Medialab Prado

Worskhop tutors: Jordi Claramonte, Chandler McWilliams, Casey Reas, and Víctor Viña. Directed and coordinated by Nerea Calvillo. 

The list of selected projects will be published on December 21, 2009

> General information about the call
> General information about Media(nera)Lab plataform 
> Technical Information on the Digital Façade of Medialab-Prado

GUIDELINES FOR PROJECT SUBMISSION

Purpose of the Call

The purpose of this Call is to select eight projects for the digital façade Led Action Screen, recently installed in the Medialab-Prado building in Madrid, to be developed in a collaborative workshop taking place February 9-23, 2010. The objective is to explore the relation between the urban screen and public space, to experiment with the screen’s communicative, narrative and visual capacities and to investigate its potential to offer new forms of participation such as receiving and participating in the different phases of content production.
Selected projects will be developed under the supervision of teachers, technical assistants and an extensive group of collaborators.

The Call is addressed to artists, mathematics, anthropologists, computer scientists, economists, ecologists, architects, educators, activists, interactive designers, scene designers and any other person interested in the subject.

Proposals can be submitted individually or collectively. Each participant or team can present as many projects as they like.

Selected projects should be open to the participation of other collaborators interested in contributing to the development of the piece during the workshop. This is why there are two ways of participating in the workshop:

1- as project promoter
2- as a collaborator in the selected projects

Once the projects have been selected, a second phase will take place calling those interested in participating as collaborators in producing the proposals. The call for collaborators will be published January 5, 2010 in Medialab-Prado's website.

General Aspects of the workshop

Methodology

The workshop, in which selected projects will be produced, aims to become a platform for research, production and collective learning.  Proposals will be developed in multidisciplinary workgroups formed by the author/authors of the project, interested collaborators and with the technical and conceptual advisement of the teachers and assistants.
Medialab-Prado will try to provide all the means needed to carry out and document the projects.

There will be different activities taking place during the workshop such as talks, presentations, seminars or small specific workshops.

Working schedules will depend on the particular needs of each project and will be organised considering the other activities taking place for the Seminar and Medialab´s rules on the centre’s schedule.

Following the workshop’s objective to stimulate the development, spreading and free access to new approaches and tools for information visualizing, participants will be encouraged adequately document the projects during and after the workshop and to publish the results and source codes under free licenses that allow to access and distribute what was learned in the workshop.

Technical requirements

The selection committee will deeply study technical viabilities to carry out the projects. For this reason, projects that clearly specify their technical requirements will be considered positively.

Medialab-Prado will only provide the equipment and basic means for the production of the projects, but always when previously requested by the authors of the proposals.

Access and use of the technical means provided by Medialab-Prado will be coordinated and supervised by the centre’s staff.

The authors of the project will cover the costs of the materials and technical equipment that have not been asked for nor approved in advance by Medialab-Prado.

Medialab-Prado promotes the use of technological free software tools. Therefore, it invites participants to work with applications, computer and software environments with open and shared codes.  In case the selection comity has any doubt about a technical requirement, they will directly contact the authors of the proposal.

Workshop Languages

The workshop will be held partly in English partly in Spanish, with no translation.

Travel and lodging aid

Pending application, Medialab-Prado will provide lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of Madrid and will consider the possibility of covering travel expenses wholly or in part, on a case by case basis.

Inscriptions

All interested in participating in the workshop will have to fill out and submit the form available below.

Deadline: December 10, 2009

Call for collaborators will be open from January 5 - February 8, 2010

More information: talleres (at) medialab-prado.es

Final Decision

Selection Committee

The selection committee will be composed by workshop teachers, the director of the event, Nerea Calvillo and Medialab-Prado.

Evaluation of the Projects

In the Project selection, the comity will value:

• Subject definition: Detecting possible social, political and cultural interests of public concern.
• Strategies for civic participation: Definition of the community and tools to activate it. Manageability and development possibilities during the workshop´s timeframe.
• Development of a platform: Synthesis of the processes in visual and programming languages. Usability and communication. Technical viability.
• Protocols for activation/evolution of contents: Development of the platform’s interactivity in any of the project’s phases.

Dates and notification of the decision

Decisions will be published on December 21, 2009 and will be notified via email to all applicants.

Spreading of the projects

Works developed will be presented publicly by their authors on the last day of the seminar-workshop.

After the workshop the prototypes can be featured in Medialab-Prado´s digital façade under an agreement between Medialab-Prado and the authors.

In addition, the projects or their documentation will be published in Medialab-Prado's website.

Medialab-Prado will provide web accommodation to the projects that require it, as well as the tools and platforms necessaries for the correct documentation of its process and its results by the participants.

Duties of the selected projects

Selected people or collectives are committed to attend the workshop and seminar February 9 -  23, 2010. Also they should commit as much as possible to finishing and documenting the project.

Selected people or collective will be able to use the equipment previously requested and approved. Any unexpected cost for materials o equipment rental will be at the project author’s expense.

The projects will belong to the author or authors, but when the projects are featured in festivals or exhibitions and its images are reproduced in catalogues or web pages, their relationship to Open Up in Medialab-Prado should be mentioned.  The names of the people that have collaborated in the development of the projects should also be included.

The projects can be shown in printed catalogues and in Medialab-Prado's webpage.

Entry constitutes acceptance of all contest rules.