Match-Making Sessions: April 16, 9:00 am UK, 8:00 pm NZ - find your local time here + April 16/17, 10:00 pm (Wednesday) UK, 9:00 am (Thursday) NZ - find your local time here + April 23, 12 noon UK, 11:00 pm NZ - find your local time here. Come to the matchmaking session if you would like to find collaborators for an 080808 performance, or collaborate on someone else’s performance.

If you have an idea for a performance, please prepare a short pitch - no more than 5 minutes long. Don’t worry about visuals at the moment, but think how best to describe your idea in words, and think about what sort of collaborators you are looking for.

To join any of these sessions, email info [at] upstage.org.nz for a log-in (if you have previously used a guest log-in you must still email us, as many people use the guest log-ins and it will not work if more than one person tries to log in with the same username. We will be issuing personal log-ins once we have selected the 080808 performances).

The 080808 Upstage Festival aims to create a participatory space for collaboration, creation, and for the presentation of current cyberformance. The festival provides a platform (and shares the technical expertise) to enable artists to experiment with the new medium, and to have their work seen alongside performances by internationally renowned practitioners - in a celebration of the evolution and diversity of online performance practices.

1st Place - Yeas & Nays: A ShiftSpace widget for calling representatives by Christian Croft ($2000) - A ShiftSpace that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier. This space combines ShiftSpace’s power to layer commentary above existing contexts with advances in VoIP telephony to build a tool for informed civic action. It layers the citizen’s act of calling an official on top of online information substantiating her argument. The proposed space enables a phone call with a representative from a webpage that politically concerns you. Type shift + space, enter a location, and Yeas & Nays fetches your matching representatives. Next, enter your phone number, and the system initiates a call that bridges your phone to that of the representative’s office. After the call, the widget updates to include a recording of your call whose URL you can send as proof of your civic action to all your friends. Read on >>

AREA 10: MEDIALAB /> will focus on engaging cross-disciplinary collaborations between various arts and science based practices, encouraging open and critical discussion in addition to knowledge sharing and skills transfer. Aims to establish a strong community of users both locally and internationally. Locally the lab will be able to provide the support, space and skills in which projects, workshops and research can be realized for individual practitioners, media groups as well as local colleges and universities. Internationally the lab will aim to make strong connections with other media labs worldwide in order to reinforce the global community of practitioners and focus on the exchange of research, art work and physical space.

Participating Artist, Musicians and Hackers: Project Serendipity (UK) Rob Davis (UK) Andy Wheddon & Fraser Geesin (UK) Genetic Moo Project (Peckham) Radek Rudnicki (UK) Erik Groen & Piebe de Vries (Holland) CathSign (France) Peckham Space (UK) Deptford.TV (UK) Chiara Passa (Italy) Phill Niblock (USA) Thibaud De Souza (UK) Sinsynplus (Germany) Günther Albrecht (Germany) Sunshine Frere (UK) Jenny Pickett (UK) Anila Ladwa (UK) Apo33 (France) Martin John Callanan (UK) Jean-Phillippe Roux (France) Lawrence Upton (UK) Mattin (Basque Country) ManamiN N(Japan) Nanofamas (Corsica) Goto10 & OpenLab (UK) Constant (Belgium) Yvan Etienne & Brice Jeannin (France) Medialab Madrid (Spain), Sonic (France) Tim Goldie (UK)…and many more!!

AREA 10: MEDIALAB has been introduced to facilitate the development of research and art practices using open source new technologies in the media arts. The medialab will focus on engaging cross-disciplinary collaborations between various arts and science based practices, encouraging open and critical discussion in addition to sharing knowledge and skills transfer.
() RE | BOOT; is part of the Node London Spring ‘08 season - and is supported by APO33.

A 30 minute performance will be given by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. The mix will then open up for everyone who is logged in to Visitorsstudio to join in. The title for the performance is inspired by a silent news reel from 1925 called ‘Fundamentalism vs Evolution’ by the Topical Film Company, UK 1925, released last year by the BFI Creative Archive Licence Group. This film represents “the blaze of conflict between Science and the Scriptures…” surrounding the Scopes ‘Monkey’ trial in the USA; staging a head on collision between two trains representing each position.

Marc and Ruth have collected, edited and looped over 300 media files, trawled from a range of other online archives and blogs: general and special interest, didactic and evangelical. Tomorrow these files will be collided in VisitorsStudio.

Join us to watch, heckle or join the mix and preach yourself!

Link for Visitorsstudio (just register with name and email to contribute to the mix)

This performance is part of an ongoing art and research project DIWOlogue

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses (iPak) is a playful, inter-active and participatory art work, that integrates your creativity, the random generation of works by a computer, and art engendered by Ajaykumar. iPak synthesises conceptual innovation, social engagement and therapeutic process: generative art as re-generative force; art-making as a medicine; inspiration emerging from tragedy; and the notion that social factors — such as marginalisation and racism — cause mental illness. Ajaykumar has created the foundation for a ‘polyphonic’ narrative, one created by many stories — yours essentially. You can upload still images, movies, texts, music, sounds, and ideas, to create a dynamic, evolving, relational entity in cyberspace. iPak fully comes into ‘being’ through your participation.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Its production has also been funded by Arts Council England. “iPak” has been researched, developed, and realised through a digital media bursary and support from Artsadmin (UK), funded by Arts Council England; as well as through collaboration with Re-Active (Italy). “iPak” - is a research project of Goldsmiths University of London, curated and engendered by Ajaykumar.

BIOGRAPHY

Ajaykumar’s art and research focuses on ‘being’: interrogating notions of ‘relational being’, ‘the being of a space’, and ‘non-anthropocentric being’. It is concerned with engendering new epistemologies in ontological art practice: through reappraising Buddhist, Tantric, and Animistic processes; through investigating the contemporary pertinence of a hypothesis of ‘dependent origination’ beyond its original Buddhist cultural and religious significance, particularly with regard spectatorship, ludic, performative, and pedagogic processes.

Ajaykumar teaches at Goldsmith’s College, London. His current courses include: Technology, Art, and Being; Narrative Construction in Film; Notions of void, emptiness, and ‘an art of spectatorship’ in Japanese Art and Culture; Multi-Media and Site-Specific Art. He is a member of the University of Arts London Research Centre, Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN); and a co-director of the Shapes Design Studio where he is collaborating with an architect and product designer to engender furniture, lighting and gardens that come into ‘being’ through the play of others.

Ajaykumar studied fine art, film, and performance at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London; the Institute of Education, University of London; and at the Royal College of Art.

New technologies constantly emerge as mediums for artistic practice and thus, bring forth a reconsideration of terms and redrawing of territories. RFID, WiFi, WiMAX, networked objects, reactive spaces, distributed actions, and psycho-geographic interventions are amongst a few contemporary artistic strategies and technologies that touch the borders of what once encompassed free103point9’s scope for Transmission Arts. Furthermore, there is always room for stretching non-technological conceptual definitions of Transmission Arts.

In light of such ongoing developments, free103point9 recognizes the need to engage a practice of inquiry that reaches beyond it’s own organizational limits of understanding. We are inviting practitioners and supporters involved with transmission ideas and activities to expand or challenge our articulation of Transmission Arts. Please help us expand our practices and galvanize our community by taking a few minutes to share your experience with us.

To submit your work for inclusion in free103point9’s archive of Transmission Arts (contemporary artist and works), please submit the following text to archive [at] free103point9.org with a subject header (Transmission Works) by the deadline March 15, 2008:
• Artist statement and links/documentation to specific works with titles and description of works. (500 word max)
• A response to, or definition of, the term “Transmission Arts.” (500 word max) Historical works and artist cited as influences. (500 word max)

2. The second tier of this archive will seek contributions from artist, curators, writers, and researchers to reflect, critique, consider, and respond to specific issues and topics related to transmission. We are inviting artists, scholars or curators working with New Media, Sound, Performance, Inter-media, Conceptual Art, Video, Installation, Social Activism, or Collective Strategies to identify artists (historical or contemporary) relevant to a discussion of Transmission Arts and to interject and engage in a larger discussion on Transmission Arts as a genre.

To learn more about this conversation, please submit a short bio (300 word max) with a general inquiry to archive@free103point9.org subject heading (Transmission Arts Discussion) by March 15, 2008.

free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts. free103point9 activities support and promote artists exploring transmission mediums for creative expression.

In this period of pictures flowing, an innovative artistic experimental project provides to everyone the opportunity of showing their own pictures. Hipic is an independent artistic project centered on pictures initiated by Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Huang Kui and other artists, who established the Hipic team. Hipic collects and displays flood of pictures from all over the world using internet as a platform. Hipic’s central system, diffuses pictures on various visual poles, including public screens, TV monitors, computer, mobile screens, and other mediums, which undoubtedly became part of everyone”s life.

This time Hipic in Beijing constitutes a large scope project for Hipic, therefore, Hipic team especially produced five Hipic Screens, to be placed in ShanghArt Beijing, Long March Space, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing Art Now Gallery and Beijing Commune, which are among the most renown contemporary art spaces in China, reinforcing this platform efficiency, and sharing with more people, more pictures resources and more spaces.

Hipic project was launched for the first time on September 4th, 2007. Since then, Hipic unceasingly shows one picture per minute. The system enables any picture to be enjoyed anywhere in the world, simultaneously, for one minute: anyone can see one same picture at the same time in any part of the globe. As an international project, Hipic receives pictures from their original authors, anyone can send pictures to the system via internet and become an “artist”. Hipic project seeks for international partners in any country of the world to invite more participants without any region restrictions.

To support the project a specially designed Hipic Screen is produced in an edition of 5 pieces a year. We are happy to announce that “Screen 1″ has been bought by DSL collection.

Ten development grants of up to $2,000 will be awarded to individuals and collectives using ShiftSpace as a platform to create new “Spaces” and “Trails”.

About ShiftSpace: 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 are called “Shifts”. Users can choose between several authoring tools - called “Spaces” - that allow web users to annotate, modify and shift the content of a page and through ShiftSpace, share that shift with the rest of the web. “Trails” are maps of shifts (shiftspace content) that create meta-layer navigation across websites. These trails might be used as a platform for collaborative research, for curating net art exhibitions, or as a way to facilitate a context-based public debate.

Go to the commissions site, watch the introductory video, apply for a grant and help us spread the word.

The ShiftSpace Commissions Program is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

BIOGRAPHIES

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, teacher and a media activist from Tel-Aviv whose work explores media in public space and public space in media. Mushon is the co-founder of Shual.com, ShiftSpace.org, YouAreNotHere.org and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network.

The next open walk-through will be held in French, kindly led by Suzon Fuks (Belgium/Australia). To participate, go here. If you want to log in and learn how to use the tools, you must email helen [at] upstage.org.nz for a log in prior to the session. The open walk-through is an opportunity for interested people to get an introduction into how UpStage works, and how you can use it to create live online performances.

Burak’s work touches on a number of the topics discussed here on Serial Consign, and he and I have spent the last few weeks firing emails back and forth that delve into economies of exchange, data portability, information visualization and how these themes are explored through his work.

Ever since your 2006 A Stock Market in Life project you’ve exhibited a fascination with incorporating the (data)aesthetics and interface of commodity exchange in a large portion of your work. You were one of the architects of OPENSTUDIO and also launched Meta-Markets last year. Both of these projects deal with trading and speculating on creative goods in quite distinct contexts. I stumbled across the word artonomics on the OPENSTUDIO site - could you discuss this term in relation to your ongoing project of creating platforms for economic simulation?

We made up the term “artonomics” to define the axes of arts, economics, and the participatory social web. In the PLW (Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab) we focused on building networked infrastructures for creative people, so that they can get economically more powerful and eventually affect politics. In OPENSTUDIO an artwork is a digital drawing. By the time a drawing is completed, it is in the market for sale. From your studio to the market there is no distance. When you buy a piece, you own a share in that person’s body of work. OPENSTUDIO members experience semi-ownership of creative capital. Well this type of living is the promised future right, what if you experience it now, future not only becomes more visible, but also actionable and debatable.

I am particularly interested in collectivity in creative work, which brings in techno-social protocols and economic models for self-organization of large groups of people. In such economic models money represents information. You buy things not because you need it but you show interest in it. In the end, I don’t necessarily consider this type of work as economic simulation or computer simulation, because participants spend real time and energy (aka micro-labor) within these systems. They draw, they click here and there, they decide on things, write comments, tag, mix, edit, vote, recommend etc. These are real relationships woven through experimental and modifiable protocols that organize network of social relationships and economic transactions.

I think today what we see on the social web is that the definition of creative work is changing. Is it an image, a movie, a sculpture, an installation, a process, a response? In this networked world, it is more clear to me that the substance of one’s creative work is not only a material, a recipe, or a code library, but it is also materialized information flowing in multiple layers of networks which are modulated by market forces, power relationships, past events, and future predictions.

[meta-markets performance & entity info for a bookmark of grand text auto]

Meta-Markets is essentially an exchange for social networking entities. In this simulation, social media like del.icio.us bookmarks or Feedburner syndication subscriber counts take on a life of their own and a community of speculators collectively determine the value of this data. I think one of the most interesting things about this project is that it creates a sort-of double presence for these services where users can determine the worth of individual articles of social media that stands outside of the generic web 2.0 chatter about valuation and venture capital. How do you see Meta-Markets in relation to the actual web economy?

The current web economy is not open enough. With Meta-Markets we aim to raise the bar of openness for existing social web services. I don’t mean the locked in data in Facebook or similar web services. I support efforts like DataPortability, these are very important steps to release our data from centralized databases. For us the problem is that the value of our labor is not open in the current web economy. In other words, what we get for our online work is not clear for us while it is clear for the service providers. This problem has been emerging because of the blurred boundaries between work and play, because information is no less real than physical matter, because information is commodity, because of the changing roles of consumers and producers, the prosumer phenomenon as discussed elsewhere. The solution is to have more transparent services, so that both the users and the service providers equally know the value of the work put in the services. Of course this is a complex task, that’s why we approach it collectively by creating a stock market for socially networked creative work.

[burak arikan / terms & conditions / 2007]

You posted an excellent commentary on the economics of Facebook which broadly outlined the disconnect between the bottom-up “social” investment by users and the top-down scramble by management to implement an efficient contextual advertising engine. You quite concisely identified the paradox as follows:

I work for Facebook everyday but I am not getting paid. In their recent Social Ads announcement Facebook says “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.” Pause. Did we sign a contract? How do you measure my labor and serve accordingly? I don’t know how you measure the value of my informational content, the value of my informational content uploaded by my friends to your server, the value of my relationships, the value of my activities…

Google’s OpenSocial begins to address the ownership that users are entitled to over their information and social connectivity. How do you see OpenSocial influencing the direction of Meta-Markets?

OpenSocial is hyper-modern politics, so is any other network protocol. Today defining standards and lobbying for the industry to adopt a standard are common political practices of the networked world we all live in. If standardization can happen by the participation of many voices, it becomes more democratic. Although I support current efforts to unlock the centralized databases, I don’t believe it is enough. The benefits of open communication standards are always publicly discussed from the point of view of the user or the developer, but who really benefits are the service providers. When you move your data anywhere, yes the user has the data anywhere, yes the developer builds write - once - works - with - any - other services, but the service provider is also happy because they have free context and free trust networks, which are generated by users’ labor in other places and carried to this service. We may call this distributed free labor. Data portability without ethics is the multiplication of the exploitation of micro-labor. When we use a service, the value generated by our action should be clear and open for all the involving parties. This is not easy, it involves political and economical struggles, but with the Meta-Markets community I believe we can make progress in this endeavor.

This conversation about transparancy and data portability is very interesting given your recent MYPOCKET project for Turbulence (pictured above). In this work, you’ve developed an algorithm to predict future purchases based off the analysis of an archive of receipts. Credit card companies employ similar algorithms to flag sudden shifts in spending habits so that potential credit card fraud can be prevented. I guess it is safe to assume you’re not doing R&D for Citibank so what exactly are your goals with MYPOCKET?

Spending habits are not only for prevention of frauds, but also for modulation of living. With MYPOCKET I see what my spending behavior is, this is probably what a financial analyst sees. I share it with general public to raise awareness and to make closed-door-analysis of our spending behavior debatable. MYPOCKET is also an exploration of the bidirectional adaptation between human and software. Between my behavior and the prediction process there is a feedback loop. Both negative and positive feedback. Positive feedback happens through confirmation of a prediction, which increases weight of that category / item in the database. Negative feedback happens through certain transactions, which have rules. For example a $40 ATM cash withdrawal means that I will not need cash for 4 days, approximately every $10 cash = 1 day, or a $70 metrocard spending (monthly unlimited ride for the NYC subway) means I will not buy a metrocard for another 30 days. These rules, some obvious some specific to me, are added as negative feedbacks in the loop. Over time the software will make smarter predictions about my spending behavior. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt to one another.

[burak arikan / tense / 2007]

All of my questions have approached you as some kind of artist-economist - that is not entirely fair as it is clear you are interested in addressing other issues with your work. You obviously have an interest in the aesthetics of information, networks and connectivity. This is evident in the projects discussed thus far, but many of your other works (i.e. Meta-Control, Tense, Arb, etc.) Could you discuss your approach to visualization?

My interest in geometry ties my seemingly separate practices. Geometry provides instruments not only for organizing space but also for understanding concepts in political philosophy. I started creating dynamic visual compositions in 2002. Since then I work directly with the code, write processes that modulate the geometry and the kinetics, explore the micro relationships, observe the macro behavior, tune, play, contract, scale, stare, change, iterate. My early dynamic compositions are repurposed as peformative artifacts in Meta-Control. Arb and Tense are the same processes, an exploration of growth in networks. From few to many, from simple to complex, from instant contractions to subtle settlements, while the network is being built, nodes push and pull each other, connections paint the color of the forces.

I create systems, they are not visual, visualizations are the visual manifestations of an instance of a system. My OPENSTUDIO visualizations show relationships built in the OPENSTUDIO economy, Micro Fashion Network visualization shows relationships of colors based on how I generate the data. Rather than creating visualizations based on other systems’ data, I prefer to create the system on my own or through collaborations. Like Meta-Markets and OPENSTUDIO, these systems can be living processes which involve many people’s time, energy, and intellect. Manifestations can also be in physical or in other forms. MYPOCKET is a living digital/physical process, which is manifested in three core forms for information: a list, a graph, and an object.

More recently I understand that the systems I create are vectors, vectors as McKenzie Wark, or Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker use the term. A vector is a medium in which information moves. I hope and work for more people to create such liberated systems. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]