From April 28 to May 2 2008 at MediaRuimte / M.A.P., Brussels.

Organized within the framework of the studio-program Experimental Media-art supported by the VAF (the Flemish Audiovisual Fund).

Because the biggest merit of live A/V is its cross-border and cross-disciplinary character, the Masterclass challenged its 12 international participants to do just that: collaborate.

Masterclass Live A/V’s blog.

Session 1: “MetaDeSIGN”

By LAb[au]

The technological developments of the past thirty years constitute a major shift from the industrial to the post-industrial information society, where the structures, processes and systems of the unit of inFORMation increasingly define notions such as body, matter, space and time. Technologies based on the transmission, edition and computation of information, more and more influence organization models as well as their spatialization.

LAb[au] developed a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach based on different artistic, scientific and theoretic methods, examining, within a practice entitled ‘MetaDeSIGN’, the transformation of architecture and spatio-temporal structures in accordance to the technological progress. Metadesign (meta = information about information) displays the theme of space-constructs relative to information processes – architecture as a code. It concerns the transposition of inFORMational processes into n-dimensional forms.

LAb[au]’s design methodology ‘MetaDeSIGN’ will be taken as a guideline for confrontation and exchange, with a specific focus on scenographical constructs.

(Image above from Binary waves LAb[au]’s installation)

Session 2: “Counternarratives: An Avant-Pop Remix”

By Mark Amerika

In this presentation, Mark Amerika remixes personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally constructed identities, fictional personas, experiential meta data, narrative mythologies, and collaborative networks. Locating what he describes as the ‘postproduction artist’ (who engages with D-I-Y networking and alternative distribution-schemes to build new models of audience development), Amerika will role-play the contemporary remixologist. Part VJ, part novelist, and part net artist, it is a made-up character in a book not yet written; someone who uses the forms of new media not so much to counter spectacle in the media culture, but to create a counter-narrative drift that moves away from the art object per se ,while investigating the depth of possibilities waiting to be discovered in the creative unconscious.