Tabakalera and Tekniker collaborate to promote projects that combine art, science and technology

Tekniker and the Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture signed an inter-institutional collaboration agreement today to develop creation-based projects that help produce and raise awareness around new knowledge, drive the innovative potential of creators in science and industry, and provide new opportunities for creative sector professionalisation.

Both entities are already collaborating on the development of an initiative aimed at exploring the emotional interaction between humans and robots with the goal of impacting collaborative robotics in companies, as well as raising awareness about research work carried out in the Basque Country. The project, called Dream painter, is being carried out thanks to the joint work of Medialab and Tekniker’s innovation-robotics department, along with the participation of the Varvara&Mar artist duo.

With the Medialab creation laboratory-library’s launch in July 2020, Tabakalera began a new line of work aimed at promoting creation-based projects that address socially-relevant questions, developed in collaboration with agents from different sectors. This line of work is based on artistic creation as a form of research due to its ability to produce new knowledge, provide other readings of reality, and propose different scenarios for the future.

First projects and Dream painter

In the summer of 2020, Tabakalera had its first experience with Supraspectives, a collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center and the Ars Electrónica scientific, educational, and cultural institute, which resulted in an ambitious and attractive art installation based on information obtained from the satellites that are constantly flying above us. The piece highlighted the contrast between the suggestive beauty of Earth seen from outer space, and a critical awareness of its human colonisation, quite often for military or surveillance purposes.

Through its collaboration with Tekniker, one of the Basque Country’s benchmark technology centres, Tabakalera intends to take a step further along this line and promote greater innovative creator impact in companies and research centres, while also creating reliable spaces for collaboration between creative, scientific, technology, and industrial sectors.

To do so, a three-part project has been launched between Tabakalera, Tekniker, and the Mar & Varvara artist duo to address questions such as the relationships of trust between people and robots, natural language communication (non-computational) between humans and robots, communication between robots, and creativity, all through artistic creation.

Currently in the design phase, an installation is planned consisting of visitors telling their dreams to a social robot, which will then “paint” a mural based on the interpretation of these dreams. The work team is currently making strides in the definition of possible technical solutions, and the piece is planned to be presented in autumn within the framework of Eginzaleak!, Tabakalera’s meetings on citizen technology.

Projects that fuse together art, science, and technology already have a somewhat established track record in central European countries such as Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, however that is not the case in the Basque Country. With its promotion of this line of work, and after already having collaborated with benchmark centres in this area such as V2 and Ars Electrónica, Tabakalera aspires to become a laboratory and mediator to impact innovation in the organisations with which it collaborates, as well as provide artists with new ways of working. In addition, given the current relevance of the topics to address, and the nature of Medialab’s public sphere, it will also provide an opportunity to raise awareness around these topics.

Throughout the work process, Medialab will offer workshops and talks that are open to the public in order to discuss questions around technologies and other topics that the project will address, thereby helping to raise awareness around the project’s key aspects.

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