In keeping with Sobell’s interest in extra-institutional viewing communities, the entire exhibition will also be webcast at all hours of the day, allowing online users access to the conventionally closed-off realm of the artist studio, in a fashion that constructively challenges existing divisions of public and private space, while also placing her web audience in the ambivalent role of surveillants. Sobell and multimedia artist Emily Hartzell realized a similar project in 1994, also using real-time webcasting to transform their studio at NYU Center for Advanced Technology into one of the internet’s first time-based installations. Reflecting on the experience, they described moments when “our actions were heightened by our awareness of unseen Web visitors,” and others when “we felt ourselves dissolved in…ubiquitous surveillance.” Given her open invitation for musical collaboration for the duration of her forthcoming exhibition, it seems Sobell is presently aiming to produce an installation that both foregrounds the “artist-in-studio as spectacle” and facilitates a new type of community-centric performance space, accessible to viewers near and far. - Tyler Coburn, Rhizome.

Artists of diverse backgrounds are involved, working mainly through performative strategies. Sceneries involving the passers-by in every city are created. For example you may see four people of four countries at the same time on four screens, communicating via webcam their wishes oder questions as a sort of statement.

The artists are still in dialogue about the common strategies. Given the same rules, the differences of the mentalities in the participating countries are going to be shaped more clearly. A Day in a Life is an international networking project. It gives a lot of space for discoveries, pushes accidental development in communication, letting emerge irritating and surprising connections.

The performances will take place on 19th and 20th of July 2008 at Wittelsbacher Platz. At the same time at ZKMax, Passage Maximilanstrasse / Altstadtring, video works of the participating artists will be shown. Sponsored by the Department of Culture of the Bavarian Capital Munich. Some participating artists are supported by the „Artist-in-Residence“ programme of Villa Waldberta.

A DAY IN A LIFE builds bridges, highlighting the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar.
Curation and Coordination: Horst Konietzny

CALL FOR PROPOSALS/PROJECT PARTNERS

Further development of a streaming event between nodes of Upgrade! International. The first version was held between Munich, Istanbul, Boston and Oklahoma City as part of the annual Upgrade! International gathering on November 30, 2006.

The project A DAY IN A LIFE (DIAL) locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of each location are contrasted with those typical and atypical to other locations, other cities, other countries, coalescing their similarities and differences into a poetic fusion. Enabled by the growing power of the Internet - all locations are networked together via broadband technology.

DIAL was begun as a multimedia bridging of peoples and locations world-wide. Its second version will be specially aimed at the theme of Munich’s 850th birthday: “Building Bridges.” Artists in various places will interpret the theme in cooperative interventions in daily life both in their home locations and on-site in Munich. The 3rd annual gathering of Upgrade! International can help to bring oversees artists to Munich as stopovers on their way to the gathering in Skopje, Macedonia. The following is a description of the basic concept which should be further developed by the participating artists.

THE SETTING

Publicly accessible spaces in participating cities around the world will be connected via Internet for a span of several hours. At any given time, streaming video and audio from at least two participating partner locations can be seen and heard in these spaces, projected next to each other on screens or monitors and audible over speaker systems.

The spaces should be locations that play a role in the typical everyday life of each country – cafes, squares, city streets. These snapshots of daily life from diverse cultural backgrounds are given meaning by the selective eye of the streaming camera, the defining frame of the screen and the juxtaposition with similar but different scenes from another city. Stimulated by the tendency of the viewer to fill a formal frame of reference with meaning – in Marcel Duchamp’s words, “It is the viewers who make the pictures.”

Meaning is constructed not only by the formal framing, but also by focusing the action on specific themes. This is done through targeted media interventions and actions that take place at both locations simultaneously and which at pre-arranged times react to a common theme.

The simultaneous artistic interventions bring the snapshots into sharp juxtaposition with each other. The performance creates a medial and performative bridge of prepared performance, chance occurrence and the inevitable intercultural differences between the locations.

THE ACTION

The events in each location are structured spatially by the eye of the camera and the image frame, and the chance occurrences are given meaning via medial interventions such as a soundtrack or subtitles. Interactions between the local and the distant participants are particularly interesting and stimulating, as our event last year in Oklahoma City has shown. For instance a simple sandbox of red earth served as the site for a lively exchange for visual and textual feedback as artists in both locations mirrored and developed on each other’s words and images drawn in the sand.

The interventions may make use of various formal methods, but all will deal with the common theme “bridges” and the intervention from each city will illuminate characteristic local references to this theme.

The interventions may be executed using differing formal strategies but will all treat the common theme “bridges.” The interventions from each city will reflect on characteristic local references to this theme.

Examples of possible performances:

All performances should incorporate direct interaction with participants in another location. This can be visual, textual or audio, but the mutual interaction should be directly recognizable to non-participants watching only the screen view showing the two streams.

* Annotating everyday life: Participants and passers-by write or draw on a glass surface (for instance a café window) while a camera records the scenes of daily life visible through the glass frame.

* Bridging texts: The streaming camera records text banners as they are unfurled across the two participating locations. In each location only a fragment is visible; the full meaning only becomes clear when the videostreams of the two locations are viewed simultaneously on a screen.

* Express yourself: Passers-by are requested to jot down personal wishes for changes in the political, economic, private, ecological etc. situation and drop the notes into collection boxes. These texts can be held directly in front of the camera as the streaming image itself, or inserted as “subtitles” into the streaming video of the scene.

* Do it yourself political protest: Passers-by are requested to demonstrate spontaneously for or against something, or can write their own slogans on placards.

* Street happenings: Passers-by are handed leaflets requesting them to perform specific actions. Within the anonymous stream of pedestrians new patterns of motions and behavior arise.

* Multi-local choreography: Dancers are linked to each other with a common time code. The complete choreography is only visible when viewing both videostreams together on the screen.

ACCOMPANYING EVENTS For those who are able to come to Munich, we will arrange art talks and if possible workshops and an exhibit in cooperation with institutions in Munich.

A panel discussion and virtual performance event, From Cinema to Machinima will explore the many ways in which the digital medium has reconfigured, even transformed, the moving image and thereby redefined concepts of cinema. Whether through software processes or interaction by the viewer, image sequences have become discrete units that can be remixed in new constellations; indeed, once digital interactivity became connected to databases, the possibility of assembling and reconfiguring media elements from a compilation of image sequences opened the way to a host of new cinematic forms.

These emerging cinematic forms include database cinema, interactive narrative or non-narrative films, and machinima — filmmaking within computer games or 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in which characters and events can be controlled either by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

The discussion will be followed by a short performance event in Second Life, which will be broadcast in the Lecture Hall. The panel and Q&A with the audience will be streamed live in Second Life.

Henrik Bennetsen works as research director at the Stanford Humanities Lab. He’s also the head of the Lifesquared research project, which is building a 3D immersive archive of the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson inside the virtual world of Second Life. The work was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and is planned for exhibition at SFMOMA in 2008. In Fall 2006 he was a part of the Stanford course The Human and the Machine, which used Second Life as a teaching tool. Bennetsen holds a MSc in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc in Medialogy from Aalborg University. He has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.

Char Davies is internationally recognized for pioneering artworks using the technologies of virtual reality. Originally a painter, she transitioned to digital media in the late 80s, becoming a founding director of the 3D software company Softimage. Her virtual environment Osmose (1995) is considered a landmark in the history of new media art. Davies has also published numerous essays on virtual space and in 2005 she completed a doctorate in philosophy (from CAiiA, University of Plymouth, UK). A monograph on her work Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality came out in 2007. Davies’ practice has expanded from “virtual” to “actual” place. She is currently shaping another immersive environment, on 500 acres of land in Québec. Davies lives in San Francisco.

Scott Kildall is a crossdisciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture, and performance. The core of his artwork is formed by material he gathers from the public realm. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Brown University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain, and Romania. Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Christiane Paul is the adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and a revised version of her book Digital Art (2003) as well as the anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond will be published this year. She teaches as adjunct faculty in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Digital and Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design, SFAI, and UC Berkeley. She has curated a number of shows at the Whitney Museum, including the online exhibition CODeDOC (2002).

Howard Rheingold is the author of the acclaimed books Tools for Thought (1985), The Virtual Community (2000), and Smart Mobs (2003). He has been the editor of Whole Earth Review, and The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, the founding executive editor of Hotwired, and founder of Electric Minds. Rheingold has taught classes on participatory and social media and virtual community at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a visiting professor at De Montfort University in the UK. His current projects include the Social Media Virtual Classroom, an online community for teachers and students; the Cooperation Project, aimed at building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation; and Participatory Media Literacy.

Scott Snibbe’s immersive interactive artworks have been installed in over 100 art museums, performance spaces, science museums, and public spaces worldwide. His awards include the Prix Ars Electronica and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. He is the founder of two companies: Snibbe Interactive, Inc. and Sona Research. In 2007 he was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for research in Interactive Narrative. Snibbe holds a BA in Computer Science and Fine Art and an MA in Computer Science from Brown University. He studied experimental animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught media art and experimental film at Brown University, SFAI, the California Institute of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley.

Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Utterback’s extensive exhibition history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. Recent projects include a large-scale interactive projection on the San Jose City Hall commissioned by ZeroOne and the City of San Jose. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College and an MA from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Featuring: Tiziana Terranova (IT), Christoph Wachter (DE), Mathias Jud (CH), Yolande Harris (UK), Bureau d’etudes (FR), and Di Mainstone (UK).

Topology is often mentioned as an ultimate example of the same subject being studied in parallel within various branches of science and art, each branch approaching the subject from its own background and with its own methodologies. Today, there are numerous initiatives on the radar in which representatives of the various branches of topology explicitly state a desire to exchange ideas and methodologies related to the topic. But do all these diverse branches even share a common understanding of what topology is?

In practice, it seems that there is still a fair amount of confusion surrounding the notion of topology, and that its definition is a matter of debate rather than consensus, with a single commonly agreed-on defining characteristic: topology deals with the qualitative properties of geometrical structures. Should the confusion surrounding the notion of topology discourage topologists from trying to unify the field? Or could it perhaps serve as a commonly shared ground for collaboration and exchange?

This topology edition of Test_Lab will feature several new and exciting artistic Research and Development (aRt&D) projects within the artistic topology tradition and will investigate the common understanding of the notion of topology in the arts. Audience members are invited to actively involve themselves in the practices of topological aRt&D and, on the basis of this involvement, discuss what defines the field and whether the proposed exchange and collaboration with other topology branches is justified.

Test_Lab: Topology will reveal censored areas on Google maps and the true networks of the world s power structures, and will include a sonic navigation walk and a fashionable artist intervention. The different branches dealing with topology will be represented by international experts participating in the project A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics (ATACD).

Test_Lab is a bimonthly public event organized by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, that provides an informal setting for the demonstration, testing, presentation, and discussion of artistic research and development (aRt&D).

Preceding this edition of Test_Lab, the Piet Zwart Institute will organize a seminar on mapping as a medium of cultural reflection and critique with presentations by artists, activists, and theorists, titled: The Map is not the Territory?! April 16, 2008, 19.30.- 21.30, Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam.

Presenters: Bureau d’Etudes, Theo Deutinger, Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud, with an introduction and moderation by Florian Cramer.

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.

To submit a proposal, email the following information to info [at] upstage.org.nz:

o working title of your cyberformance and 3-4 sentences about it;
o names and locations of people involved;
o brief background/bios (not more than 300 words);
o preferred time(s), in your local time, for presentation on 080808;
o contact email and postal address.

Performances can be on any theme or topic; the only rules are it must be no longer than 20.08 minutes, and must be created and performed in UpStage (information about the 070707 performances).

The festival will take place online in UpStage on 080808, with some RL (’real life’) access nodes at locations around the world. If you are interested in hosting a RL access node, please contact us for further information and technical requirements.

Participating artists will be listed and acknowledged on the UpStage web site. We will endeavour to record all the performances and provide participating artists with copies for documentation, however this is dependent on volunteer resources.

UpStage is an open source venue for web-based performance and is licensed under the Creative Commons and GPL. All copyright of artworks remains with the artists; we encourage artists to use Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/).

Important dates:

16 & 23 April: Match-Making Sessions (times to be announced) - Looking for collaborators? Bring your ideas to pitch, or come to join someone else’s proposal.
7 May: Tutorial for those planning to submit a proposal (time to be announced) - An opportunity for you to get to know the new features of UpStage and ask questions of experienced UpStage users about what you are planning to do in your performance.
16 May: Deadline for proposals
1 June: Selection announced
8 August: 080808 UpStage Festival

Any questions, please email info [at] upstage.org.nz. We look forward to receiving your proposals.

Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith, Karla Ptacek and Dan Agnihotri-Clark - 080808 Team

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.

As well as the usual brief: Write up to 1001 words >> Use the prompt of the day either verbatim or as general thematic (the prompt will be posted around 8.30am Sydney time on the day. And if you want to read the source article, just click on the prompt) >> Submit the story no later than three hours before performance time (see below for writing times & some time conversions). There is this additional directive: Incorporate element/s from previous stories found in the archive.

You can make your choice according to names, particular stories, prompts, tags (called threads in the archive) or any criteria of your own devising. If you don’t like the search options in the archive, try Googling: “1001 nights cast” and “XXXXXXX”. All I ask is that you note the author/s and night number/s that you use and include these at the end for me to credit. This credit line does not count towards the 1001 word limit.

I’ll be accepting stories from all those who want to write and will make my decision after the deadline on March 16, ie 3 hrs before performance time. I may even do some montaging of submissions. Remember, this is also the day of the Symposium at the Performance Space, Sydney so if you’re planning on attending that (and I hope you are), you’ll need to submit early. You would have about five hours to write in that case so not impossible. If it doesn’t feel finished, submit it anyway.

If you think you’d like to write for night 1000, just give me some indication by March 1 (so I don’t end up stranded). And if you wake up on that Sunday with the urge to write, just do it and surprise me. I won’t mind. Don’t forget, on the day, you’ll need to find the prompt on the Today Now page of the website. It is NOT “she sleeps now”. That’s the placeholder before the prompt goes up.

Writing times for night 1000 on March 16:

Sydney: from about 8.30am to 4.12pm.
Perth: from about 6.30am to 2.12pm.
Delhi: from about 3am to 10.42am.
Johannesburg & Middle East: from about 11.30pm on March 15 to 7.12am on March 16.
London: from about 9.30pm on March 15 to 5.12am on March 16.
New York & Montréal: from about 5.30pm on March 15 to 1.12am on March 16.
LA: from about 2.30pm to 10.12pm on March 15.

Other conversions here.

For info on the 1001 nights cast Symposium, go here.

cheers
Barbara

In 1845, Karl Marx, in his short fragments published posthumously as the “Theses on Feuerbach,” wrote the following oft quoted statement: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” These were working notes for Marx and in some way represented a call, an appeal, a reminder, a hope, a provocation to himself. What is the relation between what we understand about the world, the questions we can formulate, and what we can do to change our reality?

And when we initiated Continental Drift with Brian Holmes and our rag-tag bunch of activist-artist-thinkers, we felt that interpreting the world and changing it went hand in hand. That in order to change the world, we also needed to embark on the challenging task of understanding the immense shifts that have been transpiring since 1989. We also needed to create a more structured possibility for bringing together a growing number of individuals whose work does not quite fit in any prescribed competence (i.e., activist, artist, researcher).

If there has been one consistent response for us, it has NOT been to make our self-organized conversations AN END in themselves, but a constituent part of our political being and our steady assumption of a power for collective utterances.

This year is another opportunity to take this collective project forward, as we not only initiate this session in New York, but take our Drift to Zagreb in May and the Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor hopefully this summer.

We are seeking anyone and everyone who may be interested in joining us. We have been attempting for some years to foster a space that will open more dialogues between artists, activists, and intellectuals. And we would like ours to become one of a multiplicity of spaces in which these three necessary figures of resistance can begin to touch and inform one another’s practices/thinking.

We sincerely hope you will join these discussions. Please forward to friends who you think may be interested.

2. Something like a Summary

We will begin Friday evening with a talk and discussion with Henry C K Liu. It is a rare opportunity to exchange thoughts with someone who has very extensive insights into economic dynamics with a particular focus on Asia. Henry is a regular contributor for Asia Times and wrote a widely influential text about Dollar Hegemony. The evening’s talk is entitled:
“The Case Against Market Fundamentalism.”

For this entire session and particularly Saturday, we will consider the different resonances of “from the ground” “on the ground” or simply “ground.”

Ground as the contradiction and tragic failure of capitalism right now: –ground rent, for everything that concerns housing –ground to the bone, for flexible labor –ground as the earth itself, overheating and poisoned –ground zero wherever a bomb goes off and people die

We will begin with a discussion of a text entitled about Neoliberal Urbanism and then be joined by Andy from the Yes Men, who will be discussing their work in New Orleans. Claire Pentecost who will address how the growing environmental /climate change/water preciousness/ food consciousness is effecting urban organizing. We will (hopefully) be joined by a group attempting to resist the Columbia University’s plan for Harlem. We will conclude the day with a talk by Neil Smith entitled “Mega Gentrification.” Neil as most of you might know, is someone we have for some time been wanting to invite, and we felt this was a great context.

Sunday, will be an attempt to cross many terrains from Malawi and Anatolia to East Jerusalem and East Baltimore. It will include presentations by Hakan Topal, Marty Lucas, a video with Jeff Halper, Scott-Dane-Nick, and will conclude with Brian’s talk entitled: “Escape the Overcode: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics.”

3. Introduction by Brian Holmes (2008)

A continent is a name for immensity without reserve: a mass of land so large you can never imagine the end of it, the ground of everything. Yet the questions we want to raise are intimate ones, which over the course of recent decades have crept their way into the thoughts and feelings of individuals, associations, cultural groups, professional or political formations and even nations, when they are faced with the emergence of a society beyond all borders, a non-place where the continents themselves begin to loose their moorings.

How to conceive of a world society? When and why do people begin to speak of it? Where to locate it, how to perceive it? For whom does it appear, whose interests does it serve or threaten? What are its origins, its laws and regularities, its chances of lasting till next year? Does it have a taste or a color, a wavelength or a rhythm? Above all, should I be part of it? Should we be part of it? How to take that decision – or assert that refusal?

In 1997, Ulrich Beck published a book in the form of a question: What is globalization? His answer: it is a world society without a world government, where outdated national institutions tend to dissolve between the twin extremes of transnational capital and hyperindividualism. Yet Beck is not a fatalist. Rejecting the belief in globalism as a fait accompli whose only agents are giant corporations, he suggested an examination of the transformational processes affecting communications, culture, economics, labor organization, civil associations and the ecology. He conceived world society as a “multiplicity without unity,” and believed its emergence could be measured by the degree to which distinct social groups become aware of and debate these transformations: their origins, causes, spatial distributions, effects and susceptibility to change and redirection. The political question would be this: “how, and to what extent, people and cultures around the world relate to one another in their differences, and to what extent this self-perception of world society is relevant to how they behave.”

So far, so good. Become aware of social change, and find the languages that can express it! But Beck still refers to self-perception “as staged by the national media.” We’re looking for something different: the consciousness of the present as expressed by artistic inventions, on “stages” ranging from museums, universities and theaters to social centers, hacklabs and cabarets, the Internet and the streets. Rather than relying on studies and scientific procedures, let’s see how these expressions of the present are debated in the forums, circuits, institutions, self-organized meetings and counter-public spheres that have proliferated across the planet in recent years. What’s elusive are ways to sound out multiplicity, solidarity and resistance, all of which don’t only arise in words. Form, image, concept, rhythm, experiment, intervention, rupture: these are aesthetic devices for touching the world, and taking part in a world conversation.

Throughout the twentieth century the visual languages of modernism offered a means of communication, culminating more recently in a massive overflow of biennials, traveling shows, exchange programs and markets – contested from below by an explosion of autonomous interventions, self-organized circuits and alternative modes of production. Since the end of hegemonic modernism in the 1960s the definition and value of art has been a subject of intense dispute, resulting in a focus on process rather than object, a shift towards activism and group experimentation. This questioning of frames and contexts has led to the inclusion of sociological, philosophical, economic, political and psychological concepts within the very contours of the works. But this whole development is deeply ambiguous. Even as artistic circles have extended their geographic and discursive reach and tended to morph into sites of generalized experimentation, public consciousness has retained the twentieth-century definition of art as the signifier of individualism, legitimating an endless range of formal innovations, of cultural and individual eccentricities. This proliferation of choices is exactly what allows for the increasingly deep integration of art to the market, not only as a luxury object or attribute of personal distinction, but also as the prime example of innovative, value-adding production processes in the risky environment of the information economy. The upshot being that art seems to mirror and internalize the global transformations, in their mix of multifarious complexity and one-dimensional standardization.

to continue reading introduction please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/intro2008.htm#email

4. Working Schedule

The idea for the schedule is that it should be subjected to change based on our needs and desires over the course of the event.

FRIDAY EVENING 02.15.08

18:00 - 18:30 Informal Introductions
19:00 - 20:20 Henry C K Liu: The Case Against Market Fundamentalism
20:20 - 21:30 Question + Answer + Conversation
21:30 - 23:00 Dinner & Drinks

SATURDAY 02.16.08

12:00 - 12:30 Tea, Coffee
12:30 - 13:30 Open Session / Discussion of Reading Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities And the Rule of Markets (Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore)
13:30 - 14:00 Andy Bichlbaum: Yes Men in New Orleans.
14:00 - 14:30 Coalition of Groups Fighting Columbia Gentrification of Harlem (To be confirmed)
14:30 - 15:00 Claire Pentecost: How the growing environmental /climate change/water preciousness/ food consciousness is effecting urban organizing.
15:00 - 17:30 Neil Smith: Mega Gentrification

SUNDAY 02.17.08

12:00 - 12:30 Tea, Coffee
13:00 - 13:30 Hakan Topal: Possibility of Justice and Justification of Artistic Production
13:30 - 14:00 Marty Lucas: Cyber-Urbanism in Southern African
14:00 - 14:30 Video interview with Jeff Halper -Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions Good Architecture
14:30 - 15:00 Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, Nicholas Wisniewski Practicing Ecosophy in East Baltimore
15:00 - 16:00 Break
16:00 - 18:00 Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics.
19:00 - 21:30 Final Discussion: “Prospects” for upcoming Continental Drift in Zagreb and the Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor
+ thinking about further NYC prospects (over dinner)

For full details on all presentations here.

5. How to participate

There are two possible ways of joining us:
a. to physically attend in NYC
b. to participate via webcast

We will provide more details about the webcast online as the event approaches. For those who will be attending the events in New York City, please write to cdrift {the at sign} 16beavergroup.org to enroll.

Friday February 15 — 6:00 PM - 11:55 PM
Saturday February 16– 12:00 AM — 6:00 PM
Sunday February 17– 12:00 AM - 11:55PM

All events unless otherwise announced will take place at 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor - NY, NY. The participation fee is 10-30$ (sliding scale). We will waive the fee for anyone who has great difficulty in paying but has a strong desire to participate. As we did last year, we will also have some collective dinners at the space. The entire program is organized with our efforts and is not affiliated with or funded from any organizations or institutions.

1. Introduction
   1. Panelists introduce themselves briefly
   2. Primer: What’s a virtual economy? MMOs: Drew Harry. Web: Burak Arikan. Second Life: Scott Kildall/Victoria Scott.
   3. Primer: Virtual property and currency. Drew.
   4. Primer: Making real-world money in virtual economies. Scott/Victoria.
2. Where, in virtual economies, is value generated, and by whom? Who’s capturing that value?
3. How is value flowing from the real into the virtual? How is value flowing from the virtual to the real? What do you see in the immediate future of these flows?
4. How would you place virtual economies on a historical scale? In what ways do they reflect feudal, capitalist, communist, or other ideal types of historic economies? In what ways are they sui generis? How might a legal regime premised on the physical economy hinder the development of a virtual one?
5. Talk about the labor market within virtual economies. What does it mean for participants to be generating “immaterial labor”?
6. Is value shifting from traditional products (property) and services to the relationships themselves? What does that mean for participants in the economy — both individuals and the corporate entities? Is “alienation of labor” giving way to the potential for “alienation of relationships”?
7. Is our language of “production” and “consumption” outmoded in a virtual economy? If so, what language should we be using?
8. What issues arise at the intersection of economics and politics, particularly given that virtual worlds, unlike most modern real-world states, do not have direct accountability mechanisms to their inhabitants?
9. How does the real-world business model of the company running a virtual world interact with the virtual economy itself? Have we found the “right” way to match these two systems?
10. Normatively, how do you think a fair economy would operate in virtual worlds? What’s missing in them now, and what steps need to be taken to get to a fairer relationship between world-manager and user?

[posted by Gene Koo on Video Vidi Visum]

Freeman’s piece, entitled “Imaging Beijing,” is an extension of his existing work on the “Imaging Place” project in Second Life. Freeman produces panoramic nodes of the streets of Beijing, where locals describe their personal experiences of that space, and more interestingly, how that space conjures up seemingly unrelated personal experiences. He calls this concept a memory map. The Second Life-based artwork enables avatars to walk in and out of the nodes, capturing and inhabiting the intimate street life of Beijing.

Usman Haque will be talking about the piece “Remote” by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa, and Georg Tremmel. This piece produces what he calls a fundamentally “human architecture” by suturing the physical space of a Boston-based gallery with a Second Life space. The human actors in Second Life, combined with the human actors in Boston, have to work together to create a merged space - one that is comprised of the collective efforts of the inhabitants.

Pierre Proske will be discussing his piece called Caterwaul. Essentially, mixed reality wailing wall, is a physical wall built in the Boston gallery that gives people the opportunity to verbally lament the loss of their loved-one’s time in online spaces. The chorus of lamentations will then be transmitted into Second Life, where an identical wall in Second Life will broadcast those voices. By crossing over, it allows mourners to speak to the “dead.”

Finally, Michael Takeo Magruder, David Steele and Drew Baker will be representing the piece “The Vitruvian World.” Stemming from da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Magruder and his collaborators put together an installation where the human intersects with Nature and the built environment. Only now, this is manifested by the intersection of the physical, virtual and the network that connects them.

All of the pieces represented in this panel, while exploring the notion of “mixed reality,” seem to be drawing more significant attention to the “limits of reality.” In other words, where does the physical end? Where does the human end? And, where does the real end? In fact, it is the limits that provide tension in this work. We might be comfortable with a mixed reality, but when we confront the limits of familiar psychological and social categories, we grow anxious. This is what makes the work powerful, and I suspect, this is what will provide some interesting fodder for discussion.

Each of the pieces points to changing notions of place. In geographical terms, place is experienced space. It is meaningful space, enhanced by personal encounter, perpetuated by memories. But when space is “neither here nor there,” but a combination of the two, how does place take shape? Do digital spaces have the same capacity to be experienced as physical spaces? And what’s at stake? We might find answers to this question as we address the concepts of immersion and presence. Do we need to be immersed and present to experience? Consider Heidegger’s notion of dasein, or being there. For Heidegger, being was tied to presence. Human experience was always grounded in da-sein, never just sein. Is dasein possible in a mixed reality?

And finally, we might talk about the problem of attention. Multiple realities, multiple places, would seem to pull our attention in multiple directions. Does this work point to the loss of focus? Is it possible to be present, without paying attention? Or, do we need only to reconsider the current economy of attention? Perhaps, mixed realities points to new structures of attention, where we can distribute our payments for enhanced benefit.

The panel should cover some combination of these topics. If we all pay attention, perhaps we’ll arrive at some conclusions. [posted by Eric Gordon on The Place of Social Media]