Approach to Medialab-Prado: Hans-Christoph Steiner

I have had the great fortune to participate in two of Medialab Prado's  workshops: the first ¿Interactivos? and the first AVLAB.  Both  experiences were some of the most fulfilling events of my life.  They  have managed to create an amazing atmosphere of intellect, openness,  creativity, and multi-dimensional exchange.  People of a wide range of  experiences and backgrounds come together to build the projects, and  all of the projects are shaped by the process.  And during this  process, I feel that everyone involved, from the teachers to the  collaborators, have both shared and gained knowledge.

Medialab Prado is uniquely positioned as a laboratory for and creative  exploration and development since it brings together a huge range of  people with different expertise and skills and gets them to work  together to develop projects.  Having one foot in the realm of art  provides the freedom and flexibility to try new ideas and  combinations.  Free Software is another essential aspect of this mix,  and working at Medialab Prado I have felt the freedom to use, modify,  and share.  Free Software means the whole dynamic of the inspiration,  creation, and use of software changes.  It does not mean that software  is still produced in the same ways, but now the source code is  available. In order for human society to realize the true potential of  Free Software, things must be organized very differently.  Medialab- Prado's workshop exhibitions are one of the strongest examples of this  kind of experimentation I have seen anywhere in the world.

Tools like Pd, Arduino, and Processing that are widely used at  Medialab Prado are tools that are creating in the process of creating  projects.  They are developed by artists and practicioners to make the  projects that they themselves are working on.  Typically, technical  tools are developed by teams of engineers who do not use the tools  themselves, but only make them.  Since tools like Pd are produced  directly as part of the process of creation, they work much better as  tools for expressing ideas.  When these tools are Free Software, that  means that anyone who uses them can also shape them according to their  own process and desires.  Of course, not everyone will have the  technical tools to shape these tools, for example few Pd users program  in C.

As part of AVLAB, there were technical experts who were also artists  themselves.  They communicated with the artists who were creating the  projects at hand about the technical issues, and worked directly as  part of the process to know only realize the projects, but also to  improve and shape the tools themselves.  This confluence of factors is  the key to the next step of Free Software development.

All this puts Medialab Prado in a unique position to really push this  model of community-based software development.  In any kind of  technical work, issues often arise that are solved with a quick two  minute discussion that otherwise would take hours to solve alone.   Having an environment that mixes the range of intense, focused work to  drop-in casual discussion promises to create an atmosphere that not  only greatly enhances the productivity of people involved, but also  increases the joy of the process itself.  The nature of the workshops  are a rare example of an activity that both harnesses both the  benefits of curation, as in the selection process of the projects, as  well as open and free participation as with the collaborators and even  the possibility to drop in and participate.  It is this atmosphere  that is so valuable and yet so rare since it is quite difficult to  create and foster.

What do I think that Medialab Prado needs in their new building?  It  is not concrete items like equipment or facilities.  Such things are  becoming more and more accessible.  What the new building should  provide are spaces that support focused work, the free exchange of  ideas, teaching, learning, and building.  Perhaps the most valuable  and most difficult part of this is creating an environment where  people can move between spaces for these different purposes as fluidly  as people switch from focused work to brainstorming and back to  focused work, or switch from teaching to learning to building new  knowledge..