art – Looks Like New

Who owns the commons?

MEDLab — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MEDLab research fellow Kadallah Burrowes speaks with Lauren Gardner, Executive Director of Open Source Collective, about what it means to build infrastructure for the commons and why the lessons of grassroots arts spaces might hold the key to the future of collective digital life. Gardner stewards a network of over 2,500 open-source and community-driven projects, providing fiscal sponsorship and shared infrastructure to thousands of maintainers and contributors worldwide.

Her path to the global open-source movement runs through some of the most generative DIY spaces in recent memory: Babycastles, the New York arcade-turned-social-gallery that reimagined game culture, and the School for Poetic Computation, where code, critical theory, art, and collaborative practice converge. Their conversation asks what artists, technologists, and anyone interested in working collectively might learn from decades of building environments where creativity and the commons come first.

What stories do our machines tell and what do they remember?

MEDLab — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:59:41 +0000

In this month’s episode of Looks Like New, hosted by MEDLab’s associate director Júlia Martins Rodrigues, we speak with Camila Galaz, an interdisciplinary artist, editor, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of technology, memory, and historical storytelling.

Galaz is the founder of Structured Knowledge, a nonfiction narrative consultancy helping creatives and thinkers translate complex ideas into meaningful public-facing work. She is also co-creator of Our Friend the Computer, a globally ranked podcast uncovering underrepresented histories of computing; an editor at the Millennium Film Journal; and co-founder of Superkilogirls, a creative research lab examining the material infrastructures of computing and their entanglement with women’s labor.

Her projects have been supported by the New Museum, the Nieuwe Instituut, Creative Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. In this episode, Galaz reflects on how storytelling, archives, and experimental media can reveal the hidden human histories behind our digital world.

Are you being trained?

MEDLab — Thu, 29 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

AI is advancing at lightning speed—so fast that questions of ownership and data use often get left behind. What control do we really have over our data in these massive language models? And how can we rethink governance for AI?

On this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab fellow Andy DiLallo speaks with Berlin-based artist, musician, and technologist Mat Dryhurst. Known for his work on collective ownership and digital governance. We hear how DIY music culture shaped Mat’s approach to technology, the importance of transparency in AI, and the role institutions can play in building ethical, trustworthy AI frameworks.

Is online life heading into dark forests?

MEDLab — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In an ever more messy online media environment, it can be hard to know where to let ourselves be truly creative. This month on Looks Like New, MEDLab community fellow Andy DiLallo spoke with Yancey Stricker, best known as a co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter. Strickler’s story started on a farm in Virginia before he became a music journalist and founder of a leading tech company. Most recently, he co-founded Metalabel, a new platform that fosters creative expression and meaningful collaboration among artists. He has also been a leading storyteller about life online, including through his influential 2019 essay, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.”

How do you give a technology to its community?

MEDLab — Thu, 23 May 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Online technologies have often taken on a life of their own when a community forms around them. Users put their tools to use in ways the designers never expected. What would it mean to truly hand ownership and control of tools to the people who rely on them most? This month, we turn to Anjali and James Young, the founders of Collab.Land, a piece of software used by thousands of online communities. In 2023, they distributed control of their product to their users, thanks to a blockchain-based token and a cooperative company. But this was not a straightforward process. They explain their hopes and their challenges in attempting this “exit to community.”

Can artists control their own business?

MEDLab — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:00:06 +0000

Art has often been the vanguard of new tech. It was through art that many people got interested in the Internet to begin with, or became willing to pay for subscription services. But too often, large corporations take advantage of business models that artists work to create. What if artists owned and governed their own business models? Austin Robey is co-founder of Ampled, a platform for musicians, owned and governed by the musicians themselves, along with their supporters. He describes how building an online business looks different when artists are in charge.

What’s New With Textiles?

MEDLab — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 22:07:39 +0000

We might not think about textiles as advanced technology, but in fact it was textile looms that helped inspire the designs of the earliest computers. This month we hear from Steven Frost, is an artist and an instructor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who hosts the Colorado Sewing Rebellion at the Boulder Public Library. He talks about the transgressive potential of threads and the transformative power of repair.