Latest news and events

Usos y formas

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-03-22T15:20:00Z

Juan José Pulgar and Noé Baranda have developed Usos y formas [Uses and Forms] a work straddling visual culture and anthropology, based on their research in the collections of Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies.

Images can make time visible, can transform it into something that goes beyond the simple chain of cause and effect. The installation shows how anachrony can be used to establish connections which are not reliant on resemblance but, on the contrary, open up to that field of imagination defined by Baudelaire as the “the intimate and secret connection between things, correspondences and analogies.”

Using photography and installation, Usos y formas reflects on the specificity of the Asturian context. The artists’ work creates a kind of atlas that represents everything from the architecture and design of the Universidad Laboral or the Perlora residential area, to the neo-rural movement or the ethnographic activity of Fritz Krüger or Modesto Montoto’s images of rural Asturias.

The exhibition is predicated on the notion of the multiple which, throughout time, strives to create correspondences: a certain historicity of forms which, of late, shows how time is a spiral and never a straight line.

Artists: Noé Baranda and Juan José Pulgar
In collaboration with:

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

Visualizing Sound

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-01-13T11:45:00Z

In 2007, LABoral held the first L.E.V. (Visual Electronics Lab) Festival, whose initials pay tribute to Lev Thermen, the Russian scientist who was the father of the present-day synthesiser. The founding goal of the festival was to provide an eclectic and qualitative overview of electronic sound creation and its intersections with the visual arts.Throughout its five events, the Festival has featured a selection of the most interesting projects by international creators working in this field, spanning from up-and-coming promises to renowned artists.

The L.E.V. Festival is a physical and ephemeral space, particularly focused on the natural synergy between image and sound, on live action, on the influence of avantgarde movements on contemporary creation, on the relationship forged between the spectator and the public space, and on the new art movements emerging around the world in connection with audiovisual culture.

Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] partakes in this vision and expands the Festival’s lines of research to the exhibition space. The idea behind this international group exhibition is to examine the synthesis between image and sound, the various graphic and physical representations of sound, and its evolution in contemporary art. Sound should not be detached from the surrounding that informs it: space, vibration, wave, technique for representation, perception and even visualization.
Visualizar el sonido was conceived with the idea of generating a dialogue between all its constituent parts, covering a whole century of creation around the same notion or concept: the mastering, representation and taming of the wave, the need to go beyond the limits that our senses can take us to, which, at the end of the day, is the essence of all art.

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

In collaboration with:

Image:
Sound installation, Black corindon Powder, 16 coaxial high-speakers,
DVD players, mix tables, amplifiers.
Variable dimension and Unspecified listening time.
Exhibition view « Staack, galerie Frédéric Giroux, Paris 2010 »
© pascal broccolichi

What is Plataforma 0?

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-03-05T16:55:00Z

It is constituted by a modular and flexible structure. Plataforma 0 is adapted to different programmes for work groups, individual creators and educators

mapaSONORU

Lucia Arias — 2012-02-22T14:35:00Z

mapaSONORU is a sound cartography of Asturias, recording around the territory and geolocalizing audio files in an intereactive map.

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

Helena Torres. Serendipity

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-03-28T08:55:00Z

Serendipia [Serendipity] is a sound narrative geolocated in the civil cemetery of Ceares.It is a fragmented story recorded in soundtracks located in El Sucu, proposing to solve a crime that took place in Gijon in the late 19th century.

The sound drift narrative axis is Simona Margarita's telling, a historian specialized in feminism who is preparing a thesis on the figure of Rosario de Acuña. During her investigation, she discovers an unsolved crime happened in Gijon in 1895. This is Edgardo del Pozo, a symbolist painter protected by the Count of Goncourt, with whom it is said he has a loving relationship. Del Pozo's body is found in his mansion in Gijón by his fiancee, Gemma Oldman, a Catalan anarchist who advocates for women's rights.
Through radio and newspaper news, quotes, poems, excerpts from interviews, documents of the era and Margarita's telling, strollers would experience a sound drift that proposes links between past and present, presence and absence, reality and fiction.

Software noTours: soporte técnico de escoitar.org
Location: Cementerio El Sucu. Camino del Cementerio El Sucu
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday, 1 to 5 pm; Sunday, 12 noon to 7 pm
Groups of ten or more, please confirm your visit with LABoral at least three days in advance

Download the application Serendipia here

Ryoji Ikeda. Datamatics

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-01-16T12:30:00Z

Ryoji Ikeda's new large-scale audiovisual installation data.tecture [5 SXGA+ version] presents a total immersive and sensory experience to the visitors.

A single large video image is projected by 5 projectors directly onto the floor of LABoral's large gallery space, which will immerse visitors' body, sight and hearing.

data.tecture [5 SXGA+ version] is an artistic re-orchestration of Ikeda's acclaimed audiovisual concert piece datamatics [ver.2.0] (2006-) that explores the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data that permeates our world. Using pure data as a source for sound and visual compositions, datamatics [ver.2.0] combines abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time and space in a powerful and breathtakingly accomplished work. From 2D sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into dramatic, rotating views of the universe in 3D, whilst the final scenes add a further dimension as four-dimensional mathematical processing opens up spectacular and seemingly infinite vistas.

Driven by the primary principles of datamatics [ver.2.0], but conceptually deconstructing and re-composing its original elements – transformations, visualizations and sonifications of a vast amount of scientific data set such as DNA human genome, astronomical coordinates of stars in the universe, molecular structures of protein and even data architecture of datamatics itself – this new work data.tecture [5 SXGA+ version] creates a kind of meta-datamatics. Ikeda employs real-time programme computations and data scanning to create a further abstraction of the original datamatics. The technical dynamics of the piece, such as its extremely fast frame rates and variable bit depths, continue to challenge and explore the thresholds of our perceptions.

Concept and composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer re-programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama
original computer programming: Shohei Matsukawa, Norimichi Hirakawa, Tomonaga Tokuyama

Image
datamatics [prototype-ver.2.0], 2006- process
© Ryoji Ikeda
Image: Ryuichi Maruo
Courtesy: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM)

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

Tecnological partner

Lorena Lozano. Infinite Dance

Patricia Villanueva — 2011-12-29T09:45:00Z

This project explores the ways in which biological sciences doggedly pursue immortality and a transcendence of death, rendered here in an installation by means of a mise en scène of a clinical test and a dance rehearsal. The idea is to open up a reflection on the politics, rights and property of the body and the advances brought about by medical and biological research, while at once paying tribute to Henrietta Lacks.

The installation screens images of human epithelial cells known as HeLa. This cell line is traced back to Henrietta Lacks, an Afro-American woman born in the USA from whom cells were extracted without her consent, before her death in 1951. These were the first human cells that were able to be developed in a laboratory and they are still used today in the majority of biomedical research projects. The story of Henrietta Lacks lays bare the legal and ethical questions which biomedical research must face. At the same time, the installation screens footage of the dancer Sonia Gómez heavily pregnant during one of her rehearsals. It is a mise en scène of the process of construction of an improvised choreography at a specific moment in the dancer’s life. While, on one hand, the biological sciences present the human body as composed of separate and separatable parts and suggest an interchangeability of the organs without reference to the body as a unit, the dancer’s work, on the other hand, helps to reconstruct this body as a whole, underscoring the continuity of its vital functions.

In March, coinciding with International Women’s Day, an event will be held with the artist, plus a screening of a documentary on Henrietta Lacks’ story followed by a debate.

During the opening, Bitchez Wit Dikz will perform an instrumental Hip Hop demo, inspired and designed specifically for the project.

Credits:

Dancer and performer: Sonia Gómez (www.soniagomez.com)

Camera: LABoral / Ana F. García

Photographic material courtesy of: Marco Archinti / Instituto de Recerca Biomédica, IRB, Parc Cientific, Barcelona

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

What is LABoral?

Patricia Villanueva — 2012-03-16T18:44:39Z

Use of fabLAB specific equipment

Lucia Arias — 2012-01-26T10:30:00Z

These courses offer a deeper knowledge in the use of fabLAB equipment.

Dates and schedule: by request
Duration: 8 hours
Participants: 3
Registration fee: 150€
Information and registration: +34 985 185 577 / talleres@laboralcentrodearte.org

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

Posgraduate in arts, digital media and popular culture

Lucia Arias — 2011-07-15T12:00:00Z

The postgraduate course in arts, digital media and popular culture (30 credits ECTS) offers the foundations for understanding and analyzing the changes and transformation in the relations between culture and society, as well as emerging
contemporary artistic and cultural productions influenced by information and communication
technologies within a interdisciplinary context, and in connection with the main debates on an international scale in the fields of arts, humanities, communication and social sciences.
Artistic and cultural practices -from the most recognised to the most emerging ones and from the most minoritary ones to those most popular- are being transformed at a great speed by new ways of producing, transmitting and experimenting with culture. The surge of information and communication technologies, changes in mass media and creative industries are the key elements in understanding this cultural
change. The postgraduate course offers the tools to consider these changes and innovation in relation to culture, arts, technology and society by way of theoretical principles and the study of relevant cases with the help of debates with creators and analysts from the cultural world.

October 2011—May 2012
Place: Virtual Campus of UOC
Target: researchers in culture, arts and communication, creators, artists and social
and cultural innovators and professionals from cultural and artistic institutions and creative industries involved in the processes of management, production, planning, promotion and cultural dissemination.

Price: 2,395 euros

Further information and registration: 902 372 373; from Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 8 pm www.uoc.edu/masters.Project blog: http://laboralcentrodearte.uoc.edu/

Study materials
The postgraduate courses of the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya may require the study of materials in printed or digital format. The materials are given to the students as the course progresses.

The materials are one of the great elements provided in this course, given that they comprise a careful selection of significant readings that deal with the course’s subject matter. In some cases they have been translated from English or taken from practical case studies especially for this programme. It is thanks to this meticulous selection that the course can enrich and improve the students’ understanding of the link that relates the arts, culture, technology and society.

Admission requirements and degrees awarded
A legal university degree is required to enter the programme. In the case where an applicant does not have such a degree, an admissions committee will evaluate the knowledge and experience of the applicant on the basis of their resume.

Once the student has completed the programme and been evaluated, UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya will grant a Postgraduate diploma in Cultural Innovation: arts, digital media and popular culture UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya -LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial to those participants that already have a university degree considered legally valid in Spain.
In the case where the particpant does not have such a degree, he or she will be granted a Certificate in Cultural Innovation: the arts, digital media and popular culture UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya -LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Directorate and Professors

Advisory Board
Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Director, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

Derrick de Kerckhove, former Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Professor, University of Toronto and Faculty of Sociology at the University of NaplesFederico II

Roger Malina, Executive Editor, Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, San Francisco; Director, Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence; Co-director of the art-science program of IMERA Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies

José-Carlos Mariátegui, investigator, London School of Economics, London; founder, ATA-Alta Tecnología Andina and Escuelab.org, Lima

Christiane Paul, Director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School, New York; Adjunct Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Benjamin Weil, Chief Curator, LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón

Academic directorate
Pau Alsina, doctor in Philosophy (UB), Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, researcher in the group GRECS on Culture and Society and director of the magazine Artnodes on art, science and technology.

Programme of activities funded by the Ministry for Culture and Sports of the Principality of Asturias

Narrativas espaciales

Patricia Villanueva — 2011-06-10T11:25:00Z

Locative audio consists in the capacity to locate a sound in a physical space and reproduce it when the users –equipped with a smartphone or any other device that has GPS and an audio file player– find themselves in the specific place. Although it is quite clear that its usefulness is wide-ranging (from tourist guides to even navigation aids for the blind), what this project proposes is to develop sound and narrative art works thanks to the coming together of producers, sound artists and writers.

During a workshop, held from 1st to 6th November, participants learn how to use the different technical resources available, experiment with script writing, working with audio files and they create projects to experiment with their new skills. Later, the obtained results in the workshop as well as three European locative media projects developed in Hangar, Barcelona, will be shown at LABoral.

Participating artists: Fred Adam and Verónica Perales; Escoitar.org; Isabel Espín; Julie Faubert; Cristina Moreno García, Olalla Hernández and David Aguilar Sánchez; Alejandra Pérez; Luca Rullo; Enrique Tomás; Helena Torres; Lilia Villafuerte

In collaboration with: