Interview by Vincent Delavaux for Digital Cookbook.

Vincent Delavaux is a Belgian journalist, editor, and curator working at the intersection of digital culture, design, and contemporary art. This interview was conducted for Digital Cookbook, an online platform exploring emerging artistic and technological practices.

-- LAb[au], Digital meta-architects

LAb[au] is a multimedia architects and artists group located in Brussels for nearly fifteen years. Guests at many European digital arts festivals, their work today receives international attention and deserved recognition in Belgium. Their approach, in the spirit of the artists of the Bauhaus, aims to be unifying and in search of a pictorial language for our times. Digital art, with its own codes and particular aesthetic, offers them a field of action conducive to the deployment of protean artwork in search of beauty. It is therefore highly visual art in which light and sound are omnipresent and which recalls the formalism of renowned predecessors, notably the precursors of cybernetic art, but finds fulfillment through the use of the computer and its infinite possibilities.

At the intersection of disciplines and practices, LAb[au] plans the various facets of its artistic activity - installations, performances, music, architecture and theoretical studies - with the same rigour and systemic approach that constitute its trademark.

MetaDeSIGN, the work recently published by the group, represents both a summary of their work and a manifesto of their artistic vision. Its publication provided an opportunity to look back with Manuel Abendroth, one of the founding members of LAb[au], on an outstanding career.