SMARTlab
About the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute
The SMARTlab Digital Media Institute (for site specific Media, performing and digital arts) brings media artists, performers, technologists, scholars, business and e-commerce specialists, engineers, medical experts, and policy makers to sites around the world where their combined skills can make a real difference for communities, both locally and globally.
The SMARTlab has operated - with a number of partners, from a number of bases internationally - since 1991. The new home base in bespoke studios at the University of East London (in the heart of the Docklands) offers an ideal setting for creative exchange, both nationally and globally.
The SMARTlab has recently spread its wings to fill its new purpose built studios, including the MAGIC (Multimedia & Games Innovation Centre) PLAYroom, incubation and training spaces with linked fabrication, simulation, and product design facilities, and a partner institute providing a high-definition multistream film/video facility all on site.
For the past five years, the SMARTlab has gained recognition as one of the world's leading Practice-based PhD Programmes, and is viewed as an incubator for the next generation of talent and high-level scholarship in the 'ArtSci' domain.
The new base heralds a move to link more formally with the local community and an opportunity to partner with organisations around the Docklands, and across the UK. Since making the move to UEL, the SMARTlab has already run two major week-long seminar events, which have attracted many international speakers and Creative Industry representatives. Formal lecture programmes and community outreach projects are in process. Local and international organisations are invited to contact us to participate.
The SMARTlab Mission
The SMARTlab Mission is to bring together teams of artists, scholars, technologists and policy makers to share a commitment to creative technology innovation for real social change. We have fifteen years of experience in creating safe spaces for creative learning and healing, in many countries, live and online. Our aim is to bring together the world's thought leaders on social issues related to individual and community wellness achieved through empowerment, learning and creative expression, and to share the wisdom of the world's elders in specific community settings where evolution and revolution can develop with due regard to the privacy and safety of individual participants. In this way, we lever the power of new technology and the power of people to heal and to share wisdom, and bring those two forms of thinking and doing together in shared space, for real social development.
In our knowledge exchange PLAYroom and linked studios in the London Docklands, and at sister sites worldwide, we provide a top tier class research and incubation space for academic staff, practice-based PhD students and interdisciplinary teams of artists and technologists, scholars and education experts, community workers and industry representatives, medical doctors and alternative healers, city planners, architects, and artists working at the intersections of disciplines, all using new media and technology tools to achieve these greater social ends. We work together to create and test the efficacy of new media and informatics tools designed for a 'universal design' ethos to achieve social transformation for local communities, with global impact.
Together, we make new media tools, games, software applications, live and telematic performances that demonstrate our model of social inclusion through the sharing of intellectual, creative and innovative capital.
Website: www.smartlab.uk.com
