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from e-flux

NEXT THINGS 2015 – CONDUCTA: Global Art & Technology Challenge
Call for ideas: Open Hardware Fellowship

Submision deadline: April 17, 2015

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Los Prados, 121
33394 Gijón
Asturias

T +34 985 185 577
F +34 985 337 355
info@laboralcentrodearte.org

www.laboralcentrodearte.org

Telefonica R&D and LABoral are proud to organize NEXT THINGS 2015 – CONDUCTA, the Forth Global Art & Technology Challenge.

The goal of the challenge is to bring together art and technology, artists with technologies, and to unleash the huge potential of mixing the creativity and perspective of artists with the nowadays powerful open hardware technologies.

NEXT THINGS 2015 – CONDUCTA pursues innovative and breakthrough ideas on the Internet of Things in the context of art and technology.

Telefonica R&D and LABoral are seeking researchers/artists/designers who are working on artistic and research projects exploring the modulation of human behavior in groups of people through new technologies, particularly ideas and techniques involving data mining and pattern recognition, machine learning, collective group behavior and wearable technologies and biometric data and similar.

Key words: Quantifed self, behavior, self-tracking, aggregate data, machine learning, wearable tracking

It is important to reflect on these frameworks and to explore the impact that the Internet of Things, and Interactions Machine to Machine (M2M) can have on the lives of people, on a scale that spans from individual to whole societies.

It will be appreciated in the proposals:
–That may be converted in manufactured objects, employed by people and societies
–Connected wirelessly to the Internet

The call is open to all creators in the space between art and technology. Basic ability to build the project on your own, with occasional support from Telefónica R&D and LABoral, is required: knowledge of open hardware platforms such as Arduino and general programming skills.

NEXT THINGS 2015 is looking for ideas that can be prototyped and built within the course of six months, based on open hardware platforms such as Arduino connected to the Internet.

The selected project will be awarded with a six-month artist fellowship, split between LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (through Plataforma 0. Production Centre) in Gijón for two months and Telefónica R&D (Telefonica's technology research and development arm) in Barcelona for four months. The goal of the fellowship is to enable the fellow to bring the chosen idea to life. The fellowship will start the latest, on June 1, 2015.

The artist will receive 12,000 euros gross as fees and a grant of up to 2,000 euros gross for travel, accommodation and expenses at LABoral.

Please send a one-page idea proposal, a one-page visual description and a CV in PDF format to produccion@laboralcentrodearte.org before April 17 2015. The proposal should outline the project and describe—on a high level—the building blocks required to make it.

Check for the rules: www.laboralcentrodearte.org

For any additional information or queries on the proposal call:
produccion@laboralcentrodearte.org

Telefónica is one of the world's leading operators in the integrated telecommunications sector. With presence in 24 countries, the company provides infrastructure and communication, information, communication and entertainment to over 315 million customers. Telefónica Digital is a global business division of Telefónica. Its mission is to seize the opportunities within the digital world and deliver new growth for Telefónica through research & development, and digital services. Telefonica R&D is within this division.

Telefonica R&D is the research and development company of the Telefónica Group. Founded in 1988, its mission is to contribute to the Group's competitiveness and modernity through technological innovation. To achieve this aim, the company applies new ideas, concepts and practices in addition to developing products and advanced services. It is one of the first private R&D centres in Spain as regards activity and resources, and is the first company on the continent by number of European research projects in which it participates. The main asset of Telefonica R&D is its staff, which is 97% composed of university graduates from 18 different nationalities.

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial is an open platform for research, production, dissemination and interpretation of emerging cultural forms that result from the shifts brought by the creative use of new technologies. Inaugurated on 30 March 2007, the Centre is located in Gijón (Principality of Asturias), within the framework of Universidad Laboral - today, Ciudad de la Cultura [City of Culture].

Plataforma 0. Production Centre
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial has put its Production Centre. Plataforma 0, at the disposal of the cultural sector for the production of projects in the intersections of art, science and new technologies with the intention of facilitating the production of artistic projects and their introduction into professional circuits.