On a warm Irish evening, flat-screened computer monitors glow bluely and strange electronic noises blend with the bark of conversation on the top floor of an old brick warehouse, once part of the Guinness brewery. The remodelled building, now all-glass skylights, exposed brick and freshly sanded wood, is the new home of Media Lab Europe, the Dublin-based independent arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famously eclectic Media Lab.
The Irish digerati sipped wine - no Guinness was served - as Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern drifted by, Media Lab and MLE director Nicholas Negroponte at his elbow. MIT artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky chatted to clusters of the Irish research students who, unlike many of the industry invitees, knew his name and significance. In various corners, Media Lab students demonstrated the kind of intelligent, off-the-wall projects that should make MLE one of the funkier places in Europe to work and study. Rumours circled that rock star Bono, an MLE fan, would show up. So far, so Media Lab.
But MLE is not intended to be a clone of the Massachusetts facility. Already, a quiet revolution is underway by its initial faculty to make MLE what MIT's Media Lab has never really been - a cutting-edge arts institute as well as research center, where the strong arts element often present in Media Lab work will not be subordinate to the technology used to create it.
The Media Lab has always stressed art and artists. "One of the reasons we have such a focus on the arts is that Nicholas had the intuition that we had come up with a completely different response [to questions about technology] because of that," says Tod Machover, the MIT associate professor of music and media who will also be one of MLE's first faculty members.
"The arts, which started out at MIT as the farthest, wackiest fringe, has become a central part and touches nearly everyone at the Media Lab," Machover says. Students come to Media Lab for that reason. "You can't say this person is an artist or a technologist," says Machover. "Many of these students think of these issues together." But he and other researchers speaking at a two-day launch symposium say the Media Lab still tends to forefront the technology that delivers the work of art, rather than the work itself, while the wider art community has been wary of computer-derived work.
"We have had to work very hard to make sure that we got recognition from both sides of the fence," said Barry Vercoe, professor of music and media arts and science. "I think MLE is able to leapfrog over that hard work and have a new beginning."
MLE, a 150 million punt collaboration between MIT Media Lab and the Irish government, will operate from September as an independent European, university-level research and educational centre. Still embryonic in structure, the facility will grow to a faculty of 55, drawn from Europe and the Media Lab in Massachusetts, and host 200 students. While education and e-commerce are also intended to be a focus of MLE - the Irish government pushed for and will help fund the development of an affiliated digital village of e-commerce companies - the digital arts are clearly at the heart of the institute.
"MLE is new. It's a new space, a new context, a new set of people," says Glorianna Davenport, head of the interactive cinema group at Media Lab. Davenport has been MIT's key person on the ground in the Republic since the Irish government announced the initiative last December. She will join Machover as one of the first researchers in Dublin, and the broad interests of the two will undoubtedly shape MLE's future. Davenport has been pushing at the edge of narrative, considering new ways of telling stories that can be fractured and united using a network of computers.
Machover is the much-feted inventor of a massive interactive music experience called Brain Opera http://brainop.media.mit.edu, which has found a permanent home at Vienna's new House of Music, an interactive museum. Brain Opera has a score composed partly in advance by Machover, and partly by visitors to the installation, who can "play" a roomful of colourful, otherworldly instruments. "It's an opera about what happens when we listen to music," he says, noting that he based the opera on Marvin Minsky's seminal work, the Society of Mind.
Machover has other projects in the works as well, for example, Toy Symphony, a collaboration between music experts and children that will utilise a range of music toys. "I think children have to be brought into the arts and music world as collaborators, not as students," he says. "I'm acutely aware of how little music training there is for children."
Like Machover, Davenport is particularly interested in breaking through the existing boundaries between art forms and move to something entirely new - although no one seems sure what that format might be. "We have gotten to the point with the technology that it gives us enormous opportunity to reinvent or newly invent form," she says. "We need to figure out what comes after theatre, what comes after cinema," says Machover. Senior research scientist Walter Bender agrees. "There's a totally new, major scale art form that we haven't built yet."
They hope MLE will host its creation. The Republic is "about the right size" for a very big undertaking, and does not have the strict, constraining administrative and artistic hierarchies that he has experienced elsewhere in Europe, Machover says. He adds that MLE has acquired a neighbouring building and plans to convert into a large performance space. "One of our ideas is that it is an ideal space to have performances, interactivity on a large scale. Our hope is that there will be a lot of performances here."
"We're at the threshold of the way we look at arts and digital technology, and how we use them is about to change," says Bender. "We have a digital golden age before us."
