Open Up is a workshop for the development of projects for the digital façade in Medialab-Prado’s building.

Introduction

Until now, urban screens and digital façades have been greatly developed technically, but its contents, which are usually produced by advertisement agencies and occasionally artists, have been created, in many cases, during closed processes.

Open Up suggests opening the processes of content production and explores collaborative systems of interaction and creation related to the digital façade (and therefore, public space). This production can move among its different levels of intensity and development and can vary between two working environments: the platform for collective creation and its collective activation.

Aiming to create a platform of expression through the screen, the first is oriented towards involving collectives in the elaboration of contents by creating working groups or other participation strategies. The second is centred in producing tools for the collective reception and activation of the contents that appear in the screen. We need to consider that in both cases the participation can be stable, but also instant, invisible, multiple or disperse.

Depending on the cases, chosen projects should include the creation of strategies for participation, the development of the platform, the format for its visualization in the screen and the protocols for its activation. Also, the projects will need to define the context: the Plaza de las Letras, the neighbourhood’s local environment or the city of Madrid. The physical and/or virtual participation will be identified considering all these factors.
Projects presented in this call will have to explore one of the following aspects:

• Proposals referring to the development of strategies for public participation, during any of the project’s phases.
• Proposals that encourage ways to activate urban space through the screen.
• Proposals that favour a stronger public visibility of agents that normally have none.
• Prosals that visualize public collectives.
• Proposals that develop new ways to activate and interact with the screen among users and portable devices such as cell phones, videogames, lasers, etc.
• Proposals that include emerging systems and processes that allows this project to evolve and change through time.

Medialab Prado