Approach to Medialab-Prado: Zachary Lieberman

I’ve known the medialab team for years now, and I am deeply thankful for the energy and support they’ve offered.

I’ve known and worked with the Medialab-Prado since 2005, when it was known as Medialab-Madrid and based at the Conde Duque center.  I was an artist involved in the Banquette exhibition, and followed this by teaching multiple workshops - “making things move” in 2006, “New forms of storytelling” with Dora Garcia, and the interactivos? workshops, which I helped organize and teach several times in Madrid, in New York and in Mexico City.   In addition, they’ve helped produce new works I’ve been involved with.  Drawn, an interactive installation about imagining drawings coming to life, and openSourcery, a performance created with a magician, looking at how magic and technology might be married.   Both couldn’t have been created without their encouragement and support.

What I find great about the Medialab team is how actively they’ve promoted a local community.   Through workshops, talks, events, openings, they’ve created an extremely diverse following with it seems to me, a simple assumption:  the world is hungry for ideas.    They invite experts in different disciplines to provide rigorous context, while also focusing on the technical and aesthetic components of new media.    The population they serve reflects that diversity -- from people curious about open source software, to artists looking to expand their discipline, to technologists looking for projects to collaborate on, poets, philosophers, playwrights --  Every time I’ve been, the community is active and engaged.    This is a product of an extremely active public outreach.   I don’t know how they do it, but they do it insanely well.

To achieve there success, they’ve done I think the single most smart thing -- invest in people, not in fancy technology.  A laboratory doesn’t need to be about fancy tech,  it needs to be a place that curates and organizes the best people to come together and solve problems.

Perhaps the biggest endorsement I can give is that they are the model that I think of, when I evaluate what a medialab should be.  I’ve grown as an artists along side them, and seen how they’ve transformed and have no doubt that they will be as relevant in this decade as they were in the previous.

For the future, I believe they should continue their agenda, again prioritizing people over capital heavy technology.  I have long argued that they could also look for more diverse funding stream, perhaps spinning off a side project that would operate as more of a for profit wing, such as how the FutureLab works with ars electronica.    Finally, I encourage them to continue and expand on the successful models of workshops - both interactivos? and Visualizar represent a great model for active engagement of a local community.   The more chances they give the next generation to express themselves, the better off the world will be.