Established | 2007 |
---|---|
Location | San Francisco, Mexico City, New York City, Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo |
Website | fffff.at |
The Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab was a collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians, dedicated to the merging of popular culture with open source technology. [1] F.A.T. Lab was known for producing artwork critical of traditional Intellectual Property Law in the realm of new media art and technology. F.A.T. Lab has historically created work intended for the public domain, but has also released work under various open licenses. Their commitment is to support "open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents. F.A.T. Lab's mission has been approached through various methods of placing open ideals into the mainstream popular culture, including work with the New York Times, MTV, the front page of YouTube and in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection." [2]
The F.A.T. Lab was founded in 2007 by Evan Roth and James Powderly also known for their work with the Graffiti Research Lab. Their logo features a recolored NBC peacock, the use of which they were apparently never challenged on. [3] A large part of its membership consisted of research fellows, artist in resident or otherwise affiliated with the New York-based Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in 2005–2008. Most F.A.T. Lab members were based in North America as well as Central Europe and Asia. The F.A.T. Lab was fully international and Internet based. Due to the use of the Austrian Country code top-level domain '.at' many people imply the origin of F.A.T. in Austria which is not the case. Connected through the Internet, its members cooperated on mostly digital and web-based art projects which are published on the F.A.T. website. [4] Often its members published their own artistic works under the F.A.T. label.
F.A.T. Lab was nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010 at the media art festival Transmediale in Berlin. [5]
On August 1, 2015, the F.A.T. Lab announced that it would be shutting down operations, with the F.A.T. website remaining online as an archive of its projects. [3] The announcement stemmed from a consensus among its community that the war against the increased surveillance and commercialization of technology and the internet had been lost, a position articulated by Peter Sunde of Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay at Transmediale. In a presentation entitled "We Lost" at F.A.T. GOLD [6] at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, members Magnus Eriksson and Evan Roth referenced both events, stating:
It would be unwise to predict ten years into the future again. But one thing is clear, tactics of the last 5 years whether legal, political, activist or artistic have resulted in little progress and have not kept up with the latest control measures. There's no use banging our heads against the wall anymore. Either your head will explode or they will simply open the door and let you in. Either way, no house will come crumbling down. It was as true in 2005 as when Peter says it in 2015. Let's face it, we lost, we all lost. [7]
Selected exhibitions, workshops, screenings and performances include:
A QR Hobo Code, with a QR stencil generator, [15] was released by the Free Art and Technology Lab in July 2011. [16]
WifiTagger a project by member Addie Wagenknecht was released in 2012 by the Free Art and Technology Lab. [17]
A hobo is a migrant worker in the United States. Hoboes, tramps and bums are generally regarded as related, but distinct: a hobo travels and is willing to work; a tramp travels, but avoids work if possible; and a bum neither travels nor works.
Eyebeam is a not-for-profit art and technology center in New York City, founded by John Seward Johnson III with co-founders David S. Johnson and Roderic R. Richardson.
Evan Roth is an American artist who applies a hacker philosophy to an art practice that visualizes transient moments in public space, online and in popular culture.
James Powderly is an artist, designer and engineer whose work has focused on creating tools for graffiti artists and political activists, designing robots and augmented reality platforms, and promoting open source culture.
Theo Watson is a British artist and programmer. His art work includes interactive video, large-scale public projections, computer vision projects, and interactive sound recordings which have featured in museums and galleries across the world including Museum of Modern Art, New York Hall of Science, Tate Modern amongst others. Watson is a partner at Design I/O, a Cambridge-based interactive design firm known for cutting edge, immersive installations. He is also co-founder of the programming toolkit openFrameworks, co-creator of the EyeWriter and a virtual fellow at Free Art and Technology Lab.
Steve Lambert is an American artist who works with issues of advertising and the use of public space. He is a founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, an artist-run initiative which critiques advertising through artistic interventions, and of the Budget Gallery which creates exhibitions by painting over outdoor advertisements and hanging submitted art in its place. Lambert's artistic practice includes drawing, performance, intervention, culture jamming, public art, video, and internet art. He has worked with the Graffiti Research Lab, Glowlab, and as a senior fellow at Eyebeam.
Scott Kildall is an American conceptual artist working with new technologies in a variety of media including video art, prints, sculpture and performance art. Kildall works broadly with virtual worlds and in the net.art movement. His work centers on repurposing technology and repackaging information from the public realm into art. He often invites others to participate in the work.
Aram Bartholl is a Berlin-based conceptual artist known for his examination of the relationship between the digital and physical world. His works often deal with anonymity and privacy. Aram Bartholl is currently Professor for art with digital media at HAW Hamburg.
Jamie Wilkinson is an internet culture researcher and software engineer. Wilkinson started Know Your Meme, a database of viral internet memes whilst working at Rocketboom in New York City. Wilkinson also co-founded VHX, a digital distribution platform targeting independent filmmakers, which was acquired by Vimeo in May 2016.
Becky Stern is a DIY expert based in New York City. Her work combines basic electronics, textile crafts, and fashion.
Amanda McDonald Crowley is a New York-based Australian curator and arts administrator who has created exhibitions and events focused on new media art, contemporary art, and transdisciplinary work. She has served as the executive director of Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City and as the artistic director at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
Ursula Endlicher is a New York City based Austrian multi-media artist who creates works in the fields of internet art, performance art and installation art.
Stefan Hechenberger is an Austrian artist and programmer. His works include interactive software, computer vision projects and open-source hardware.
Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.
Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist and researcher living in New York City and Austria. Her work deals primarily with pop culture, feminist theory, new media and open source software and hardware. She frequently works in collectives, which have included Nortd Labs, F.A.T. lab, and Deep Lab. She has received fellowships and residencies from Eyebeam, Mozilla, The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and CERN.
Geraldine Juárez is a Mexican and Swedish visual artist. She lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Nora Nahid Khan is a Warwick, Rhode Island-born American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. She is currently on the Faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital and Media.
Ruth Catlow is an English artist-theorist and curator whose practice focuses on critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential. She is also the Director, with Marc Garrett, of the Furtherfield gallery, commons space, and online arts-writing platform based out of London, which the duo founded in 1997.
Thom Kubli is a Swiss-German composer and artist known for installation art and sculptures that often deploy sound as a significant element, using digital technologies and material configurations that increase the viewers' spatial perception.
Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a Chicago-based American new media artist and digital feminist whose practice incorporates sound, performance, poetry, and installation with focuses in new media art, feminist art, net art, digital art. Holloway engages with the rhetoric of technology and sexuality to excavate the hidden architectures of power structures and gender norms.
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