I just got back from two intense days in Spain. On Thursday March 28 2008 I gave a talk in a series on Open Knowledge at the Circulo de Bellas Artes the impressive old style Madrid art institution, right in the centre. Before the event I gave a number of interviews that will be published over the next period. I spoke with Laura Corcuera from SINC, an online magazine on recent developments in the sciences. You can find the email interview that I did with them, here, on my pages. The Spanish translation is here, on the SINC site.

After a trip on the high-speed train I visited Seville where I was amazed to see the temporary media lab that the Zemos98 festival set up for five days in order to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Instead of doing an ordinary video/new media festival, the Zemos98 collective decided to select ten topics, invite ten ‘professors’ (workshop leaders) and then opened up the workshop to up to ten participants each. Twice a day there were plenary lecture sessions for all hundred participants. The festival was organized in an 18th century monastery that had been converted into an arts centre. The recent history of this centre wasn’t very fortunate but the Zemos98 was a blast. Please look around the Flickr pages and see what the architect did with card boxes in order to transform the large, high spaces into creative workspaces. The unique character of this format is the five days parallel programming of the ten workshops, combined with collective sessions. Usually the workshop either run one after the other (as we have done in Kassel during Documenta X with Hybrid Workspace and the Temp Lab in Kiasma), or the workshops are additional to a conference or festival.