The Culture Lab

The company The Culture Lab was established by three La Salle students, who wanted to convey that data does not necessarily have to be presented numerically. In today’s society our minds are focused on practical and logical data representation, but this limits the beauty of the information. The idea behind The Culture Lab is that we can represent data through shapes and art; it takes away the complexity of the information and makes it more aesthetically pleasing.

It all started the winter 2013. The two students Ægir Steinarson and Leonard Schreij had nothing to do, so they decided to set up a club. While the boys were planning the club, their idea of a club turned into an event. At one point, La Salle's professor Dawn Hiscock asked if they could come up with something for her Sport Event class; a fusion between sports and art. The ideas kind of jumped around and while the boys worked on the project, Leo drew freely on the blackboard. Then they started to talk about using shapes or lines to display patterns of movements.

That turned out to be exactly what they would spend their free time doing. Firstly, they tried to understand how they could capture the signals of movement. To organise the event they had thought about earlier, the boys decided to set up a football match for their friends. This was their initial experiment. They made the players run around with phones in their pockets, as an attempt to use the mobile GPS signals to track the player’s movements. Due to low GPS accuracy the results were not as good as expected, so the boys decided to try another approach. They attached go-pro cameras around the football courts at the university campus, combined with trackers for each player, a solution that turned out to work decently. Later, the boys decided to move away from tracking the movement themselves, and found an external supplier who could provide an accurate tracking system. This tracking system use X and Y coordinates to track movements every tenth mili-second, and they realized that they could use computer programs to translate the patterns into graphs.

The boys then got in touch with some artists, who were responsible for designing creative and artsy representations of the movements. The vision is simple: The boys believed there is too much numerical data out there, and that we have lost contact with it because it is difficult to visualize. Therefore, they want to use art to convey the story behind the data, by showing it through shapes and arts instead of numbers.

Initially, this was something the boys did for fun, but last autumn they realised that the project had bigger potential. Ægir and Leo got introduced to the architect student Alex Rodeira, and together they decided to take the project to the next level.

The Culture Lab was created, and the company launched last week. The Culture Lab aims to visualize the beauty of sports, by translating it into pieces of art. The first step the boys made to transform the idea into a business was to send a proposal to Manchester City Football Club. The football club really liked the idea, so the boys sent a brochure explaining what they’re doing, how the process is now and how they believe the future would look like. They also made a big prototype art-piece on an aluminium plate, showing Sergio Aguero’s goal in 2012. This goal is very important in the history of the football club, it made Manchester City win the Premier League championship for the first time in 44 years and it happened with very little time left in the game.

The football club really liked what they saw, and the boys are now preparing for their first exhibition and auction, which will be held in Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium (also known as the City of Manchester Stadium) next autumn. The exhibition will have artistic representations of historical moments from the history of the football club. The final artworks will be the typical art to have in a living room, as Ægir himself explained it “You would not like a live size poster of a goal, that makes for an angry woman, but the point is that this will compete with what you already have in a living room.” The art will allow people to have artistic representations telling the same story as a picture, but in a different way.

The biggest challenge the boys have faced so far has been related to the artistic work. They cooperate with several different external artists, some specialised in graphical design and others with more of an abstract background. The difficult element is to make the artist convey the story from the football court, without loosing the creativity and the personal touch. However, the boys believe they have gotten past most of the issues related to the artistic representations.

Now they will devote their focus towards their first exhibition, while also making sure to generate and develop new ideas. The boys have several cool ideas for the future. They will try to track three-dimensional movements, which will allow them to also make sculptural representations. What is important for the team is to not forget about the creative journey they have gone through the last months, and to make sure it will be a circular process so that the company will continually have new ideas to launch in the market.

It will be exciting to follow this company into the future, and we wish them the best of luck!