What is Feral Labs?
The Feral Labs Network is a network of temporary dislocated hubs for research in art, technology and communities. It’s members share a common interest in art-science research and contemporary do-it-yourself (DIY) & do-it-with-others (DIWO) communities.
The Feral Lab Network is focused on connecting and organising a series of camps and similar kinds of temporary creative environments, all with a strong emphasis on process-based activities like peer learning, field work, research and co-creation, as opposed to standard presentational modes like exhibitions and festivals. What these activities have in common is their deliberate setting in a remote environment, away from the usual urban set-up. These temporary creative hubs vary in scope, format and topics, but hold a common methodological framework.
Feral Labs are events of transdisciplinary nature which discern no clash in focusing on production of cultural artefacts and philosophy, hacking and tinkering with technology, sensing environmental data, creating educational content and addressing resilience by investigating environmental and technological challenges, all within the same event framework. By bringing together the worlds of art, humanities and social studies, education, digital activism, natural sciences and technology, participants inevitably learn about each other’s methods and processes, and benefit from each other’s know-how (tacit knowledge), know-why (the scientific explanation) and know-who (communication with & to). They can tap into the knowledge they usually could not access and discover new ways of approaching and defining social, political, natural and technological questions.
Feral Labs embrace the ethos of open and free software and hardware, inspired by the Free and Open Source movements. Furthermore, the participants of Feral Labs are oftentimes themselves avid champions of these ideals. However, the events are designed not just to propagate the use and extraction of these principles, but also to encourage participants to publish their code, designs and documentation.
Environmental sustainability, inclusivity & accessibility
The core pillars of the network – environmental sustainability, inclusivity, and accessibility – serve as the foundation for the future resilience of our events and projects. Through these pillars, we will invest in research efforts and introduce experimental, pilot, and other exploratory initiatives with the potential to become permanent practices across Europe. These efforts aim to make our work and formats more sustainable and offer a better experience for the environment, participants, and democratic society as a whole.
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Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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SCHMIEDE HALLEIN Verein zur Förderung der digitalen Kultur
Schmiede is a cooperative prototyping festival between the arts, maker and digital media, a playground where our ideas come to play. The objective is to learn from the process, each other, build trust and find collaborators for the current or future projects. Schmiede does not teach. Schmiede provides inspiration and possibilities. Schmiede empowers this process by bringing together the essentials: space, people, infrastructure, food and freedom to explore. Schmiede is open to everyone interested.
Since 2003, Schmiede is the world Smiths (participants of Schmiede) create in late September, on an island in the Alps. Once a year, around 200 people from about 15 nations, peers, artists, experts, and students in their professions and spheres of interest come together in an old salt refinery in the city of Hallein. For ten days they experiment, network and present, to an audience but first of all to peers for feedback.
Schmiede in 5:20 by Judith Holzer: vimeo.com/64489715
https://schmiedehallein.com/
IONIAN UNIVERSITY (IURC)
The Ionian University, founded in 1984, has seven departments spread in the urban complex of Corfu and, since 2018, five departments in the islands Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. The Ionian University, despite its quantitative dimension but also thanks to its qualitative elasticity in adaptability and fast flow of experimental ideas, has traditionally been in Greece the initiator of less represented fields of knowledge. The Ionian University joined the Feral Labs Network in 2021 and is the coordinator partner of Feral Knowledge within Rewilding Cultures.
The members of the Interactive Arts Lab of the Department of Audio & Visual Arts of the Ionian University are the force behind the coordination of the activities proposed in this program TTT Conference, TTT Labs and TTT Fellows and the edition of two books TTT2023 Proceedings and Feral NodeBook #3.
Cultivamos Cultura
Cultivamos Cultura is a platform for experimentation and development of shared knowledge in the theory and practice of science, technology and contemporary art. In other words, Cultivamos Cultura provides conditions to foster your creativity, organizes activities in the areas of production, dissemination, research, education and exhibition. It is also part of our mission to contribute a strong sense of cultural identity by fostering the generation of bonds with the local community and environment. We are located in an old farm house at the village of São Luís, within the Southwest Alentejo Natural Park, on the Atlantic coast of Portugal, approximately 200 Km south of Lisbon. Cultivamos Cultura hosts resident creators for periods up to 4 months. During the residency, creators are encouraged to engage in activities with local communities, including schools. It is expected that a record of the activities pursued during the residency will remain in our archives.Cultivamos Cultura curates and produces art exhibitions related to new media and experimental art practices. The objective of these exhibitions is to show the diversity of strategies within contemporary art creation, as well as the outcome of art residencies. https://cultivamoscultura.com
Bioart Society
Bioart Society is a Helsinki-based association developing, producing and facilitating activities around art and natural sciences with an emphasis on biology, ecology and life sciences. It is a leading organization in art & science and experimental arts. Since 2008 it developed into one of the principal organisations in Europe setting the tone on an international level for activities related to art engaging with biology, ecology and life sciences. The Bioart Society has about 130 members, artists and scientists, from Finland and international. Since 2008 it worked actively with several hundreds of Finnish and international artists and practitioners as well as with many organizations and institutions in a diverse program of exhibitions, seminars, workshops and laboratories. It runs SOLU Space, an artistic laboratory and platform for art, science and society, and together with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki – Ars Bioarctica, an art & science program with focus on the sub-arctic environment.
https://bioartsociety.fi
The Culture Yard (Kulturværftet)
is located by the harbor in Elsinore and, together with Denmark’s Maritime Museum and Kronborg Castle, forms the Kulturhavn Kronborg area. The Culture Yard is North Zealand’s largest cultural center and, organized together with the city’s older culture house Toldkammeret, provides stages and space for a large number of local, national and international cultural events all year round. The two houses together delivers a broad and diverse cultural program with both tradition and unexpected artistic experiences. Visitors can find concerts, lectures, debates, films, theatre, social dining, family events and civic activities.
In the same spirit, we continue parts of the work that Catch, Center for Art, Technology and Design in Elsinore, has begun and built up over the years. Within The Culture Yard cultural programming, Catch has functioned as a municipal center for creative education and innovation, operating at the intersection of art, technology and design. Catch has had a practice-based and open door approach to learning, offering year-round workshops, institutional and independent collaboration resulting in public exhibitions, in close integration with CLICK.
https://www.kuto.dk
Projekt Atol Institute
based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has amassed extensive and long-standing experience in fieldwork-based artistic research all around the world in its 25 year history. It manages one of the first and signature art+science field-based nomadic laboratories, the Makrolab. These experiences helped shape ZPA’s ongoing engagements in the Arctic Perspective Initiative, within which the institute aims to empower the North and Arctic people through open source technologies, as well as applied education and training since 2007. By creating access to these technologies while promoting an open, shared network of communications and data, without a costly overhead, they can advance the sustainable and continued development of culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology, and education opportunities for peoples of the North and of the Global South at the same time. ZPA is also an initiator of similar activities in Slovenia, namely the Unmanned-Resilience project held on the Gora Plateau and the yearly PIFcamp, held in the Triglav National Park.
https://www.projekt-atol.si/en/
Radiona Makerspace – Association for Development of do-it-yourself Culture
is a non-profit organisation and citizen lab consisting of makerspace/hackerspace, media art lab, Repair Café and residence program founded in 2011. The organisation is dealing with DIY (do-it-yourself), DIWO (do-it-with-others) and DITO (do-it-together) cultures, STEAM concepts, interdisciplinary and intergenerational non-formal education and hybrid activities. The lab is developing innovative projects with an emphasis on community building, participation, cohesion and social inclusion, knowledge transfer and co-creation. It is also active in the areas of GLAM, CCI in the international and local context, policy making on municipal and international level. It focuses its activities on education, innovation, research processes, art production, curatorial practices, residencies, international and domestic inter-sector collaborations, self-sustainable systems, repair community activities, citizen science and social awareness related activities.
http://radiona.org/
ART2M / Makery Art2M, Digital Art International
Art2M (Art To Machine) is an innovative company and a think & do tank exploring and supporting creative communities in the relations between art, design, education, technologies and science. ART2M produces art works, publications and events (workshops, residencies, conferences, exhibitions, festivals) and directs its activities according to different research&action cooperation projects, the ART2M labs: media lab (Makery, MCD), make lab (with RFFlabs, Fab City Grand Paris, MakersXchange), care lab (Open Source Body, ART4MED, with Echopen foundation), planet lab (with More-Than-Planet, Aerocene France), feral lab (with Rewilding Cultures), money lab (From Commons to NFTs), bio lab (with Roscosmoe.org). Art2M is directed by Anne-Cécile Worms.
Makery is the medialab of ART2M and an online & bilingual information media (English-French, newsletter, website, social networks). It aims to cover the dynamism and give out information on the creative communities and the scene of labs, fablabs (fabrication laboratories), makerspaces (for community tinkering), hackerspaces (spaces self-managed by people wanting to divert technologies), medialabs (dedicated to new media experimentation), living labs (also known as third places, they encompass users-industries co-design in processes of innovation and experimentation), biohacklabs (the scientific, DIYbio and bioinformatics version of hacklabs), foodlabs (for community cathering and exploring future of food), artlabs (dedicated to artistic production).
https://www.makery.info/en