The LCD - Laboratório de Criação Digital is an open space founded by Audiência Zero - Associação Cultural in Porto, Portugal where creative people meet weekly to work on their projects and share experiences and knowledge about art, technology and creativity. It was founded as a way to complement the creative tool workshops promoted by the association’s CCT project by providing people with work space, network structure and tools to bring their ideas to reality.
Working in a semi-autonomous self-managed structure, the lab participants have worked on projects like sensor-based clothing for performance work, bicycle power generators, web visualizations and computer vision installations, electronic percussion instruments and kinetic sculptures. The lab community also has a strong presence online and organizes regular activities outside the lab space, like presentations and theoretical discussion panels, and is now starting to branch out into other cities and helping to create new communities, like AltLab in Lisbon.
This talk will tell the story of the LCD project, describe how it is organized, show some examples of current projects and discuss some ideas for the future.
Pedro Angelo.
An independent research consultant for interactive software projects. He has been around coding and games since he got his first computer at age eight. Since then, he has been a DJ, drummer apprentice, record shop clerk, sound designer and somehow got himself a BSc. in Computer Science. After a brief experience as a researcher digging through 80’s Fortran code for astronomic simulations, his interest in the expressive potential of videogames and his love of the demoscene made him enroll in a MSc in Computer Graphics where he met a group of talented individuals with whom he founded his own startup, doubleMV - I&D.
As a Free Software and Free Culture activist, he has been involved in the foundation and organization activities of the PortoLinux user group, the Portuguese Blender community, the Audiência Zero cultural association, and the LCD lab.
His current research interests lie on building disruptive social and technological structures for participatory culture, coding as a form of fundamental literacy, the appropriation of videogame technology and concepts for expressive purposes, and do-it-yourself hardware/software musical tools.