lab 30, Augsburg’s Media Arts Festival is going to take place this year for the 7th time. From 13th to 15th of november, Kulturhaus abraxas in Augsburg will transform into an international arts laboratory for media and installation artists, for sound electronics technicians and digitals artists who make up the offspring of the European arts academy scene. This festival of electronic arts has found its place within the relevant festival landscape, moving on from being an insider’s tip to becoming a constant in the yearly agenda of visitors and artists who travel the scene.

 

In 2006, the »lab award« was introduced and will again go to one of the most innovative exhibits. lab 30 will also introduce a novelty this year: visitors can join workshops where robots, pixel images and sensor-guided machines will be construed and where gameboy software will be developed.

 

For lab 30 2007, 100 presentations from all over Europe, Iceland and Canada reached the city of Augsburg’s cultural department Kulturbüro. Many of those presentations featured digital artists, experimentalists and sound modellers who before had shown their work at festivals such as Transmediale, Berlin, Ars Electronica, Linz or Sonar Festival, Barcelona. The team of curators, consisting of taskmaster Elke Seidel (Kulturbüro Augsburg), Prof. Robert Rose, Hans-Christian Grimm, Peter Bommas and »sound scout« Manfred Genther, has chosen 35 installations, sound experiments and visuals that can now be visited, looked at, played, worked on or experienced live on stage in three densely packed festival days.

 

Already legendary are the IndieTronica Club Nights at abraxas Nordflügel which feature electronic web sounds, hand-made song structures, ingenious soundscapes and digitally animated tracks, all of them presented in a structure that moves between DJing, computer live performance and analogue showcase.