With Platform4 in winter hibernation, the administration staff and the community is working tirelessly - not only to prepare the coming season, but also on condensing and visualizing the ideological bedrock that the Platform4 project is based on. Ironically, this has never been done before, because we've been to busy inviting people inside, creating projects and building robots!
During the first weeks of January, we've been working on a vision statement. Come peak inside the churning machine to get a glimpse of this process.
With more than 30 submitted projects, about 200 people visiting the exhibition in two days, more than 400 attending the Award Show and coverage in local television, radio and newspapers the Platform4 Awards showed it's relevance, opened Platform4 and the creative environment surrounding it to a lot people and created a fundament for network and inspiration.
At the grand Platform4 Awards show the prizes and honor went to two magnificent projects; the People's Choice-award, selected via SMS-vote among the audience, went to the TS Collective for the 'Wolfram'-installation - and the Platform4 Award of 10,000 Danish Kroner, as chosen by the official award jury, to Edit Vizer's 'InsideOut Vol. II'. Big congrats to the talents creators! And a big thanks to all the participating projects.
FAT Labs activist Jerry Juarez came back to Platform4 to host the soft-circuit workshop 'FAT CRIER', where participants learned how to have open hard- and software interact with audio units through the use of conductive thread.
PLATFORM4-IN-A-BOX was Platform4's first fully self-curated exhibition featuring 7 art/tech installations made by local talents, who worked over the course of the last year to build an art piece to be exhibited at the official showcase in August 2011. See/read documentation and afterthought here.
Platform4 and a handful of graffiti painters did a fun experiment painting an old 1994 Ford Escort on October 8, 2011. It was a live performance art piece in conjunction with the P4 Cafe. Beers, music, friends and art made for a super hyggelig night. Check out the results in the short video here.
Right outside the building is the beautiful Platform4 street art gallery, curated entirely and autonomously by the various street communities. Alrune Rødder has done an awesome little video featuring artist themselves (Smelt Mig & Hands Off) & Lars Pank.
This last weekend FormuLab was full of talented aspiring computer game creators during the Indie9000 Game Jam 2011 session that was held by the Indie9000 crew in collaboration with Shareplay and DreamGames. Lots of great gaming ideas took shape and friendships were made. Check out the video summary and photo galleries here.
The video artist C-Men aka. Julian van Aalderan held an inspiring talk about how he makes live visuals using two decrepit Amiga 1200's and other lo-fi gear. The talk was recorded and is now available for viewing online.
On September 8-11 Platform4 hosted the big hacker-conference Platform4.0.Future Meeting Hub #1 where 7 backspaces and creative groups - as well as a list of individual tinkerers and speakers - congregated with the Platform4 community to discuss, talk, make, build, hack and tinker for four straight days in a meet-up that was part conference, part maker lab, part think tank and part anarchic craze. Here's a little afterthought/summary, some videos, a series of photo galleries and some feedback.
This weekend the monitors surveying Aalborg's Østra Havn at the regional powerplants must've looked really weird. The reason being that we hosted one of the most extreme voltage-meets-music experiments of all time on Danish (and European) soil: The so-called Tesla Coil Concert Experiment, also known as Tesla In Concert.
MadeByWho - as part of the BUILD4-group - has made this funny furniture project that builds on the idea of a place for people to meet, share ideas, create art and design, have fun and drink beers. The stools are made to fit into this environment.
It is with great joy that we can announce that a new fundraiser has joined the Platform4 family; namely Mads Bang, who comes from a varied background of cultural entrepreneurship. Mads will be helping fundraise for Platform4 in general, but also act as a councellor for all the ProjectFormers working on developing projects in Platform4 and FormuLab.
More than 100 people showed up to discuss the future of Platform4 and creative hubs in general - and to hear inspiring words from Eva De Klerk, Elske Hazenberg and Anna Porse.
The 17 people who signed up for the free 3-day Mz. Baltazar's Laboratory workshop had a seemingly awesome time. Not only did they learn the basics of soldering and using open hardware microboard platform Arduino, but also how to have the hardware interact with software such as Processing and PureData - as well as take apart old electronics to create something new.
One of our platformers, Lina Bergstrøm, did a videoblog thing from yesterdays Wet Art workshop - check it out and learn about what's going on down here this week.
As a new initiative, our revamped and re-energized café will be open every weekend over the summer - check this site every week for opening hours.
So drop by for a cup of hot coffee, a chill beer or a sweet soda and enjoy the Platform4 vibe - either inside the café or outside in our outdoor environment.
