.

We are the first of four groups of sampad staff and associated artists who are undertaking a research project to explore how we can use more digital technology in the South Asian arts sector – across programming, performance, education and communication.

Medialab Prado (MLP) is a leader in the field of digital culture. Funded by the City Council of Madrid, it is main function is to produce, research and disseminate digital culture, exploring the area where the arts, science, technology and society intersect.

It has an open public space where anyone can come and use its facitilities, work and collaborate.

They organise workshops, seminars, projects and conferences on a wide variety of themes, bringing together the expertise of people from different sectors, such computer programming, artists and architects, from all over the world, to come together, share ideas and create new work using the latest technology.

All projects are documented on the Medialab Prado wiki which all participants add to. The aim is to make all the research public, so anybody can take up the ideas started in labs here and develop it further.

Current projects include the development of a 3D printer – which prints plastic objects from a computer file. It can even produce replications on all it parts to create another identical model. The black objects in front are samples which have been printed:

They do a lot of data-visualisation work, like this one which shows the distribution of funding to different cultural organisations in Madrid:

This weekend we’ll be joining the Jugando con numeros (or Playing with Numbers)workshops, which will be looking at maths, juggling and programming in relation to interactive and mulitimedia art – so watch this space for more!

The facade of the building is one huge digital screen – here’s a film of it in action from a previous workshop called Open Up. This is part of a project to take MLP’s digital art work to public places and urban spaces.

234 frames from the Taller Open Up at Medialab-Prado, Madrid from Liisa Tervinen on Vimeo.