With the formal launch last Monday of MediaLab Europe (MLE) the Dublin-based, independent arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famously eclectic Media Lab, many cheered the arrival of a world-renowned technology research facility. What most people haven't yet realised is that the Republic has also just gained a cutting edge arts institute, a planned new performance space, and the chance to participate, as leading artist technologists - or is it technologist artists? - reinvent the arts for the digital age.
The Media Lab has always stressed art and artists. "One of the reasons we have such a focus on the arts is that Nicholas Negroponte, a founder and director of the Media Lab and MLE, had the intuition that we'd come up with a completely different response to questions about technology because of that," says Tod Machover, the MIT associate professor of music and media who will also be one of MLE's first faculty members.
MLE, a £150 million, 10-year collaboration between MIT Media Lab and the Government, has received seed funding of £28 million from the State. It will operate as an independent, university-level research and educational centre and is expected to grow to a faculty of 20 full-time and 20 part-time lecturers and 15 full-time researchers, drawn from Media Lab, Ireland and Europe. Eventually MLE will host 100 undergraduates and 100 graduate students from the Republic and abroad.
"The arts, which started out at MIT as the farthest, wackiest fringe, have become a central part and touch nearly everyone at the Media Lab," Machover says. This has led to "a new kind of culture" brought in by a new kind of student. "You can't say that this person is an artist or a technologist. Many of these students think of these issues together."
Machover, along with a dozen other leading Media Lab researchers, spoke last Monday and Tuesday at a symposium in Dublin on the work of the lab, as part of MLE's launch. "We're really at the threshold of the way we look at arts and digital technology, and how we use them is about to change," says senior research scientist Walter Bender. "We have a digital golden age before us."
However, several researchers said that the Media Lab still tends to emphasise the technology that delivers the work of art, rather than the work itself. "We have had to work very hard to make sure that we got recognition from both sides of the fence," said professor of music and media arts and science, Barry Vercoe.
"MLE is new. It's a new space, a new context, a new set of people," says Glorianna Davenport, head of the interactive cinema group at MIT's Media Lab. Davenport has been MIT's key person on the ground in the Republic ever since the Taoiseach announced last autumn that the Republic would be home to MLE. She, along with Machover, will be one of the first researchers based in Dublin.
Like Machover, her particular interest is to break through the existing boundaries between art forms and move to something entirely new - although no one seems quite sure what that format might be. "I think we've gotten to the point with the technology that it gives us enormous opportunity to reinvent or newly invent form," she says. And that's where Dublin comes in.
They believe Dublin will host the creation of an entirely new, large-scale art form that combines a variety of media. "We need to figure out what comes after theatre, what comes after cinema," Machover says. "We're hoping to develop a large part of it in Ireland." The Republic, he says, is "about the right size" for a very big undertaking. MLE, which will take over the former Guinness Hop Store site over the next six months, has also acquired a neighbouring building that it plans to convert into a large performance space, he says.
If this new performance space gets into full swing, the Republic can prepare itself for a creative roller coaster ride full of the inventiveness and digital impudence for which Media Lab researchers are renowned. Davenport has been pushing at the edge of narrative, considering new ways of telling stories that can be simultaneously fractured and united through a network of computers. She is also intrigued by the idea of having multiple, interactive narratives playing across, say, the rear windows of moving automobiles for the passengers inside.
Machover, on the other hand, is the much-feted inventor of a massive interactive music experience called Brain Opera, which toured the world but has now found a permanent home at Vienna's new House of Music, an interactive museum. Brain Opera has a score composed partly in advance by Machover, and partly by visitors to the installation, who can "play" a roomful of colourful, strange-looking and utterly otherworldly instruments.
The result is a bizarre blend of structured and freeform sound on instruments whose sound and function can vary depending on the software program running. "It's an opera about what happens when we listen to music," he says, noting that he based the opera on Media Lab colleague and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky's seminal work, The Society of Mind.
Machover has other projects in the works as well: for example, the Blur Building, planned for Switzerland, which he describes as "an artificial soundscape within an artificial cloud at the end of a bridge" - the cloud will be created by atomised water jets in a building built on a lake, reached by a bridge. He says students at MLE will participate in the creation of the work. Another project is Toy Symphony, a collaboration between music experts and children that will utilise a range of music toys.
"I think children have to be brought into the arts and music world as collaborators, not as students," he says. "I'm acutely aware of how little music training there is for children."
MLE is so new that no one knows exactly what it will turn into and what will come out of it. One of the reasons the Media Lab held a two-day symposium in Dublin this week was to try and give people here a flavour of what the mostly indefinable Media Lab is all about (Nicholas Negroponte said on Monday that he'd happily describe it as "chaotic", "unconventional" and "anti-Establishment"). But at the same time, a central group of researchers had the chance to get a feel for the Republic and see if they thought this might be a place they'd like to come and work. Marvin Minsky, among others, expressed interest.
Certainly, the arts in Ireland look as if they are going to be changed, changed utterly. "It takes all of us to build the future of arts and expression," says Machover. "We have to think bold. We have to come up with ideas that are worthy to spend all our time on."
For more on Brain Opera see: http://brainop.media.mit.edu
