Guest Project: artistic and multisensory telepresence at Medialab Prado

As part of Medialab Prado activities, the Guest project, an Intact cyberculture initiative (interface for telesharing action) has opened the call for collaborators interested in adding physical interaction components to telepresence to make it multisensory.

The innovation project in the field of arts and telecommunications Guest, which forms part of the cyberculture initiative Intact (interface for telesharing action), directed by Sara Malinarich, co-authored by Manuel Terán and other professionals, has opened the call for collaborators interested in “adding physical interaction components to telepresence in order to make it multisensory.”, from robots capable of carrying out remote-controlled actions via the Internet and articulated through human interfaces, analog and digital.

The working group, who can be contacted through Medialab Prado, seeks collaborators interested in participating in the third phase of this artistic telepresence project, mainly specialized in sensors, robotics and programming Pure Data, Arduino or other free interaction software, as well as artists of any discipline interested in interactivity, el streaming, virtual reality, collaborative networking, etc.

Intact is an international network and project that is developed collaboratively between several 'nodes' located in different places..

In this case, The Huésped project is developed in collaboration with technicians and artists from San Sebastián (Arteleku and Arteklab) and Canada (Hexagram) and is now looking for collaborators to form the working group in Madrid, at Medialab Prado.

In the previous phases of the project, remote control and sensorization tests were carried out. In this third phase, the aim is to create a 'Guest briefcase' for artistic telepresence., specifically, a briefcase (literal) containing the components and devices necessary to establish a portable telepresence 'node'. The group's activity will be completed with artistic demonstrations carried out between all the 'nodes' (teleshared) and that may include all types of disciplines: music, performance, video, distance interaction between hybrid spaces,…

In this sense, Guest is an independent research project, artistic development and creation, that tends its route between the fields of art and new technologies. An innovation proposal based on research and development of technologies for the art of expanded communication; concretely, multi-user telepresence through the Internet and remote interaction between hybrid spaces.

Besides, The Huésped project promotes artistic creation and production online, the generation of audiovisual content through the Internet and the transfer of shared knowledge at a distance.

Back to Intact, in which the Huésped project is framed, Its main objectives are collaborative network creation, the production of collective thought and the development of free technology. So, The purpose of a telesharing action is to produce a work collaboratively between two or more users using telematic tools., through which various artistic expressions are collected and shared in real time, both analog and digital.