MTF Labs
2012–present ongoing Director with Michela Magas, MTF Labs AB
A travelling innovation lab and a global community of nine thousand innovators across music, technology, science and the arts.
MTF began in London in 2012 as Music Tech Fest, founded by Michela Magas as a festival of music ideas: a place where performers, hackers, researchers and instrument makers shared a stage rather than a conference schedule. The first edition drew 54 presenters, 70 developers and 70 creative practitioners, and the BBC called it “the future of music”. Twenty-six international events later, the festival has become MTF Labs: a travelling laboratory and a community of over nine thousand innovators whose work spans medicine, robotics, neuroscience, oceanography, physics, AI and traditional crafts as readily as music.
The format is the thing. An MTF event is an intensive week in one place that combines conference talks with hands-on collaborative work: the 24-hour Hack Camp, the Trackathon music production challenge, Jam Camps, Kids Hacks, curated expert labs and public showcases. Editions have run from London, Berlin, Paris and Boston to Wellington, Ljubljana, Helsinki, Karlsruhe, Pula, Aveiro and a string of Swedish cities including Umeå, Stockholm, Örebro, Gothenburg and Linköping. MTF Stockholm 2018 filled six floors of KTH with more than eight hundred people, put ninety experts in a decommissioned reactor hall, and bounced eighty-one voices off the Moon via the Dwingeloo radio telescope. Partners and hosts over the years have included the BBC, Spotify, Microsoft Research, the MIT Media Lab, IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou, the London Symphony Orchestra, Funkhaus Berlin and ZKM Karlsruhe.
Dubber arrived at MTF in May 2013, as a professor with a conference paper, and in his own telling never really went home: he became festival director soon after and has run the programme with Magas since. In 2018 the operation moved formally to Sweden as MTF Labs AB, and the company now runs labs, events and consultancy from Umeå and Stockholm. Its lab format lives on inside European research projects as the Innovation Prototyping Labs, and its community remains the connective tissue for much of the work in this archive, from MusicBricks to JUST Data. The MTF Podcast archive of 118 episodes, with transcripts, remains freely available.
Links
mtflabs.net ↗MTF history ↗The MTF Podcast ↗MTF Labs on Wikipedia ↗
