Abstract

The Makrolab project began in 1994 and was first realized during Documenta X in 1997. Its final state will be as a permanent art/science/tactical media station on the Antarctic in 2007 with primary research focus on telecommunications, migrations and climate. Up to now, the project has been set up in Germany, Scotland, Slovenia, Australia and Italy, with future plans for India, Canada and South Africa.
The MAKROLAB project was born in 1994 during the wars, that were raging in the former Yugoslavia. Its initial purpose was to function as an autonomous and mobile performance/ tactical media environment as it was explained during one of the first conceptual presentations of the project at ISEA94. Ten years later, the project has grown into a complex set of technological, political and environmental subdivisions and phases with the final aim of establishing permanent art/science/tactical media laboratory and station on the only transnational territory of the planet, the Antarctic, focusing the research on the three global fields of interest for the project, telecommunication, climate and migrations.
The MAKROLAB-UNTP [unmanned network tactical ) setup, together with the TRUST-SYSTEM S-77CCR platform is a specific net and geocentric focused phase of the project with the emphasis on open source protocol definitions and rapid deployment operations with ad-hoc networking capability for remote sensing and data distribution.

• Marko Peljhan is a native of Slovenia and a theatre and radio director by profession, he founded the arts and technology organization Projekt Atol in the early 90s and cofounded one of the first media labs in Eastern Europe, LJUDMILA, in 1995. In the same year, he founded the technology branch of Projekt Atol called PACT SYSTEMS where he developed the Global Positioning System based participatory networked mapping project, the Urban Colonisation and Orientation Gear 144, one of the first works in the s.c. “locative media” genre. [source: lifeboat.com/ex/bios.marko.peljhan]

Full text p. 62-63