On July 17, the residents and projects situated at ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS. OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Showcases is a data-driven investigation that visualizes police reports of politically motivated crimes to draw attention to a mounting normalization of xenophobic, trans- and homophobic violence and right-extremism in Germany. It roots in disturbing records of incidents such as: swastikas (Hakenkreuz) appearing on walls of mosques, synagogues and schools; people tearing off the Hidschāb from a 14-year-old and spitting in her hair; cashiers confronted with drunk customers that perform the Hi...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
On May 22, the residents and projects situated at ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS. OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Algorithmic Ecologies is a metaLAB (at) Berlin research project in collaboration with ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics, the Berlin University of…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A dynamic, two-day virtual AI Summit for the general public to hear from leading experts about the latest AI developments, gain a clearer understanding of what…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
This project assembles practical and imaginative approaches in speculative spatial design, data visualisation, graphic experimentation, and—at its heart—experimental publishing. It gathers a diverse range of voices, including students, researchers, designers, and practitioners in interior architecture, each contributing from their own unique lived experiences and needs. The result is a collection of playful, poetic, and practice-based counter-strategies—tools for shaping micro-habitats,...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Patrik Svensson's book is a deep journey into humanistic and humane knowledge and how it can be engaged to help us collaboratively respond in ethical and…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
From July 5–9, 2025, the interactive sound installation Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace will be presented at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference in Funchal, Madeira. The project explores the 2022 shipwreck of a luxury car carrier as a speculative site of logistical failure, ecological transformation, and financial abstraction. Using spatialised audio, sculptural debris, and responsive headphones, the piece immerses visitors in a fragmented evidence room of submerged ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
If it is true that the world population is ageing and living longer, it is equally true that there is no single “typical” aging person. People’s experiences, needs, and the social and physical environments in which they live and grow are diverse. As a consequence, designing for the aging population becomes challenging if the experience is not collectively defined and understood. Rewiring the Post-Reproductive Sensorium is a practice based research intervention on aging through collectiv...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A conversation to explore and integrate diverse perspectives on data and healthcare, enriching design research and practice.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In this interactive talk, Petja Ivanova, artist and researcher from the Studio for Poetic Futures & Speculative Ecologies, explores “soul loss” as a condition of imperial modernity — a psychic fracture shaped by exile, economic precarity, normalized machine-ic abuse, and the inherited wounds of dis-belonging. Weaving personal narrative with theoretical inquiry, the talk draws from decolonial philosophy, feminist technoscience, somatic poetics, and digital media practice to ask: How does...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Environmental events such as increased rainfall and heat waves are becoming pressing issues for both human and nonhuman residents – globally, and in Berlin. In response, the two-day hack at the ZK/U Berlin - Center for Art and Urbanistics will prototype artistic installations that deepen our understanding of rainwater and rainfall patterns, and their impacts on urban life. Bringing together students from the Freie Universität, the Technische Universität and the University of Arts in Berli...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The multiphase project “Prompting. Flora. Archives.” explores the algorithmic visualization of botanical data-collections.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Bringing together artists, curators, scientists, designers, and technologists, this symposium examines the material, political, and poetic dimensions of data in contemporary art and curatorial strategies. Hosted by BarabásiLab and metaLAB, Data | Art is a space for exchange and reflection on the ways in which data is collected, interpreted, and mobilized - shaping not only images and narratives, but also institutions, disciplines, and lived realities. At a time when data permeates every aspe...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Echoes of the Sanctuary is an upcoming research exhibition at Ocean Space in Venice, exploring the intersections of sound, conservation, and ecology, with a…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Curated by metaLAB (at) Harvard, Belin, & Basel under the direction of Jeffrey Schnapp, the installation is part of Performance—the second of three exhibitions leading up to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, hosted at the Gallerie di Piedicastello in Trento. Supported by the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino in collaboration with the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Performance reflects on a century of Olympic evolution through a visual and data-driven lens.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The term “Wayzgoose” refers to a long-standing tradition in the printing and publishing world, dating back to the 16th century. Historically, the Wayzgoose was an annual event organized by master printers to mark the end of the summer and the beginning of the longer working hours of winter and working by candlelight. It was a time when printers and their apprentices would come together to celebrate their craft and hard work, with feasts and outings.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The continent. Wayzgoose 2025 explores experimental publishing, editorial labor, and non-extractive knowledge practices. Jamie Allen will be there to explore…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Do the personalities of large language models, including their tone, style, and values, change depending on which language we prompt them in—and should we care?| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
As a transdisciplinary team, we foster collective experiences/performances through interweaving body, space, technology beyond the threshold of materiality.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Panopticum News investigates journalism through the use of visual methods and data visualization, the project aims at charting the landscape of online news.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Climate change and human industrialization are having an accelerating negative impact on the ocean, which covers 71% of the planet. This hands-on course, co-taught by metaLAB Director of Art & Education Sarah Newman and scientist and ocean enthusiast Heather Newman, will bring generative AI tools and design interventions to some of the biggest climate challenges today. Through a series of short lectures and design-thinking activities, we will use AI tools to creatively approach selected topic...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Course Instructors: Sankalp Bhatnagar and Talia Cotton Course Tutors: Camryn Given, Katrynna Jackowicz, and Juvaria Shahid Course Format: Gund Hall 12pm-1:30pm on M/T/W/R/F January 6-17, 2025. In person but enrollees can seek permission to participate virtually. Course Limits: Limited to 10 participants. No prerequisites. Ames does not “exist”. However, facts about its people and laws do. In this course, participants will render realistic competing ways of life at stake amongst the people...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
REGISTRATION: harvard.zoom.us/j/96487565928?… SYNOPSIS: Legendary artist Eduardo Kac will revisit key highlights in his forty-year career, with emphasis on his current space artworks. After an introduction contextualizing his pioneering telepresence works from the mid-1980s, Kac will give examples and further discuss his development of bio art. Kac first gained prominence at the beginning of the twenty-first century with his transgenic work GFP Bunny (2000), in which he used molecular biolo...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A City of Longevity is an innovative urban framework that uses technology, data analytics, and citizen engagement to promote healthier, longer lives through preventive measures, while optimizing city resources and addressing the challenges of aging populations in urban environments.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
With students already leveraging AI in creative ways, how can institutions balance innovation and academic integrity?| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
What stories can an arboretum tell us? As ecological concerns become increasingly urgent, botanical collections have gained recognition as vital bioinformatic resources. It has even been argued that these collections are “uniquely placed to address several challenges to conserving the world’s plant diversity” (Westwood: 2021). From studying the behavior of bees to measuring the lifespan of trees, botanical collections offer much more than just peaceful surroundings. The Arnold Arboretum...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
One Day Laboratory October 1 2024 Jetsam – Acts of Queering AI *Organized by Annette Jael Lehmann, Ariadna Blanch López, Charlotte Hannah Peters, Giacomo Nanni, Suzan Hanow, Till Rückwart and in collaboration with: Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin. In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalga...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In cooperation with ClimArt, situated within ZK/U Berlin, metaLAB (at) Berlin presents Up-Dates on Weather: a collaborative research investigating in/visibilities of climate change through case studies, prototypes, and strategic interventions to raise awareness and mobilize urban climate resilience. The multi-faceted project is taking part in “Commons Cosmodrome—Re-entering the spaces of ZK/U”. “Commons Cosmodrome” is the reopening of ZK/U Berlin and takes place from September 12–...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Technologies of Relating Technologies of Relating is a participatory workshop series that explores embodied movement as a fundamental technology for enhancing human connection and interaction. This series invites participants to delve into the art and science of movement, understanding how our bodies communicate, connect, and create relationships in both analogue and digital spaces. The series is presented by Partnering Lab and metaLab (at) Harvard, in partnership with the Office of the Arts ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The history of Olympic sport is written in records. Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence. Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against precedent, which is to say, against th...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
On July 18 from 7 pm (CEST), the residents of ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS JULY. In July, OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists in residence who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Please click here to join online from 8:00 am EDT/ 2:00 pm CEST Based on interdisciplinary, practice-based research contributions by data scientist Dario Rodighiero artist Helene Nymann, research-practitioner Ilya Vidrin, anthropologist Joe Dumit and choreographic designer Lins Derry, this interactive workshop examines the plasticity of “Slownesses” and suggests it as a quality or modality, rather than a temporality. Exploring so-called “attentioning”, in terms of physical and neural ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Tuesday, 2 July 2024, at the Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin and on Webex. Building on previous studies about the mapping of library collections through library loans (Casey et. al 2024), this lecture proposes expanding and refining these methodologies for dynamic classification systems. Libraries, particularly in academic and research settings, require classification systems that evolve in response to shifts in scholarly focus and the introduction of new fields — n...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE ENVENT After years of deliberation there has been a great surge of AI products. Whether you love them or hate them, these products are now rapidly transforming our existing practices as designers, technologists, and educators. This talk considers AI through a number of ethical lenses, use cases, and speculative examples. Laura Scherling is a designer, researcher, and educator. She is a director and lecturer at Columbia University where she teaches course...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In recent years, new sound recording technologies such as passive acoustic monitoring and underwater sound arrays have become increasingly central to environmental science, offering new ways to gather and analyze data to understand changing ecosystems. At the same time, creative experimentation with sound has been growing in the journalism, storytelling, media arts, and curatorial worlds. With sound as the common medium, increased collaboration across these disciplines presents significant op...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In 2024, Kat Jungnickel, Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of London, joins metaLAB (at) Basel as researcher-in-residence! During their research stay, Kat will explore inventive approaches to archival research, radical histories of clothing patents, speculative sewing, and DIY wearable tech cultures. In collaboration with Aylin Tschoepe, Director of metaLAB (at) Basel, Kat will further connect across the Institute of Contemporary Design Practices at HGK Basel FHNW and sh...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The research project Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile explores which new approaches performing arts festivals and cultural institutions, mainly in Switzerland and neighboring countries, have developed in dealing with “im/mobility” as one of the challenges of our times. Performing arts festivals tend to take on a pioneering role as incubators for new ways of working and aesthetical practices, both in the context of accessibility for disabled artists ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The proliferation of metaverse-inspired cultural activities raises questions about the meaning of metaverse art and its performative aspect. What does metaverse performance mean in terms of extending the human body within constantly evolving technology? How does the body function within both autopoietic and allopoietic processes when participating in highly immersive and interactive art? What is human agency in metaverse performance, and how far do...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT This roundtable brings together a diverse group of dance practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of dance in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for dance to spearhead innovative transmedia formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced dance in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion - human or otherwise - move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technol...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
ClimArt, situated within ZK/U Berlin, focuses on raising awareness and mobilizing urban climate resilience through artistic interventions. The collaborative research between metaLAB and ClimArt investigates in/visibilities of climate change through case studies, prototypes, and strategic interventions. The project challenges the politics of truths and data representations from the perspectives of artistic and practice-based research. Project Context The current knowledge system about climate ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT What makes a performance live, and how is liveness changing? After the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a wave of digital theatre, the liveness of live performance has never been more contested. This lecture draws on Hawthorne’s doctoral thesis Contextualising Liveness: Digitally Distributed, Digitally Mediated and Digitally Located Theatre in Edinburgh and Berlin, 2017-19’ to discuss the historical role of liveness within theatre and performance...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
On Thursday, March 14, metaLAB (at) Basel will officially launch at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland! The event will include contributions from various members of the international metaLAB community, as the two existing labs at Harvard (2011) and Berlin (2022) will be joined by Basel (2024). Attend in person or view the event live on Vimeo! metaLAB Basel launch program Thursday, March 14, 2024, 2-7 pm Central European Time (...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing and understanding. Over the past years, these models have achieved remarkable success in various language-related tasks, a feat that was unthinkable before. After its launch, ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing app in the history of web applications. But as these systems become common tools for generating content or finding information—from research and business to greeting cards—it is crucial...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Are you an educator? Are you feeling challenged, or inspired, or overwhelmed by this moment in AI? Come join some of the leaders of the AI Pedagogy Project for an interactive session that helps develop critical AI literacy. We will do this by exploring some resources from the AI Pedagogy site, including a tutorial and engaging with some curated assignments. We will also discuss challenges educators are facing, and workshop ideas for the year to come.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
[CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT](REGISTER: zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIld… ) The ‘empathy machine’ is a claim that has been directed at the assumed potential of virtual reality (VR) (Sanchez Laws, 2017). Other common claims relate to the potential for VR to enable first-person experience and transformation of self (Slater, 2009) or to ‘body ownership’ and ‘full body illusion’ (Schoeller et al, 2019; Maister et al, 2015) where it is claimed that when a person embodi...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, some theatre groups in Africa had begun experimenting with digital promotion and distribution of their shows. However, the pandemic and its attendant global lockdowns catalyzed the digitization process and encouraged more innovative and high-tech development, promotion, and execution of live theatre. This lecture examines how specific theatre groups adapted to the global upheaval (and general competition fr...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Course Instructors: Sankalp Bhatnagar and Phoebe Walton Course Tutors: Elena Kuran, Brandon Martinez, and Kelsey Cumiskey Course Format: Hybrid/GSD 10am-12pm on M/W/F January 3-12, 2024 In 1911, students at Harvard Law School founded the Ames Moot Court Competition as the first co-curricular space for law students to practice their legal writing and presentation skills before a panel of experienced judges. In the last century, “mooting” has become a commonplace practice throughout legal e...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The Weather Map is a project designed for visually analyzing public debates in the media. Using Media Cloud, the dynamic digital tool converts specific queries into advanced visualizations inspired by synoptic weather charts. This approach sheds light on media conflicts through atmospheric dynamics metaphors, offering a fresh perspective on the intricate nature of media controversies and their actors. In the field of Science and Technology Studies, the Weather Map is a notable contribution to...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today’s society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Digital Mapping of Contemporaneity, Activism & Ecology Organized by Annette Jael Lehmann and Till Rückwart as part of the research project Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin. In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. Hosted by Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT This talk focuses on the entanglements between human labor and machine “intelligence” in artistic performance. Indeed, as artificial intelligence in the guise of large-scale, data-driven neural networks rewrites the rules on what constitutes human language, thought, and action, this lecture will examine the bodily, mental, and affective work required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Join us for a conversation with Dietmar Offenhuber and Lev Manovich about Offenhuber’s forthcoming book Autographic Design - The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World (MIT Press) which examines the material life of data and post-digital practices of visualization. RSVP here *Cover image by Frank Kleinbach.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The lecture will explore various experiments in transmedia and immersive theatre initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. Bakk will offer a framework of how to understand these genres based on the level of interactivity or immersion and will also explain how immersive & transmedia productions have emerged in the CEE region and how it can be interpreted through various types of immersiveness or categorized based on their use of media, including th...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if we could see the information that moves invisibly around us via wifi, cellular, and satellite? Most of us take for granted the basic functioning of our electronics and the modes of transmission used to move the massive amounts of information that support our daily lives, economy, and tech development in the 21st century. If you want to clear up some of your own misconceptions about how things really work, come meet the team behind metaL...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A delegation of cultural bearers (Teal Hansen, Danaya Hoover, Brooke Mallory and Lloyd Montgomery) from the Alaska Native Village of Eyak are currently working with the Eyak collection held by the Ethnological Museum Berlin. On October 12th, they will present their work on building a VR traditional Eyak Village, introduced by the metaLAB B4 Tomorrow project team and hosted at gamelab.berlin. We warmly invite you to attend. October 12th 2023 | 1pm EST / 7pm EDT | gamelab.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Vimeo from Lins Derry’s opening talk at the symposium. Friday, October 6, 2023 at the ArtLab, Harvard University and on Zoom 9:30 am*: arrive + breakfast 10:00 - 10:30 am: opening remarks + presentation (hybrid) 10:30 am - 12:00 pm: movement workshop (hybrid) 12 - 1 pm: lunch break 1:00 - 3:30 pm: exposition + discussion (in-person) Schedule is in Eastern Daylight Time/Boston How can performance research help us make sense of abstract data, whether through choreographing a dataset, visualiz...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The project’s overall goal is to support Chugach investigation of their heritage artifacts once taken from their home, the Prince William Sound and Kachemak Bay, and to accommodate the Chugach People as they make connections with traditions and memories to enhance cultural identity and spiritual well-being. The people engaged in the cooperation are members of the Chugach community and visitors of all ages from the preschool through Elder years.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the project will primarily focus on the intersections between Southeast Asian and ‘Western’ performative practices while addressing the blind spots in traditional historiography in ’the West’ as well as the consequences of colonialism and relationships capable of advancing the deconstruction of the ‘Western’ canon. “Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance A...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT One of the most fascinating aspects of the newest generation of chatbots seems to lie in an increased level of theatricality: self-learning machines such as ChatGPT impress with their ability to engage in vivid dialogue, to create empathy, to (re)act spontaneously, and to charm by critically self-reflecting on the “artificial” nature of their real effects. Meanwhile, ChatGPT users immerse themselves in giving directions - prompts - and revel, m...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
While considerations of the growing role of automation in artistic production have been a consistent trope in modern and contemporary art debates since the mid-twentieth century (from Siegfried Giedion to Jack Burnham and Rosalind Krauss), in comics, industrial manufacturing, automation and scalability are hard-coded features of the medium’s production routines. Concepts such as efficiency, marginal utility, and computability hold significant conceptual and technical importance in comics. A...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Proposed Harvard AI Code of Conduct Download PDF| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A note from Jacek Smolicki on his talk, Soundwalking through Time, Space, and Technologies: Departing from several of my recently developed artistic research projects, I will discuss how creative and critical approaches to recording technologies, particularly those concerned with sound, can help rewire some of our preconceptions about the surrounding environment, its human and more-than-human actors, histories and temporalities. I will talk and speculate about how sonic thinking and doing can...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Swimming in a Sea of Invisible Waves is a multimodal project – part art, part science communication, part public engagement – that seeks to understand, demystify, and create designs to visualize the various radio frequency technologies (including wifi, cellular, bluetooth, and satellite) that provide the scaffolding for 21st century information and communication technologies. The invisibility of technology infrastructures are varied: some are invisible because they are literally out of si...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The pandemic had compelled many of us to rely on online platforms to create performances, design seminars, and conferences, and make art. As a meditation on that moment in time, Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar conceived a VR exhibition on the open source platform Mozilla Hubs for the Serendipity Arts Foundation, New Delhi between December 16th-18th 2020. The title of this show was, Look, here is your machine.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT How do we create a participatory experience? How can you foresee participation and design for it? Drawing from Belén’s extensive experience in creating immersive and participatory experiences, she will discuss the key insights and learnings she has acquired through her work, including the importance of collaboration, the role of technology in enhancing the experience, and the value of placing the audience at the center of the creative process.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
“Anjan Sundaram is one of the great reporters of our age. He writes with exceptional courage and deep humanity. An inspiring chronicler of the world and the spirit.” —Fergal Keane, author of The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD In this upcoming public event, co-hosted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, metaLAB Affiliate and TED Fellow Anjan Sundaram w...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Following the vision of digital accessibility and environmental sustainability of performing arts outlined in our Future Stage Manifesto, metaLAB joins TheTheatreTimes.com, European Theatre Convention, and Digital Theatre Plus, to launch the 4th edition of IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival. IOTF also includes a partnership with STAGES (Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift, an ambitious theatre experiment aiming to challenge how the cultural sector interacts w...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT teamLab (f. 2001) is an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects, whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. teamLab aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world and new perceptions through art. In order to understand the world around them, peop...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
On March 28, 2023, Emanuele Coccia from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris presented a talk that anticipates some of the arguments contained in a forthcoming book collaboratively written with the former art director of Gucci and noted fashion designer, Alessandro Michele, entitled Fashion as Philosophy :: making philosophy with fabrics:: making clothes with concepts. After a doctorate in medieval philosophy and philology at the University of Florence, Coccia received ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
On the occasion of the EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography 2023, we invite professional and amateur photographers to submit images that explore the expanded surfaces of digital photographic images. Although digital images on screens and smartphones play a significant role in our everyday social lives, media and networks, they are still often underestimated as photographic practices with potential for critical agency and aesthetics. This open call aims to engage critically with smart...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The last couple of years redefined the way performing arts live. Trapped behind small screens, artists stopped moving, and the shared time/space experience was lost. How did we cope with this? What did we have to say? Did we learn something from all this technology? Drawing on La Quinta del Lobo’s own research and artistic production, this lecture explores the place where media and contemporary art intersect the theater experience and invert the way performing arts are built today.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In 2017, the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (CAPACOA) published its digital innovation assessment, “Digitizing the Performing Arts: As Assessment of Opportunities, Issues, and Challenges.” As the rationale for its work, CAPACOA noted that, “… as audiences gain the ability to curate their own content, and seek content on multiple devices and platforms, artists and arts organizations have had to respond to new intermediaries such as search engines, applications, video, and audio s...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The phrase “Knowledge Design” in the course subtitle strives to capture the spirit that animates much advanced and experimental work in a wide array of contemporary disciplines, from the arts and humanities to the social sciences: the circumstance that the form that scholarship assumes is no longer considered a given. The tools of inquiry are becoming as much objects of research and experimentation as are the modes of dissemination. Statistical methods press against one edge of the qualit...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A collaboration between metaLAB (at) Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Digital Access Research Project (DARP) developed out of metaLAB’s FutureStage project, which was concerned with the future of the performing arts and the social and technological challenges brought on by the pandemic. The DARP continues to pursue these lines of inquiry, with a renewed focus on the digital accessibility of performing arts events and the codification of streaming as part of...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence, a J-Term course taught by Sarah Newman, Dir. of Art & Education, metaLAB and Juliana Castro Varon, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, will take place on Thur., Jan. 12 and Fri., Jan. 13 from 2-4:30pm at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The two-day workshop explores the implications of artificial intelligence systems on our everyday lives and allows students to experiment with contemporary tools that aid creativity.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Salome Asega / @computers_puting (she/her/hers) is an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technology. Salome believes in leveraging the power of collective imagination to redistribute power, change culture, and shift policy. Before joining the NEW INC team in 2021, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a Technology Fellow supporting artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships wi...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
There are fragments of wisdom everywhere. —S. Newman How the Light Gets In is an interactive art installation in two parts — offered at Lawrence Public Library and the Spencer Museum of Art — and exploring themes of learning and knowledge, chance encounters, and finding wisdom in unexpected places. Created by metaLAB Principal Sarah Newman and the metaLAB team and developed in collaboration with Professor Hyunjin Seo and the KU Center for Digital Inclusion, this project builds on the wo...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Conflux is a new Harvard student organization dedicated to expanding the intersection between art and technology. It is co-led by metaLAB researchers and Harvard College students Peggy Yin and Alice Cai. Conflux Winter Residency Overview The Conflux Winter Residency is a free, student-led residential program for Harvard undergraduates to immerse themselves in exploring, learning, and creating art tech during January term. The program will take place January 4th - 22nd, 2023, and is hosted at ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Theatre and film are intimately related representational media. In both, actors embody fictional characters to convey narratives. At the same time, as both practitioners and theorists have long recognized, there are profound ontological, phenomenological, and structural differences between them. One of the most significant and least explored of these differences is that theatre and film conventionally engage radically different modes of representation. The film is primarily a pictorial medium...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A lecture/presentation by the noted artist, curator, and creator of conceptual comics Ilan Manouach on his past, present, and future work.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Networks consist of conglomerates of points connected by lines. Two forces allocate their positions. Points repulse each other; they drift away from one another through time. Lines draw points together. A performance without width or thickness of separation and togetherness. Networks segment space, creating borders through their connectedness without occupying the surface. Networks are spaceless entities defined by the power relationship of attraction and separation. Network connections creat...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
What does the hybrid future of theatre look like? Hybrid Futures is the title of an exhibition, currently on view at the Theatre Museum in Düsseldorf that responds to this question by putting the work of the VolkswagenFoundation-funded artistic research project Viral Theatres on display. Over the last 1.5 years, Viral Theatres has developed a range of creative and participatory documentation formats to gather responses of German and international theatre artists and audiences to the theatre ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In October 2021, the futureStage research group published the Future Stage Manifesto, which has been translated and published in thirteen languages, including Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Russian. This panel of international researchers and translators discussed the impact of the Future Stage Manifesto on the Eastern European performing arts scene, and the opportunities it opens for transcultural collaborations, access, and political engagement. The panel was moderated by Kasia Lech, Asso...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Charles S. Peirce is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of philosophical pragmatism and semiotics. After he died in 1914, Harvard University acquired Pierce’s writings to preserve them for future study, collecting approximately 1,650 unpublished manuscripts for over 100,000 pages. Carefully cataloged by his pupil Richard Robin, the archive was microfilmed in the 1960s, and the Houghton Library subsequently digitized the microfilms, but their limited legibility recently persuaded the...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of opera in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for opera to spearhead innovative transmedia storytelling formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Long considered innovative storytelling formats, site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced opera in multi-faceted ways, transporting aud...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In October 2021, the futureStage research group published the Future Stage Manifesto, which has been translated and published in thirteen languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This panel of international researchers and translators discussed the impact of the Future Stage Manifesto on Asian performing arts scene, and the opportunities it opens for transcultural collaborations, access, and political engagement. The panel was moderated by Cui Qiao, President of Beijing Contemporar...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020, a vital trend propagated throughout the country and even internationally as communities—big and small, urban and rural, sanctioned and unsanctioned—engaged in a memetic dialogue of installing and remixing anti-racist artworks on their streets. The Black Lives Matter Street Mural Map—an open research project created as a collaboration between the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center (Stephen Larric...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
The Busch-Reisinger Museum was recently gifted more than 70 sketchbooks kept by artist Otto Piene (1928–2014). Dating from 1935 to 2014, the largely unpublished sketchbooks reflect interdisciplinary, cross-media experiments from Piene’s long career in the Boston area and abroad, including both realized and unrealized projects. A pioneer in multimedia and technology-based art, Piene was long interested in optical perception and kinetic forces, resulting in a body of work that emphasizes co...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Exhibition, May 17–July 3, 2022 Harvard Art Museums, Lightbox Gallery Summary Living by Protocol queries the contemporary reflections of artists and artistic researchers on, with, and by social media. While scientific research deepens the knowledge of a specific domain, art and artistic research has the power to transfer questions, problems, and opportunities into wider spectrums of society. The nine-grid structured monitors within Harvard Art Museum’s Lightbox Gallery become a lens into ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
In his lecture Attunement, Dr. Andrea Lissoni discusses his leadership approach as artistic director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The talk was organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and was offered online to both campus communities. “The vision that I am developing for the Haus der Kunst is based on a central force: to share the significance of contemporary art and culture in an interdisciplinary way and in an open, original, visionary, inviting, and optimistic way,” Lissoni sa...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
What is a choreographic interface and what role does dance choreography play in its design process? In 2019, metaLAB began work on Curatorial A(i)gents, a group exhibition presenting a series of machine-learning-based experiments with museum collections developed by members and affiliates of the lab. The show was slated to premiere the following year at the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery. Postponed until 2022 due to the pandemic, metaLAB assembled a team to develop a “touchless” ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Surprise Machines is a visual investigation that will take the form of a digital installation, part of the exhibition Curatorial A(I)gents that took place at the Harvard Art Museums in Spring 2022. The project sets out to visualize and curate the entire universe of museums’ collections, intending to open up unexpected insights into the more than 200,000 objects that make them up. To accomplish these surprise encounters, “black box” algorithms are curatorially employed to shape the data ...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Igùn is an ongoing investigation into a 17-year artistic decline (1897-1914) in Benin Kingdom—following the 1897 British colonial invasion. During the invasion, British colonial officers torched Benin city, deposed the Oba (King), stole over 3000 cultural objects from the royal palace, shipped the objects off to England for sale to private and institutional collectors. The 1897 invasion ushered in an interregnum (1897-1914) which was characterized by an artistic decline, because the absenc...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze When the Harvard Art Museums collection looks back at us, which direction does it look? Up, down, left, or right? How deeply or shallowly does it cast its gaze? Do most images peer straight into the visitor’s eyes? What is the orientation of the subject’s head, frontal or rotated? Do particular media or cultural traditions correlate with preferences regarding the directionality of the human gaze?| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Curatorial A(i)gents presented a series of machine-learning experiments with the Harvard Art Museums’ digital collections developed by members and affiliates of metaLAB (at) Harvard. The exhibition ran from March 1 through May 15, 2022 as part of an extended metaLAB residency in the museums’ Lightbox Gallery. During this period, four panel discussions among the artists and designers of Curatorial A(i)gents were offered on Zoom and remain available with closed captions on Vimeo.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Designed to serve as a capstone experience for visitors to the Harvard Art Museum, the Object Map greets the visitor with a mosaic of thumbnail images of the 1803 objects, each scaled to occupy the same area irrespective of its actual physical size, that are on display on the Harvard Art Museum’s galleries below. Navigating them with an air mouse, she can settle upon and click on any one of these works, perhaps on the basis of a faint memory or curiosity, triggering an overlay which exposes...| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Over the course of an hour, Zoom attendees had the opportunity to hear about three perspective-shifting projects featured in Curatorial A(i)gents: Surprise Machines, Object Map, and Aixquisite Corpse. For background, Curatorial A(i)gents was a metaLAB exhibition that featured 11 projects centered on the theme of AI and curatorial practice. The projects utilized the Harvard Art Museums digital collections or data, and were exhibited at the Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in spring 2022.| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
Now is a time when the humanities can do what the humanities do best: surface foundational questions about what it means to be human, attend with precision to…| metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel
