This year's laboratory is a self-experiment: for the first time, we will be using a location - the Galerie KUB - as a field for experimentation over several days in the context of the Leipzig Jazz Days, thus giving scope to the innovative, risky and unfinished.

The lab consists of three events.

Leipzig-based graphic designer and illustrator Stefan Ibrahim is once again responsible for the design of this year's festival motif. With his audiovisual lecture in the laboratory, he presents various influences and backgrounds that can be seen as parts of a more comprehensive reference system for his creative work. In this way, he provides insights into his own kind of image atlas.

In a short cultural history of cartography, we take a look at its first milestones in surprising accuracy and a creeping shift in meaning towards an aesthetic of exoticism and a thirst for adventure. We look at the loss of blind spots, the voluntary and involuntary abandonment of inaccessibility in times of all-encompassing networking efforts and the World Wide Web, as well as the marketing claim of the concept of "place of longing" and the constant (re)invention of an imaginary distance in pop culture as a coordinated collective substitute action.

This is how we heal the world and let everyone know that it's Christmas - with just one reach into the well-stocked CD compartment, once around the globe and back again, and ultimately all from home.