This year, at Ars Electronica (sept 4 - 9) openFrameworks is planning to make something pretty unique. Essentially, it’s a laboratory space where a group of us will make artwork live during the course of the festival. The idea is to build a space where a dozen or so hackers, tinkerers and researchers will hang out and experiment, make stuff, create guerrilla exhibitions around the festival and document their progress and discoveries. The work that we do will come directly out suggestions from the festival audience members — and hopefully, over the 5 days, we’ll create a kind of good feedback loop between getting suggestions, making projects and exhibiting the results.

For us, we like a project like this because it can demo really well the activity of the community, and it’s a great chance to meet face to face and work closely together, since many of us are spread out in different locations. The space and scale of the project is quite big, so we could use tons of help to pull this off. In addition to the work done on site, much of our research and development will occur online so that folks who can’t make it to Linz can also participate, help out and keep track.

So, we are recruiting for the lab …