summ( )n

Otto wrote recently about this coming event, The Future of the Lab conference in Eindhoven. Yesterday there was a public opening of this gathering in the Baltan Labs in the Strijp-S complex. The list of participants is very impressive, 35 various media labs, art and technology centers, and sort of other labs from all over the world: Kudus to Baltan for gathering them all together in one place!

At this very moment they should be fishing their ‘future mapping’ exercise (at least, according to the official program); the promise was that that all these materials will shared on their website (at some point). I was *slightly* disappointed with the presentation by Horst Hörtner, head of the FutureLab of the Ars Electronica, but perhaps because I had very high expectations from the talk. We’ve been to the Ars Electronica festival this year in Linz, and it was a stunning show, so I somehow expected to see the sparks of that in the presentation. Instead, it was just four barely visual slides, and then reading aloud from the prepared text. If one prepared the text, don’t read it at least but beam it to the wall: I read quicker than you speak, and all in all, we will have more time for the discussion. But well, at least some observations of him were very interesting.

The rest of the evening was pretty impressive, there were two projects shown, the Tracker by Geert Mul (see below) and another installation by the MUA team; so it was all pretty gezellig, as they say in Dutch.