Benjamin Van Dyke, MFA University of Michigan, BFA Kendall College of Art & Design. In 2006, Van Dyke was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands where he was artist-in-residence at NLXL in The Hague. During this time, he lent his talents to the implementation of experimental practices for the ministries of education and culture with an analysis on the cultural implications. He has continued his research through site-specific installations of experimental typography. He has been invited to exhibit his work across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Following his work in The Netherlands, Ben Van Dyke was invited to join the Visual Studies faculty at The State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is Head of the Communication Design program. He also serves as Vice President of DesignInquiry — an international design collective focused on design research and education.

DJs / VJs / WJs — WJ-S is a software and a flexible public device for web performances allowing WJs (webjays, artists, curators, web addicts, web mutants…) to play live with online text, sound and visual… WJs take the control of a multiscreens environment and surf at distance in different browser windows simultaneously. WJ-S is a visible and collective experience of the surf. WJ-S is an immersive experience in the flux.

Following the steps of DJs and VJs, WJs (weejays, webjays, webjockeys …) directly draw their sources from the Web and mix the network flow in real time. The WJ-S/essions are organized indoors or outdoors in a public space, in front of an audience..

Taking out the network from the web: As it is often related to a solitary adventure led in a very intimate relationship with one’s machine, the virtual experience is seldom extended to another dimension of time-space. Projects involving network actors mostly take place in closed circles, within the network, and hardly ever outside, within a live performance environment.

The idea of the WJ-S project is to disrupt this tendency by offering a public surf where the feeling of being immersed in the flow and the pleasure of browsing are shifted to a live performance environment. Individual and collaborative online productions (in different geographical sites) become collective events (to which an audience is invited).

The web as a medium / the web a giant hard disk

WJ-s/essions make it possible to handle online contents (texts, sound, video, animations…) coming directly from the web, this giant hard disk.

The widened, shared and liberated opening of context creates a sensitive and lively situation that allows the full potential of scenography, writing, forms, combinations and practices to arise and flourish. The contexts generated in this way develop mobile dynamic display and hybridization.

The multiscreens projection system is a reduced model of the internet, a metaphor of its codes and of the way information flows and appears on the network.

Different WJ-S productions

The WJ-S productions can take many forms : performances, demos, presentations of projects, , parties, workshops, conferences… The WJ-S productions are specifically related to the network’s activity, they can be works in progress, unique or original actions The themes revolve around transmission, communication, dialogue, sharing, open and wide distribution, personal experience, experiments, history, processes and issues of the network.

The artists (the webjays)

According to the themes and the contexts of the events where the project is presented, the international media artists, famous or emergent, are selected in collaboration with the cultural operators

Webjays explore and experiment with the changing and fluctuating territories of the Internet. They subjectively articulate its intimate contours and zones. They play with an exacting choice of plastic, graphical, sensitive, political, social, aesthetic and narrative works they select on the realm of theweb… Webjays become flux stalkers offering things to see, hear, feel, observe and think about, through progressive and dynamic processes. Guided by their critical spirit and their own personal outlook, Webjays reveal the fragrance of the Web, defragment and confront worlds that make the invisible become visible.

Hundreds of artists and art students have already participated to the WJ-S project, among them : Isabelle Arvers, Sylvie Astiè, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Lucille Calmel, Agnès de Cayeux, KRN, Olga Kisseleva, Anne Laforet, Jérôme Joy, Marika Dermineur, Jérôme Joy, Mia Makela, Antoine Schmitt, Janez Jansa, Igor Stromajer…

Anne Roquigny (concept- coordination - production)

« Internet as a space of creation »

Anne Roquigny, media arts curator, has specialized during these last fifteen years in the production and curating of hybrid digital projects linked to sound, visual arts, flow, networks and to the Internet.. After devising and organising for 3 years (1995-1998) the cultural programs of events of the Web Bar, an internet café cum art gallery in Paris she joins in 1999 the CICV Pierre Schaeffer, one of the first French new media center where she was working as artistic coordinator and curator of the international urban multimedia arts festivals Les Nuits savoureuses and Interferences and then as co-director of the center with Pierre Bongiovanni. From 2002 to 2004, Anne Roquigny is in charge of the general co-ordination of the preliminary project for the future Digital Arts Center in Paris, dedicated to digital production and to electronic music, at la Gaité Lyrique.

Anne Roquigny is now developing the web performances project WJS and co-coordinates with Peter Sinclair and Jérôme Joy the Locus Sonus research laboratory specialized in audio art and it’s relation to space and networked audio systems.

In November 2009 Anne Roquigny launched WJ-SPOTS #1 “15 years of artistic creation on the internet”a special edition of MCD (Musiques et cultures digitales Magazine) in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events look back on 15 years of Internet history.

http://www.roquigny.info
http://www.locusonus.org
http://www.wj-s.org/WJ-SPOTS-1-15-years-of-internet

Kim Stringfellow will join us in the opening event to launch the San Diego node. She will talk about her current work addressing ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment.

Kim Stringfellow is an artist and educator residing in Joshua Tree, California. Her professional practice and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, mapping, and locative media. Her work investigates repercussions of human development within the western United States evolving out of a rigorously researched area of interest focused on a particular subject, community or region to discuss complex, interrelated issues of the chosen site. Within her research, she attempts to expose human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places. Ultimately, her projects are designed to create awareness, educate, and create a rich dialogue in relation to the subject at hand.

Kim teaches multimedia and photography courses at San Diego State University as an associate professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.

Chris Cuellar will be presenting on a series he recently organized for the Art21 blog where he transformed the guest column into a practical art-making resource as well as a vehicle for the un-distribution of existing works. He asked a small group of artists to give away their secrets in the form of online tutorials. Each how-to is meant to give the reader enough information to accurately reproduce the project presented. Furthermore, in order to reduce issues of artistic ownership, each artist’s contribution has been more or less ‘anonymized’ before posting, with as many overt references to the the individual artist or original project removed as possible. Cuellar asks why display a work when you can use a work? Why distribute copies when you can distribute a process? “Why buy a work, when you can just make it yourself?”

Read more about the series and view the tutorials on the art21 blog.

Chris Cuellar is a Los Angeles (previously Chicago) based new-media artist, writer and provocateur. His works occupy various media simultaneously including www, installation, social-media and printed texts. His pieces, occasionally brain-busting but often conceptually simple, deal with themes of digital identity, distribution of information, labor, spam, networks and telepresence in a way that never fails to incite a re-evaluation of these issues. He has worked and performed for the Austin New Music Co-op in Austin, TX; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hyde Park Art Center; the Red Rover Reading Series in Chicago; and Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn.

Upgrade! Chicago is the local Chicago-based node of the international Upgrade! network, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. Upgrade! Chicago presents new media projects, engages in informal critique, and fosters dialogue and collaboration between individual artists. Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.

The Nightingale is a rough and ready microcinema dedicated to screening emerging work across film, video, and new media genres and aims to support Chicago vibrant cinema community.

Juanjose Rivas is a Noise && Dirty New Media Artist based in Mexico City. His experimental musics, video art projects and realtime audio video performances have been screened and performed internationally. From his recent performance at BENT Festival in NYC to his current and previous engagements in the Chicago scene, Rivas brings a visceral digitalPunk energy to every event. For his screening at the Nightingale, he will be showing selections from his personal and collaborative projects. Rivas teaches video and cybernetics at Universidad Centro in Mexico City, runs dorkbot Mexico City and will be participating in the Festival de Música Electrónica Latina while in Chicago.

Nick Briz will facilitate a discussion following the presentation. He an organizer of GLI.TC/H and curator of various Glitch Art programs, will moderate the discussion following the presentation.

Upgrade! Chicago is the local Chicago-based node of the international Upgrade! network, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. Upgrade! Chicago presents new media projects, engages in informal critique, and fosters dialogue and collaboration between individual artists. Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.

The Nightingale is a rough and ready microcinema dedicated to screening emerging work across film, video, and new media genres and aims to support Chicago vibrant cinema community.

For its sixth edition, Mal au Pixel Festival — dedicated to the Open Source and DIY Cultures — looks at the issue of alternative money and currencies through a series of public lectures. This conferences panel is associated to an exhibition at Plateforme Gallery, with Paolo Cirio, Baruch Gottlieb & Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, DYNDY, Christian Nold.

Jaromil and Marco Sachy (Nl) DYNDY - Imagine the Future of Money:

DYNDY is a collective platform, an effort at building a Pattern Language for Alternative and Complementary Money Systems to inform and empower grassroots communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, instruments and reflections for the Exodus from proprietary money. DYNDY gathers researchers and practitioners in the fields of philosophy of economics and technology, activists and hackers, developers and visionaries. They hope to share plenty of resources for collective agencies to weave diverse networks of values that are sustainable, resilient and socially responsible. For example, the virtual currency BitCoin or the Banking platform Cyclos aim to free and decentralized banking services.

Enric Duran (Sp):

In 2008, Enric Duran, anticapitalist activist, ‘borrowed’ 492 000 euros in loans with several banks as part of political action to denounce the bank system, and used the money to support initiatives turned toward an alternative society and to publish 200 000 copies of a magazine “We can live without capitalism.” Cooperativa Integral is a self management project based in Catalonia which intends to put together gradually all the basic elements in the economy such as production, consumption, financing and own currency for a transition to enable us to build a way of life where neither bank nor state will be required.

Christian Nold (Uk) Bijlmer Euro:

The Bijlmer Euro is an complimentary local currency for South East of Amsterdam which creates economic benefits for local people, inspires social connections and builds a complex network identity for the Bijlmer. The Bijlmer Euro is a standard Euro banknote, which has a special Bijlmer Euro sticker attached to its surface. The stickers contain a unique electronic RFID-tag, so one can trace the route that the money is travelling through the Bijlmer from shop to shop. These movements are translated into a real-time visualisation that can be found here. In 2011, Christian Nold is invited by Pixelache to renew this experiments on Suomenlinna island.

Christian Nold is an artist, designer and educator working to develop new participatory models for communal representation.

Mansour Ciss Kanakassy et Baruch Gottlieb (Sn, Ca), AFRO:

AFRO is the first Pan-African currency, an art project developed since 2002, an imaginary currency embodied by a series of bills designed and printed by the artists Mansour Ciss Kanakassy and Baruch Gottlieb, at Déberlinisation Laboratory. The AFRO is proposed as an alternative to the Franc CFA (the original French colony’s currency in Africa renamed Franc Communaute Financiere Africaine), the currency of several countries in Africa, constituting a part of the Franc Zone. After this action, the artists proposed the “Global Pass” which gives the possibility to move around like a World Citizen, and work everywhere and to benefit from health insurance; and the “AFRO Express card”, offering a way to store and spend its AFRO anywhere in the world.

See also:

Exhibition, June 9 - 19, 2011 :: Opening June 9 :: U$ER FRIENDLY meeting with Paulo Cirio :: June 19, 2011 :: Plateforme, 73 rue des Haies, 75020 Paris.

Paolo Cirio (It): P2P Gift Credit Card, by Paolo Cirio, proposes an alternative economy based on Peer-to-Peer architecture for a more equal sharing of wealth in society. It offers an innovative participative system using counterfeit virtual money. By issuing a visionary type of credit card, the project introduces the P2P Gift Finance system based on People-to-People free credit shared across digital networks. The P2P Gift Finance is a democratic creation of money directly regulated by ordinary people in order to redistribute wealth in society. The website P2PGiftCredit.com allows people to generate unique virtual card numbers to send to others via digital devices and platforms. A limited edition of physical plastic P2P Gift Credit Cards are available by request at P2PGiftCredit.com.

Upgrade! Paris is the french node of Upgrade! International network: monthly sessions about the digital art scene.

With some museums acquiring net art works in the recent years, issues of preservation and exhibition have arisen. On the one hand, the digital materials of these works are fragile and continually on the verge of obsolescence. On the other hand, these works have to be online and activated by their audience to be full works of art. Preservation is both related to the material dimension of the artwork but also is a dialog with the artist and the museum.

In her book, Le netart au musée - Stratégies de conservation des œuvres en ligne, Anne Laforet presents and examines an overview of specific preservation strategies developed by the institutions, archives, artists: emulation, migration, score, re-interpretation, self-archiving, automatic archiving, etc (which can be also combined)… and draws the proposal of an hybrid conservation she calls the “archaeological museum”.

Anne Laforet is an independent researcher. She has recently completed her PhD in information science (from the University of Avignon in France) on the preservation of net art which will be published in the coming month. She has written a report entitled “Net art and artistic institutions and museums” for the French Ministery of Culture in 2004. She has presented her research in Europe and Canada. Anne writes on digital art and digital culture for Arte.tv and Poptronics.fr. She takes part in collective projects, whether art and/or research. She’s a sound performer and wj (web jockey).

Abstract: Charles Sanders Peirce conceived the notion of diagrammatic reasoning as a method of inquiry through diagrammatic operations, emphasizing the fundamentally spatial and sensory nature of language and thought. This talk will show a selection of my projects that employ diagrammatic principles in a variety of time-based, spatial, and software formats.

Dietmar Offenhuber is a media artist and research fellow in the Senseable City Lab at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning, MIT. He has backgrounds in architecture, urban studies and digital media and works on the spatial aspects of cognition, representation and behavior.

In his artistic practice, Dietmar frequently collaborates with the sound artist Markus Decker and composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl under the label stadtmusik.

His work has been extensively exhibited internationally and been shown, among other places, at ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, the Sundance Film Festival, Secession Vienna, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale and Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid. More here.

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org. It is one of 34 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence dot org.

Technocratic management of public spaces considers the body as an object that interferes with flow regulation. Citizens are patronized, attacked by these anti-ergonomic devices. Space is degrading / degraded. Today, public space ceases to be a shared space. It embodies the violence of powers. — Gilles Paté

The french law of 21 January 1995 laid the foundation for the prevention of malice in the planning and construction. Better known under the term of Prévention Situationnelle, this law mandates a study of public safety, as part of development projects, of public utilities and construction programs. Relaxation situationnelle is an hijacked translation of these methods of development of public and private spaces.

About the artists:

The Wa
Jérôme Fino

Benjamin Gaulon received a degree in Visual Communication from l’École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg and a MFA in Interactive Media & Environment from the Frank Mohr Institute. During his time at the Frank Mohr Institute, he developed several high profile projects, including de Pong Game, the Recycling Entertainment System, the PrintBall and Corrupt. After Graduating Gaulon started leading D.A.T.A (Dublin Art and Technology Association) and co-founded the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (IMOCA) in 2007. Since 2005, in collaboration with Lourens Rozema, Gaulon is running workshops entitled the e-waste workshops, inviting participants to create art projects from recycled electronic waste.

Gaulon teaches several courses at the National College of Art and Design on topics such as visual programming, physical computing, new media art and digital art theory. His work can be found on recyclism.com Gaulon currently lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter.

About /dev/art/: Meeting, discussions and exchanges between artists and developers using technologies (digital art, hacking, performances, etc).

About Upgrade! Paris is the french node of the Upgrade! International network. Monthly sessions on digital art.