FAT Lab (Free Art & Technology, 2007-2016) was an open-source art collective I was part of for nearly a decade. We were “dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media” — or as we liked to say, “releasing early, often and w/ rap music.”
Members
The core crew included Evan Roth, Theo Watson, James Powderly, Steve Lambert, Greg Leuch, Dan Phiffer, and many more collaborators over the years.
Projects I worked on
Some of my favorites from the collective:
- Graffiti Markup Language (GML) — file format for capturing graffiti tags
- 000000book — open database for GML files
- ScratchML — file format for turntablism data
- Google Alarm — browser extension that alerts you when you’re sending data to Google
- Occupy Internet — animated GIF protestors for your website
- FuckFlickr — open-source image gallery software
- Kanye Rant Detector — alerts when Kanye uses ALLCAPS
- Quotable Kanye — Yeezy wisdom API
- KanyeStudio Pro — make beats like an 8-bit Kanye
- Internet Famous Class — algorithmically-graded class at Parsons
- Meme Breaks — scratch your favorite Internet memes
- Add-Art — replace online ads with art
The ethos
Everything we made was open source and public domain. The group functioned as a kind of rapid-prototyping lab for cultural interventions — make something weird, release it, see what happens. Many projects were conceived and shipped in a matter of days.
We’d often coordinate “week” events where multiple members would release related projects all at once: Kanye Week, GML Week, Occupy Week, etc.
Links
- fffff.at — the original FAT Lab blog (archived)
- My posts on fffff.at
- FAT Lab on Wikipedia
- FAT Gold archive