metaLAB is a porous community of experimentally-minded scholars, artists, designers, technologists, and thinkers, with affiliations and practices distributed worldwide. Together we instigate and manage a portfolio of projects: some we spin up ourselves; others involve partnerships with libraries, archives, and museums; others still involve commissions or competitions. Projects vary in scope and scale from provocations to platforms and weeks to years. Amidst the ebb and flow of projects, we come together for conversation and shared critique, inspiration, and collaboration. That conversation is ongoing and represents the heart of metaLAB as a community.
Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER)
An exploration of experience, perspective-taking, uncertainty, and cultural learning that draws on scientific, somatic, and artistic approaches, led by artist Olafur Eliasson and scientist Andreas Roepstorff (Aarhus University), funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (2019–2025).
This project includes people from diverse disciplines and many countries. It is centred on a core group of contributors who meet weekly and expands out to other contributors who all come together for multi-day workshops in different locations about 1–2 times per year. During the stretches between workshops, contributors produce artworks and scholarship that feed back into the project as modalities to think along with.
EER is founded upon experimentation. Our experiments examine perception, decision-making, action, notions of togetherness, collaboration, and the transmission of knowledges. We adopt analytical, embodied, and multi-media methods in our group processes, which, in turn, inform artworks, web-projects, participatory installations, and programmes presented in museums and other public institutions. EER experiments and workshops have taken place at Tate Modern and Tate Exchange in London (UK), Aarhus University (DK), Trapholt Museum (DK), the Steno Museum (DK), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (JP), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (CH), PSM gallery in Berlin (DE), and Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin (DE) and Copenhagen (DK).
Panel talk: Experience in the Age of Digital and Virtual Space, EER LAB, PSM Berlin, January 2023.
Andreas Roepstorff (co-founder of EER), Helene Nymann (artist), Pireeni Sundaralingam (poet and brain activist), Sophie Erlund (artist)
Artist Olafur Eliasson ( co-founder of EER) on experimentation and his interest in embodiment and experience, June 2018.
The Nordic Society for Aesthetics Conference: Aesthetics, ethics and relational being
Reykjavik, Iceland, 13-15 June 2024
Presentation on Nature is an event that never stops and navigating interdisciplinary formats in art making.
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics
Research paper coming out in 2025:
Designing for Relational Complexity: the Role of Interdisciplinary Strategies in Art
Authors: Sophie Erlund, Samuel E. Tepper, Andreas Roepstorff, Cordula Vesper