LABtoLAB Madrid: International Medialabs Meeting

Labtolab project was born as an iniciative by several cultural spaces that had received a Grundtvig grant. It started in Budapest on December 2009, where representants by five institutions met: Kitchen (Budapest), Constant (Bruselas), Crealab (Nantes), Area10 (Londres) and Medialab-Prado (Madrid). For the next meeting in Madrid the network will be enlarged by other european and latin american projects/spaces; this extension has had the collaboration of AECID. 

Labtolab meeting and and Interactivos? workshop will coincide both in time and theme. As Labtolab project was born under the premise of building up and maintaining a network of medialabs in order to share experiences and methodologies, it looks interesting to explore on this second encounter the idea of the medialab as a neighborhood laboratory.

Thus, after Budapest’s first contact, Madrid will serve to concrete thematically the discussions, in order to elaborate a documentation corpus that will persist and, for instance, serve as a guide forwhoever willing to start a project with similar characteristics with what has been called a “medialab”.

The concrete proposal of Madrid’s meeting consits on working on and over several local institutions as study cases. Participants will meet during three days on some selected cultural/social/artistic spaces with notably different characteristics in terms of space, infrastructures, geographical context, users community, program, financing model, management types, etc. These meetings will start from a basic questionnaire, previously answered by all the participants (both studied institutions and visitor medialabs), and from the analysis of the concrete case will start a debate and a series of workshops/debates about themes previously proposed by the analyzed institutions themselves. At the end of every journey, a pooling of results will take place in Medialab-Prado.

Labtolab relation with Interactivos? will be specially strong during the first two days, june 7th and 8th: on 7th at 1pm, LabtoLab participants will first meet at Medialab-Prado, after that selected projects for Interactivos? will be presented, and all along june 8th will take place conferences and communications that, with Neighborhood science as their main theme, will link theoretical and conceptually both events and their participants. See complete program.

[+info]