Marginalia+Lab, this first year, did not seek to be a homogeneous program. On the contrary, from its initial definitions and in all activities and partnerships, the laboratory has always tried to combine many different initiatives, and not be constrained by fixed categories of intersection between art and technology, building itself as a space open to different proposals that explore this intersection.

In this set of approaches and activities, consolidatng the contributions to Marginalia+Lab through regular recording and documentation remained as one of the laboratory’s main efforts. Although we have tried and stimulated the participant artists throughout the whole work process experimented last year, the fragmentation and the oscillation of these records are among the various difficulties faced in this task. Even though these records keep a lot of the momentum of the experience in their emergent formulation, they need a following moment of rereading and organization so that they are structured more cohesively and consistently.

This is why Marginalia+Lab has planned, since its inception, the publication of an online magazine able to gather some of the fragments of this experience, without a pretention of unity, but attempting to organize in a collection the reports and essays considered relevant to the laboratory’s first year of operation. Hence, the magazine is presented as a diverse set of approaches, an attempt to understand, in a wider sense, the contemporary relationships between art and technological resources. Therefore, at least two sets of contributions are presented.

First, five texts written by guest artists, researchers, and curators present different approaches to some aspects of art and technology, pointing to the diversity of existing paths for study and reflection. In this group, Giselle Beiguelman traces the contemporary panorama of the field in Brazil and its technophagic approaches; Patricia Moran approaches the prototype Marginalia 1.0 Beta, from Marginalia Project; Roberto Andres writes a provocative essay about the relationship between art and technology; Singaporean curator Gunalan Nadarajan reflects on the field of toy art in the context of contemporary art; and Eduardo de Jesus articulates aesthetic and theoretical relationships between space and time in media art.

Secondly, the participating artists of Marginalia+Lab, who developed their experimentation projects with support from the laboratory, present in their reports their projects’ technical and conceptual development, consolidating the records made over the months and opening their processes to the interested public. In one of the main actions of Marginalia+Lab, these projects were selected among several subscribers and, in transdisciplinary approaches, used digital and electronic resources in projects for installations, performances and applications in areas such as music, fashion design, video, poetry, and drawing.

Closing the publication, an interview with Marcos Garcia, responsible for programming the Spanish laboratory Medialab-Prado, discusses the contemporary issue of the media labs, reflecting on models and methodologies of work for these centers of research and experimentation. After one year of activities, this remains as a major concern for Marginalia+Lab: the reflection on the role of programs that encourage creation in art and technology, and on the models of action for these initiatives, seeking to form interconnected communities of creators for exchange and collaboration. After one year of activities and with the prospect of continuing the work in the laboratory, the existing certainty is that of the impossibility of providing closed answers or universal models for this issue, which remains a focus of research and experimentation in Marginalia+Lab.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Marginalia Project is an art and technology collective, formed by André Mintz, Pedro Veneroso and Aline X, that aims at creating works with uncommon approaches to technology, bringing its uses to an aesthetic – often critical, always ludic – perspective. It creates installations, softwares and video usign computational resources in its conceptions, having participated in collective exhibitions in Brazil and China, besides collaborating in projects shown in Peru and Mexico. It won the Technological Connections Festival in 2008 and was finalist of the 8th Sérgio Motta Art and Technology Award. Since 2009, it organizes Marginalia+Lab, a collaborative art and technology lab, held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.