Present ShiftSpace Today

Mushon Zer-Aviv and Dan Phiffer will present their thesis ShiftSpace - an open-source layer above any website - at ITP today. Dan’s presentation is at 4:00 pm, Mushon’s is at 7:00 pm :: 721 Broadway at Waverly Place, 4th Floor, South Elevators, New York, NY 10003. If you can’t make it you can follow it online.

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 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.