Every now and then metaLAB holds a public event to showcase some work in progress, hack a device or two, resuscitate a multimedia piece or two from the vaults, and to start up some fresh conversations. In the past, such openLAB events have featured social games that make creative use of thermal receipt printers, Kinect-based gestural systems for remixing tracks on vintage vinyl recordings, an Arduino-armed book as an interface for navigating libraries. What’s an openLAB? It’s a combination between a project fair, a hackathon, and a party. We hold such an event on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, from 6-8:30 pm at Arts @ 29 Garden Street (located at the corner of Garden and Chauncy Streets, approximately 15-minutes by foot from Harvard Square). It included:

    • demos and presentations of two platforms in development: Palladio (Stanford) –presented by Dan Edelstein and Giorgio Caviglia– and Curarium (metaLAB) –presented by Matthew Battles and myself
    • two large projection displays of Yanni Loukissas’s recent work with Krystelle Denis on data sets from the Arnold Arboretum
    • student projects from the past few semesters of Mixed-Reality City, Cold Storage, and Homeless Paintings
    • an exhibition of designs and page layouts from the forthcoming metaLABprojects publication series with Harvard University Press, including The Library Beyond the Book card decks
    • demos of two ongoing projects from the History Design Studio
    • clips and rushes from a couple of web documentary projects that are underway
    • fresh experimental dishes from the Library Test Kitchen, including our entire SXSW setup with a mylar inflatable reading room complete with windows and curated Viewmasters
    • posters, installation pieces, hacks, visualizations, and performances

 

There was a really good turnout of friends from Harvard, MIT, and surroundings. Here’s a brief video clip documenting the evening’s highlights:

[ylwm_vimeo height=”350″ width=”525″ class=”MYCUSTOMCLASS” portrait=”false” byline=”false”]93215472[/ylwm_vimeo]

Here’s the poster from the event:

4-14 openLab

- April 30, 2014