MediaLab Madrid is a programme conceived of and directed by Karin Ohlenschläger and Luis Rico in 2002, as part of a collaborative venture between cultural producer Todo Fluye S.L. and the Centro Cultural Conde Duque of the Madrid City Council’s Arts Department (Área de las Artes del Ayuntamiento de Madrid).

It aimed to consolidate a stable platform –non-existent until that time-, and serve as a driving force and catalyst for emergent digital culture in the city. Therefore, MediaLab Madrid took on a mediating role, generating a broad programme of training, research, production, debate and exhibit activities, given their ability to establish relationships among various actors in the local community and foster their connections with a variety of national and international circuits. This involved a process of building networks, in connection with other nodes and already established networks.

Since its birth, MediaLab Madrid has fostered dialogue among art, science, technology and society. It was conceived as a process of research and social and cultural innovation, exploring the art-life binomial in the light of scientific and technological breakthroughs related to emergent languages and practices linked to contemporary creation and corresponding social dynamics.

Updating the relation between art and life –one of the 20th century’s most productive lines-, MediaLab Madrid has inspired and explored biological concepts –symbiogenesis, autopoiesis, ecosystems-, recombining them with other concepts stemming from sociology and computing sciences –free software culture, the network society, collective intelligence-, as well as the sciences of complexity –systemic, non-linear dynamics, emergence-, among others, to develop a trans-disciplinary production and knowledge transfer dynamic.

In the work teams and activities carried out over its first five years, Medialab Madrid has collaborated with artists, biologists, anthropologists, engineers, mathematicians, sociologists, programmers, architects, physicists, philosophers, journalists and educators. That has fostered interaction and synergy among various actors, generating an open, porous environment and, implicitly, a propitious atmosphere for the emergence of new transversal formats and creative processes.

The key issues and ideas at the heart of its dynamic, evolving model from a conceptual and organizational standpoint are as follows:

The transformation of a traditional exhibit centre into a space for dialogue and a creative ecosystem, devoted simultaneously to: reflection and debate, research and production, training and socialization, exhibits and dissemination. All of these activities taken as a whole served as catalysts to innovative processes in the field of art and emergent digital culture.

The transformation of the conventional, compartmentalized concept and experience of the relations among author, work and audience.

The creation of a context that changed production relations among authors, projects, processes, mediators and audiences, as an open network for collective, interactive creation, generating communities with shared interests.

The development of new hybrid formats and non-linear models of knowledge production and transfer, to overcome the limited linear nature of the traditional sequence of research-training-production-dissemination.

Structuring collaboration networks among projects, persons, entities and institutions to dynamize processes of research, creation and open innovation.

The exploration of models crossing sectors for financing trans-disciplinary production processes that add value, concepts and methodologies to other field of knowledge, in addition to the area of culture.

Contributing to achieving social recognition for science and technology as culture.

Normalizing artistic practice as a research and knowledge production activity.

In September 2006, upon completion of scheduled objectives and after receiving national and international recognition for the conceptual and organizational model as well as many of the resulting research and productions –presented at venues including the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the VIDA contest at the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, Sónar in Barcelona and File in Sao Paulo, to name a few-, the collaboration agreement between Todo Fluye S.L. and the Madrid City Council came to a close.

Among other results, we would like to point out that the processes and dynamics generated at MediaLab Madrid have served as a conceptual and organizational model for the subsequent development of city cultural projects related to art and digital culture.