During the MediaFutures first biannual Alumni meeting on June, 16th, the first cohort graduated projects reported about the development of their activities.

Artists and startups from projects that graduated from the first cohort, met online on June, 16th. They reported updates of their projects and were informed about newest activities in MediaFutures, including the upcoming opportunities to participate and showcase their projects results and share their best practices in front of the second cohort in June, but also during the Demo Days (EXHIBIT phase) in October (more information will be published this Summer). 

Mariana Lanari and Remco van Blades just finished an exhibition in Amsterdam, where they displayed Biblio-Graph, a tool prototyped in the frame of MediaFutures first support programme. This exhibition took place at de Appel art centre. For the launch of an interactive online environment they lent about 16 000 objects from their collection for the installation : the public could interact with these objects, manually annotate them and digitise parts of this collection using Biblio-Graph’s technology. Digitised pages were directly uploaded to their software environment. This exhibition was hence an acceleration both in terms of visibility and research for the team. They enriched the database for their tool and will be able to produce research by interpreting the results of this first successful show. 

Concerning Critical Climate Machine, an artistic installation created by media artist Gaëtan Robillard, it has been exhibited at the ZKM (Media art centre in Karlsruhe), and will be exhibited in France later this year. The artist also held several talks on this project, at Sónar Lisboa as well as Central Saint Martin’s. In addition, the code written for the artwork has been published on ZKM’s GitHub, meaning that the code is also hosted by a museum. Learnings from MediaFutures are also used in teaching to design students, implemented by the artist.

PONTE, implemented by the startups EZC.Partners and The Cynefin Centre with the artist Annika Varjone, is being further developed and applied as a case study in a European ERASMUS+ Programme. In addition, the business plan is evolving and currently concentrating on museums and public authorities as future clients.

It was thrilling to hear more about this first cohort, as the second support programme is currently at its mid-term. We hope to see more exciting projects developments and dissemination opportunities, and we again congratulate this first cohort for their work.