Upgrade! Boston

Upgrade! International: DIY Oklahoma City :: November 30-December 3, 2006 :: International Upgrade! organizations and their artists will converge in Oklahoma City to present art and ideas to each other and the community in the second annual international symposium. Included in the event will be workshops on art and technology, audio/video performances and presentations, and exhibitions of works by international and regional artists representing this yearÂ’s theme: DIY (Do-It-Yourself). Upgrade! Boston will contribute the following:

DIY or Die: An Upgrade! New York, Turbulence, and Rhizome Net Art Exhibition :: In celebration of their respective ten-year anniversaries, Turbulence and Rhizome collaborated with Upgrade! New York to present an exhibition of works that they commissioned or presented over the course of their histories. The term D.I.Y. (or do-it-yourself) expresses an independent ethos, one that encourages cultural producers to create and distribute work outside mainstream or commercial systems and often in direct confrontation with them. Continue reading

Upgrade! International Oklahoma City

Stock Market

Upgrade! A Day in Life events take place in four cities simultaneously. Urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place.

The stock market uses this value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms. You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. Get your shares now!

The Upgrade! Stock Market is a project by Burak Arikan. Other Upgrade! Boston events >>

Variations VII: FishNet

Variations VII: FishNet by Mobius Artists Group :: Needs Real Audio and Windows Media Player plugins; High speed (DSL/Cable or better) internet connection recommended.

In Variations VII: FishNet, the primary component is an autonomous network space in which the listener/visitor will “fish” among a myriad of live audio/visual internet feeds. These will include sources such as air traffic controllers, police and fire departments, horse races, and webcams. The project will also make use of live, distributed input from cell phones. The outcome will be an environment built by the team of artists, but freely explored by visitors to the virtual and live sites. The artists will provide the resources for a distributed audience to create its own experience of synchronicity. FishNet is inspired by John CageÂ’s Variations VII, a pioneering “art and engineering” performance event from 1966.

“Variations VII: FishNet” is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the LEF Foundation. Continue reading

Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986

First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986 :: November 7, 2006 – April 2, 2007 :: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, c/ Santa Isabel, 52, 28012 Madrid (Spain).

First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986 has the intention of presenting in a contextualized manner the historic core of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía’s video collection. It has been built up in recent years with the goal of laying solid foundations upon which the collection could grow. Curated by Berta Sichel, director of the Museum’s Audiovisual Department, the exhibition aims to reconstruct a history which has been neglected for a long time via the acquired works and with the support of a small yet significant group of works on loan to cover existing gaps. The exhibition has been organized around the different approaches and ideas of the artists who worked with video during the first 25 years of this medium. These include the inspiration of Fluxus, the critique of commercial television, the relationship between the medium and the viewer, feminism, performance and the legacy of minimalism and conceptual art. Continue reading

Open Walk-Thru and ADA Swaray

The last UpStage open walk-thru for 2006 will be combined with the last ADA Swaray for the year, and held on Wednesday December 6 at 9:00 pm NZ time. To join the online festivities, just point your browser here at party time (we have some surprises up our cyber-sleeves!). To find your local time, go here. If you’d like to log in and play, email me for a username.

Helen Varley Jamieson: helen[at]creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm
Continue reading

The Net as an Artwork

Networking: The Net as an Artwork represents a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of the realities which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the formation of Italian hacker communities.

Written by Tatiana Bazzichelli, with the preface of Derrick De Kerckhove and the epilogue of the videoartist Simonetta Fadda. Networking means to create nets of relations, by sharing experiences and ideas in order to communicate and experiment artistically and where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the public, act on the same level.

In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years of experimentation a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed. Active in underground environments, these projects use diverse media (computers, video, television, radio and magazines) and deal with technological experimentation, or hacktivism, depending on the terminology used in Italy, where the political component is a central theme. Continue reading

New Media, Fan Muscle will mold TV future

[Image: Henry Jenkins’ Second Life avatar] How will we enjoy entertainment in the future? Via a high-definition plasma TV screen, computer, cellphone or iPod? Who will create entertainment? Will it be mega studios, independent producers or the whiz kid on his laptop–or a network of whiz kids? And who will watch the result when the audience is also the writer, critic and marketer?

Experts–from network executives, academics and game designers to gadfly media artists–peered into the “Futures of Entertainment” at a two-day conference, Nov. 17-18, sponsored by the MIT comparative media studies program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. The future they sketched reached way beyond the buzzword of “interactivity” to a time when the line blurs between media producer and media consumer.

“We now live in a networked society where we’re seeing the ability of communities to rapidly pool information,” said Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program and conference organizer. “This new environment both creates community opportunities and creates activities for this community.” Continue reading

We Still have the Power

“…We are inventing new forms of artistic and cultural expression, from machinima to mashups via video clips and blogs, and soon we will find ways to curate, present and sell them, as we do with every other form of artistic expression. Participative media, citizen journalism, blogging and social networking mark the point at which the social structures of the second half of the 20th century finally break down and vanish and new relationships emerge.

Companies like Dell feel the fury of their former consumers and try to reinvent themselves in the image of the participative community, even if they sometimes stumble. And every media outlet is turning to its former audience and trying to find ways to include and embrace people, hoping that they can turn participation into money when previously all they needed were passive viewers…

So how are we going to deal with the social, political and economic impact of the monster that we have unleashed since the two-way web came back into fashion? If we’re going to move forward and do so in a way that will give us a modicum of network and social justice we have to recognise two fundamental principles. The first was expressed most clearly by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig when he pointed out that “code is law”. Continue reading

Information Artefacts

Katharina Birkenbach (aka Ponypink), an Amsterdam- and soon Berlin-based designer, has just launched a pretty fresh social networking website, it’s called Nearness. Built on Mediamatic’s anyMeta system, it allows you to feed it with various information about events, people, things, etc., all of which are equally treated as artefacts. This allows users to create rich interconnections between the individual entries, creating an ever more complex network of stuff.

I asked Katharina to briefly line out what the idea behind it is: “Nearness is an environment where people can store their information that is surrounding them in their daily life. It is not focused on one kind of media but is open for nearly any kind of information, doesn’t matter how big or small, important or unimportant it is. Nearness can become an always present little companion, which is helping you to collect, to not forget, to organise the things you like. But organising not in the sense that you are somehow the administrator of a complex folder system, but by generating context for the data and embedding it in the data network. The context in which, for example, your favourite book is displayed is not only set up by the information you’ve entered, but all the users of Nearness. In this sense it can develop to some kind of stimulating treasure trove.” Continue reading