Consulting • Lalya Gaye • Teaching

Inclusiva-net 2 at Medialab Prado

Posted by Lalya on 21 March 2008⋅ Comment⋅ Share⋅  Email ⋅  Print
Tags: digital networks, Interaction Design, International, Locative Media, physical space, Urban Space, Workshops

The 2nd Inclusiva-net meeting on Digital Networks and Physical Space took place at the Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain earlier this month. This workshop gathered a number of participants from all corners of the world who got help developing projects they had submitted. I (Lalya) was one of the instructors who advised these projects and I had a fantastic time at the Medialab.

Medialab-Prado is a super dynamic spanish institution based in Madrid that is dedicated to holding production workshops, seminars, debates about culture, society and technology, as well as electronic arts events. The space of the Medialab is open to the general public and all events are free of charge. Inclusiva-net is one of the production workshops they organise. In their own words, it “is a platform dedicated to the research,documentation, and circulation of network culture theory. Its main study and documentation focal point is the processes of social and cultural inclusion in telecommunication networks and their effects in the development of new artistic practises and critical knowledge production.” These meetings have a strong social focus and aim to benifit communities and society as a whole.

The theme of the 2nd Inclusiva-net meeting was Digital Networks and Physical Space and included a mixture of: support for collaborative project development, talks (with live spanish-english interpretation!), discussion groups, lectures, mini-workshops, project presentations and a final exhibition of the finalised projects that takes place at the Medialab space during several weeks after the workshop. All of it is open to public!

In terms of project development, we had selected 10 projects from large number of proposals from around the world. Project teams came from of all kinds of backgrounds: architects, hackers, artists, designers, anthropologists, etc. The Medialab provided them with the infrastructure to realise their projects during the 2 weeks of the workshop and with the opportunity to exhibit the final results in the space of the lab afterwards. Projects were developed under the guidance of expert instructors and benefited from the participation of enthousiastic voluntary collaborators that complemented the skills of the project leaders and helped them get their projects done. Collaborators basically showed up to the workshop from nowhere just to help, which I find quite amazing.

Some Inclusiva-net projects: Seguridad vs.
Liberdad - Oterp - The Mobility of a Landmark

Below is a list of the projects that were developed during the workshop and a link to a page that summarises what they are about. Please note that several of these projects are up-and-running community platforms based on the participation of the public, so feel free to contribute!
* Una Ciudad Mejor: an online platform to stimulate democratic participation in the configuration of cities, by making it possible for citizens to communicate incidents, inconveniences, and urban problems of all kinds that arise in their daily lives to the city administration.
* Seguridad vs. Libertad: a collaborative mapping of the security cameras installed on the streets of Madrid, as well as a series of art works reflecting on the balance between security and freedom.
* Local Feed: an online platform for collaboratively editing feeds associated with an address or a specific area of the city, taking different scales into account.
* Oterp: a prototype implemented on a Sony PSP that is somewhere between a video game and a real time sound editor, in which GPS sensors allow you to manipulate music in real-time, based on your location on Earth.
* The Mobility of a Landmark: a project aiming to determine the centre of a given city, to challenge our very own perception of the city and its boundaries.
* In Hear, Out There: aurally/visually transposing, fitting, juxtaposing an environment, a path, a locale from another place to your place – putting you within a hybrid place.
* Fluid Nexus: an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists or people in a crisis situation to send messages and data amongst themselves independently of a centralised cellular network.
* Wikibivouac: a collaborative mapping of “parallel” information about the urban environment that could support a nomadic occupancy of the territory, such as hitchhiking areas, material and food retrieval places, water spots, empty places ready for occupancy.
* Earth on Heaven: an installation that uses data from people’s paths in the physical city to form a digital environment that reflects their “universe” on Earth in the form of a sky and trails of stardust.
* Maxi-Redes Cube Stomper: a collection of design proposals aiming to resolve the question of how to give network-based art a tangible presence in gallery spaces, beyond the computer monitor and the mouse.

>> Link to projects description and credits

My contribution to the workshop was to take part in the project selection committee and work as one of the instructors together with Julian Oliver, Steven Pickles (aka Pix), Juan Antonio Fabián and Juan Martín Prada (director of the Inclusiva-net platform). I also gave a lecture about “Locative Audio: Sound and Mobility in Urban Space” that gave an overview of the field of locative audio. Finally, I gave a mini-workshop called “Interaction Design Exercises: Focusing on the User in the Digital-Physical Realm” where participants got to try out a mixture of user-centred interaction design methods such as extreme characters, scenarios, interaction relabelling and bodystorming for one evening.

In the seminars, I found certain talks particularly interesting. Julian Oliver talked about maps, how they influence the way we perceive and manage the world and what the political implications this brings. Ewa Wójtowicz talked about how the digital world has started to physically leak into the real one. Spanish architects Hackitectura presented their work, including a project called Fadaiat where they misused surveillance technology at the border between Spain and Marocco as a means of bringing down virtual frontiers. Michelle Teran presented her beautiful work where she exposes images leaked from surveillance cameras (see picture). At the end of her talk, she took us on exploratory walk in the city.

These two weeks at the Medialab-Prado were a fantastic experience and I am very happy I got the opportunity to take part of it. The Medialab is a very progressive, effective and productive place with a supernice team, and I found the production workshop format to be a great way to develop projects and give people a platform to collaborate and debate. It was a real pleasure working in this multidisciplinary environment with lots of super-talented people. Madrid is also a very dynamic city, with places such as Intermediae and Matadero Madrid, dorkbot-madrid, La Casa Encendida (where supa dupa Japanese electronic musician Kanta Horio performed on the night of my arrival in Madrid!), lots of hard-working Senegalese compatriots (props to them!), and much more. It was also great to get to see more of what is going on in the Spanish-speaking world in terms of digital media.

I warmly recommend to send submissions to workshops at the Medialab! The next one is called Interactivos? Vision Play. More info here

Workshop URL: http://www.inclusiva-net.org
Location and organisers: Medialab Prado, Madrid, Spain
Workshop Dates: 3rd-14th March 2008
Exhibition Dates: 26th March - 18th May 2008
Project advisors: Julian Oliver and Lalya Gaye, with the precious help of Steven Pickles (aka Pix) and Juan Antonio Fabián
Directore of Inclusiva-net: Juan Martín Prada
Press: Cámara Abierta, TVE la 2
Photos: Inclusiva-net on Flickr
Facebook: “inclusiva-net 2″ group