OPENLAB 3
Group Show, 4/11-11/11/2006 1-7pm

Auto-Italia South London Gallery 82-86 Queens Road
SE152QX Peckham, London

Opening Event and Private View, 4/11/2006 4 -12 pm
Closing Event, 11/11/2006 4-12 pm

OpenLab is delighted to present OpenLab3, an group exhibition with an opening and closing event featuring musical performances by more than 20 artists and musicians of the OpenLab collective. OpenLab engages in the aesthetics and politics of Free Open Source Software Culture. Free Software Culture seeks to emphasise transparency of the creative process by making all stages of development available to others, enabling them to learn how the creation works and alter it for their own purposes. When this idea is applied to artistic practices, the boundaries between the artistic usage of software tools and their collaborative development become blurred. The workings of the artist's tools are exposed, and the artists are actively engaged in developing media technologies. They can modify them to suit their goals, rather than creating works by using existing tools that impose "their way of doing things" on the artwork.

This group exhibition brings together interactive installations, sonic interventions, video works and animations which explore the audio-visual code of this network culture: computers start to paint pictures on their own, expose their internal circuits and "commit suicide"; birds will sing and fly around in multiple realities, the skylines of two cosmopolitan cities merge, language, meaning and time burst into fragments and recombine. The range of the combined works points to the strength of Open Source Culture – its increasing versatility as artistic playground essential to contemporary debates and its continued importance not just in the invention of new media realities but also in tackling themes of “real” time and space.

The two music events feature sound and multimedia performances of artists who use and develop open-source tools such as PD, Supercollider, Processing and Fluxus. They will perform prepared sets and code their music live in various programing languages. Musicians will also experiment with a set of live instrument swapping. By exchanging PD-Patches, they will challenge each other in an uncharted space of sonic manipulation. The performances will span from excursions into the symphonica, experimental noise and soundscapes to electronica and beat-oriented minimal techno-sets.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Rob Canning, Chun Lee, Claude Heiland-Allen, Carl Forsell, Sabine Gottfried, Karsten Gebbert, Paul Webb, Rob Munro, Chiharu Kaido, Evan Raskob, U-Sun, Ryan Jordan, Oli Laruelle, Robert Atwood, Luke Jordan, Rene, Monica Subrotova & Daniel Kordik, Michael Woelkner, Andy Farnell, Martin Aaserud, Ryan Jordan & Rachel Horne, Dave Griffith & Alex McLean

For more information please visit http://openlab.pawfal.org
or contact Sabine Gottfried, sabine.gottfried@gmail.com