We state that performing is about movement but it begins with an inhibition. At least some of the automatic circuits between regularized stimuli and habitual responses must be disconnected, as if a crowbar had been inserted into the interlocking network of standardized actions and trajectories constituting the World As We Know It. The resulting zone is a tear in the fabric of good-common sense. Society's equilibrium is breached by a void into which freakish bodies rush as if sucked out of time, and out of which mutant beings come pouring.

The lab is open and in-becoming: an intensive training, a site of research in the use and mis- use, the suppression, oppression and control of the body, space and informations. A program dedicated to integrate performance practices, art and activism in the field of digital counter-culture. The program includes movement research (Body Weather research), counter-information, video activism with open screenings, workshops on issues such as economic globalization and counter-information strategies, direct action trainings, creation of independent media, contribution on the printing of the activist magazine Green Pepper etc.

The lab is based in the autonomous- interdisciplinary research centre overtoom 301(c.s.o.a.ot 301) in Amsterdam. The former film-academie o.t.3:01 was squatted in october 99 with the aim of realizing alternative living-working space for independent artists and creating an infrastructure for non profit cultural activities. But there is more. We perceive o.t.3:01 as a derelict space, as a hole in habit, dysfunctional for extraction of surplus value and therefore often perceived as a simple negative from the common-sense perspective: a lack of functioning, a waste land. They are seen for what they are not. Autonomous zones are sites of interdeterminacy that bodies-in-becoming may make their own. They are interstitial zones of escape but not 'outside of existing structures. Derelict spaces inhabit the in-between of socially significant constellations. The 'outside' of autonomous zones is not the relative of topography, but an absolute outside that is ever and already in this world, an irruption in the actual order, a tear in the fabric of common-good sense. Often their capacity to be sites of poli ical invention goes unnoticed.

in the ot 301 we host:

a research / performance studio, theatre / film studio, cinema, office for independent media and the counter-information agency (eyfa, european youth for action), sound studio, free internet access, radio station, organic vegan kitchen and bar.