July 04, 2007
Upgrade! Tel Aviv-Jerusalem
Dan Phiffer + Mushon Zer Aviv
Upgrade! Tel Aviv-Jerusalem: Dan Phiffer (US) & Mushon Zer Aviv (IL) - ShiftSpace (the talk will be held mainly in English) :: July 10, 7:30 pm :: Minshar Art School, David Chachmi st. 18, Tel Aviv :: Free Entrance.
While the Internet's design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment--but who controls the terms of this new read/write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city's social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.
By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions - which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we're working to develop - which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes and Highlights) and some are more experimental / interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). In the near future users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, for curating netart exhibitions or as a platform to facilitate a context-based public debate.
Recent commissions from Turbulence.org and Rhizome.org will help ShiftSpace continue to grow its user base and further its Open Source model. It will support our upcoming goals including a developer API, a workshop series, a ShiftSpace commissions program and a research into peer-to-peer network architectures.
Dan Phiffer is a new media hacker from California, interested in exploring the cultural dimension of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet.
Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer and a media activist from Tel-Aviv, interested in challenging the perception of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through politics, culture, globalization and the world wide web.
Posted by jo at July 4, 2007 02:11 PM
