FAT Lab
FAT Lab (Free Art & Technology, 2007-2015) was an open-source art collective I was part of for its whole run. We said goodbye on August 1, 2015. 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.”
The FAT diagram, NBC peacock edition, by FAT Lab.
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.
F.A.T. NYC by Greg Leuch, 2011.
We’d often coordinate “week” events where multiple members would release related projects all at once: Kanye Week, GML Week, Occupy Week, etc.
Shows
FAT Lab work showed at Gadgetoff (2007), the New Museum’s Rhizome Commissions (2008), the Netherlands Media Art Institute (2009) and Transmediale (2010), where FAT was nominated for the Transmediale Award. Lindsay Howard curated F.A.T. Gold, a five-year retrospective, at Eyebeam and MU Eindhoven in 2013 and Gray Area in San Francisco in 2015. See the full exhibitions list.
The F.A.T. Manual, edited by Geraldine Juárez with Domenico Quaranta. Co-produced by Link Editions, F.A.T. Lab and MU, 2013.
Links
- fffff.at — the original FAT Lab blog (archived)
- My posts on fffff.at
- FAT Lab on Wikipedia
- FAT Gold archive