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Some mem­bers of the AZ Labs com­mu­nity have been gath­er­ing in artis­tic res­i­dency in Guimarães once more, the topic for this res­i­dency is Cre­ative Pol­i­tics, mean­ing to come up ideas and projects con­nect­ing the cit­i­zens back with the polit­i­cal sys­tem. Com­plain­ing is easy, pre­sent­ing solu­tions is harder. Cit­i­zens feel dis­con­nected with pol­i­tics and dis­en­gage them­selves from these issues. We are try­ing to counter that with artis­tic or oth­er­wise use­ful projects and proposals.

Dur­ing the first week­end we had run­ning at LCD a par­al­lel event named Antropocode, part of the Atlantic Arc Sum­mer of Labs 2012. Dur­ing the week­end over a dozen artists and hack­ers from Por­tu­gal and Spain were gath­ered devel­op­ing con­cepts and projects in a hack­a­ton about the bor­der­line of body and tech­nol­ogy. Some of the projects were also related to the cre­ative pol­i­tics theme.

The hack­a­ton is now over but the Cre­ative Pol­i­tics artis­tic res­i­dency con­tin­ues with a dozen other folks, mostly folks from Por­tu­gal but also includ­ing some for­eign­ers. The first days have been focused on brain­storm­ing project ideas. You can find more infor­ma­tion on our wiki.

Some exam­ples of projects cur­rently being developed:

• Reclaim­ing Data
  Research and doc­u­men­ta­tion of open data ini­tia­tives in Por­tu­gal, the end goal is to develop a viral video call­ing for more active par­tic­i­pa­tion and involve­ment from the cit­i­zens or a webtool to request miss­ing data.
• Hack­ing Urban Resources
  Research and doc­u­men­ta­tion of ways to hack urban resources to improve the way of life at a local level in Guimarães, bring­ing back the con­trol of the city to the cit­i­zens. A sam­ple book on how to re-appropriate, re-use local resources and also on how to re-learn use­ful old skills.
• Polit­i­cal Man­ager
  A web based game where you play the role of a ris­ing politi­cian and have to improve your skills to build your career with­out suc­cumb­ing to the pres­sures of the dark side.
• Com­par­a­tive News
  The goal of this project is to help cit­i­zens under­stand the trends and ten­den­cies in the polit­i­cal dis­course that the media present to them every­day. The strat­egy is to com­pare dif­fer­ent sources of infor­ma­tion, like news­pa­pers, radio and tele­vi­sion using data visu­al­iza­tion. The intu­ition behind this project is that com­par­ing sources enable peo­ple to see the big pic­ture, to iden­tify what’s impor­tant and what’s not.