NEXT THINGS 2015 - art & tech challenge

Telefónica R+D and LABoral organise NEXT THINGS 2015 – CONDUCTA, the Fourth Global Art & Technology Challenge. Open to creators worldwide, it pursues innovative and breakthrough ideas on the Internet of Things in the context of art and technology.

Submission deadline: April 17, 2015

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.

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