BALTAN LABORATORIES (Eindhoven) organises and hosts a presentation of Dutch, Belgian and German media art laboratories, brought together around three shared themes. This is an international presentation of the Baltan Lab program 'The Future of the Lab'.
 
On Monday, August 23rd, OKNO (BE), FoAM (BE) and Labsa (DE) will present work with a focus on ecology and art.
On Tuesday, August 24th, Patching Zone (NL), timelab (BE) and 7Scenes/Waag Society (NL) will explore artistic urban interventions.
And on Wednesday, August 25th, V2_Lab and Constant (BE) will present some of their work in the field of e-textiles and wearable technologies. Additionally, SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne will preview a new lab in development.

Biomodd is a collaborative art installation in which a living ecosystem coexists with a networked computer system. The challenge is to bring biological life physically as close to the electronics as possible and create functional hybridity. It is crucial that the electronics and ecosystem are 'communicating' with each other and have some form of symbiotic relationship.

City In A Bottle is developed by a small interdisciplinary team of artists, musicians and computer scientists. Our aim is to create a computer game that is a showcase for evolution by natural selection. All of the software (game engine & algorithms), audio and artwork will be released as open source material. The project is a collaboration with the Champ d'Action ensemble for contemporary music.

Cool Mediators is an opensource crossmedia platform that offers tools and methods to organise an open interactive debate online, loosely modelled after a talkshow. By using the web interfaces of the CMHT, audiences can program the content of the shows and participate in them directly.

Presentation by Heike Kropff (curator for cultural education) and Hendrik von Boxberg (public relations) of Folkwang Museum Essen on new possibilities for engaging with art in web 2.0 and digital archives.

DarkMatr is developed by an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists. The project investigates the way data from the web and our physical world can be merged and presented in a total user experience. The installation will use representations that are recognizable for humans and which humans can empathize with. We are interested in how to visualize complex patterns generated from the combination of physical and virtual data.

FoAM is a transdisciplinary laboratory and a research group committed to developing a holistic culture, by actively propagating resilient cultural forms. FoAM's members include artists, gardeners, cooks, technologists, designers, writers and scientists from all walks of life. FoAM is dedicated to developing and supporting a community of generalists, people who live and work in the interstitial spaces between professional & cultural boundaries, operating under the motto “grow your own worlds”.
 
This presentation is part of the BALTAN Laboratories lab programme at the E-culture Fair

Fundels brings alive existing physical picture books and books for children aged between three and eight. We create a digital world around the book constantly referring to the book and its characters (drawing, games,…). The innovative startup, i.e. the combination of an rfid-chip in the existing picture book and a reader, makes Fundels child- and user friendly. Children can discover a book in a new innovative way. Fundels combines the pleasure of reading and viewing and stimulates language, cognitive and motorical skills.

iDiscover aims to achieve a better visitor experience in museums and heritage sites using mobile ICT: a surprising, fun and social learning experience, tailored to both audience and environment. Although ICT is frequently used to enhance the visitor experience, few ICT applications fully exploit the medium and go beyond the mirroring of traditional media. Mobile ICT offers the possibility to create a social and highly interactive visitor experience, incorporating the messages and goals of the heritage institution.
iDiscover is part of the RITCHIE project by Hasselt University (research institute Expertise Centre for Digital Media) and the Gallo-Roman Museum from Tongeren, Belgium. RITCHIE is supported by the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRO), The Flemish Government and the Province of Limburg, Belgium.

The Labor für Medienkunstproduktion (Laboratory for Media Arts Production) / LABnrw has existed since early 2010 as a concept and desire for the location Cologne. It should fulfill an existing blatant vacancy in NRW. LABnrw’s task and purport is to create a practicing network for media art, offering exchange and production, as well as a presentation platform. The LABnrw will operate locally and internationally likewise.
Work is presently in progress to set up a separate legal entity for the media laboratory LABnrw. The desired goal is the establishment and final realization of the LABnrw with its own permanent exhibition venue, a large studio and an affiliated production office in the planned "Zentrum für neue Musik Köln" (Center for New Music in Cologne) (ZNMK).
It was developed by a working group consisting of media artists and curators mainly from NRW, such as Kathrin Becker, Natalie Bewernitz, Martin Brand, Daniel Burkhardt, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Barbara Foerster, Marek Goldowski, Birgit Hauska, and Mischa Kuball among others.
Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski will be publically introducing the concept LABnrw for the first time at the E-Culture Fair 2010 as part of the ISEA2010 RUHR with examples of artistic positions.

Netzspannung.org (since 1998) is a media art archive in the Internet that illustrates the process of archiving through visual database interfaces and eases researching. The metaphor of the flow of thought in picture, sound and movement enhances the archive’s presence. Renowned artists and scientists offer insight into their works. Excellent didactic examples are in a multimedia documented form.
Netzspannung.org’s Medienfluss (mediaflow) browser (2008) is a web interface database horizontally dividing the screen into two sections: the upper part contains four picture series, the text section of the lower part provides three lines to each with titles, people and key words. Image and text lines scroll with slightly varying speeds. Artificial voices pronounce selected names and terms which immediately move to the center of the screen as presented data. The stated title, people or keywords, in conjunction with the selected object, present authors and topics in context.
As an interactive installation, the archive can be experienced sensorially. Like in a staged performance, it is set into scenes and draws in visitors as performers. The archive responds!

OKNO is an artist run organisation for art and media technology. The working of OKNO hinges on two driving principles that are interconnected: collaboration and ecology. We use our collective garden OpenGreen, our workspace and our server as catalysts for creating art works such as the Wind Clocks and Connected OpenGreens. This presentation is part of the BALTAN Laboratories lab programme at the E-culture Fair

PATCHING ZONE (Rotterdam) presents their forthwithcoming book about the Patching Zone methods and about 'appropriate' media technologies. Patching Zone organises a session that is part the live presentations on urban regeneration. 

On 25 August, the last day of the E-Culture Fair 2010, delegations from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany will visit the fair for a guided tour. To complement this morning tour with an afternoon program, the organisation of PICNIC was appraoched to discuss the possibility of a PICNIC Mini-Salon Dortmund.
The Idea: The best idea and team goes to PINIC
PICNIC 2010 will emphasize its participatory character, whilst celebrating the creative brainpower of its attendees with the campaign slogan “What do you bring to PICNIC?”. The format and content proposal for the PICNIC Mini-Salon Dortmund as described below, follows from this slogan.
Main target for the PICNIC Mini-Salon Dortmund is to facilitate active networking among the participants from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, and to stimulate active, multi disciplinary exchange of ideas, expertise and knowledge by staging co-creation teams. The best co-creation ideas that originate from the PICNIC Mini-Salon are provided the opportunity to present results during PICNIC Amsterdam, in September 2010.

REMOTEWORDS (Achim Mohné / Uta Kopp) is a long-term artistic project that disseminates communications installed on roofs worldwide through by virtual globes such as Google Earth. The messages are permanently applied to the roofs in the form of capital letters. The location and the message conceptually represent a semantic unit.
So far, 14 stations have been labeled, including the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Academy of the Arts, Berlin), The Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the Neue Aachener Kunstverein (New Arts Association of the City of Aachen), the Edith Russ Haus (Edith Russ Site for Media Art) in Oldenburg, the Escola de Comunicações e Artes (School of Communication and Arts) of the University of Sao Paolo, or Arts on Main in Johannesburg.
For the E-Culture Fair 2010, the concept of REMOTEWORDS is being expanded as a virtual game: A large-scale, accessible satellite picture of the surrounds of the exhibition space (Dortmunder U) invites each visitor to cover one roof with a message. On the spot, the statements are directly applied to the satellite picture. By means of REMOTEWORDS’ blog (http://www.remotewords.net/forum/1.html) virtual visitors from around the world can contribute statements on issues such as urbanity, navigation, digitality, virtual simulation and city (urban space).

The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from the book The Man in the Moone, written by the english bishop Francis Godwin in 1603. Godwin was the first person ever to describe weightlessness – long before Newton’s theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by gansas birds, more commonly known as geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon. The artist equips the space expedition on a sand island in the Siberian river Ob and observes the effect of the total eclipse of the Sun on the behaviour of the moon geese. The Moon Goose Experiment is a part of Curated Expedition by Capsula.
[...] I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, [...]
Francis Godwin (1603), The Man in the Moone

Eleven students of the architecture department of the TU Delft (Technical University Delft) followed the online lives of the same amount of inhabitants of Amsterdam. Based on the image they developed of their "virtual clients" they designed a house for them. The teachers gave them the following design constraints: The designed living space should be placed in the urban texture, and nothing can be demolished.

Culture park Westergasfabriek is the city park of the 21st century. Since its opening in 2003 the people of the Westerpark have been adressing the question: How can digital technology for sharing culture and knowledge enrich the park for its visitors? This innovation agenda was called: Urban Park Laboratories (UPLabs). The Culture Park is outfitted with 8 urban screens, an augmented reality machine (De Tijdkijker), an oral history installation (De Fluisterbank) and 10 GPS Tours. 

V2_Institute for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary art institute in Rotterdam doing research at the interface of art, technology and society. V2_ will demonstrate a wearable technology project produced in cooperation with Daan Roosegaarde, Maartje Dijkstra and Anouk Wipprecht and will inform visitors about the V2_ artist-in-residence program, Open Lab-opportunities, the public Test_Lab events and research topics.

This presentation is part of the BALTAN Laboratories lab programme at the E-culture Fair

The WERKTANK is a small-scale production house for media art, which focuses on the practical aspects of the artistic work, rather than the theoretical. In its headquarters in a reconverted milk factory in Bierbeek, artists from very different backgrounds investigate how to transform glass into pixels, try to find out if they can turn human heads into photo cameras or develop tools to look behind the horizon.

The WERKTANK presents the outcome of three of these experiments during the E-Culture FAIR 2010: Behind The Horizon and Reversed Blinking by Ief Spincemaille and Static by Wim Janssen.