Watch the live video stream on March 4 at 7:30PM (EST) and participate in the discussion!

Over 5 days in mid January 2010 the Transmediale festival locked 6 writers and 1 programmer in a Berlin hotel room to collaboratively write a book about the future of free collaboration; the authors started with only the title, and ended the week with a book.

Transmediale Artistic Director Stephen Kovats will be on hand to join Eyebeam Senior Fellow Michael Mandiberg and Eyebeam Honorary Resident Mushon Zer-Aviv, to talk about the process of writing the book, and some of their discoveries in the collaborative process. Stephen Kovatz will also talk about the ‘Futurity Now’ concept of TM10 in general and particularly in the context of the Collaborative Futures book sprint.

This will be your first chance to get your hands on a dead-tree version of the book. Books will be for sale for $15 at the event, but you can pre-order now for $12 and help make the print run possible. Click here to pre-order!

The Collaborative Futures team working on the book

The “Collaborative Futures” book sprint was facilitated by Adam Hyde (FlossManuals.net) and authored by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer, Alan Toner and several additional collaborators using the Booki software (booki.cc) by Aleksandar Erkalovic.

Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse - Invisible Threads

Upgrade! NY continues its series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice.

Within activist and creative practice there is a range of models for mobilizing the labor and creativity of the crowd (aka “crowdsourcing”). Both practices experiment with a spectrum of autonomy and control within those models. From distributed design to distributed fundraising, MoveOn to Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcer issues a call and creates structure for participation.

What role do individual motivations and collective goals play within these structures? What are the ethical, social and political implications of distributed labor?

Panelists include xtine, artist, educator and creator of the Mechanical Olympics; Jeff Crouse, Eyebeam senior fellow, artist, technologist and co-creator (with Stephanie Rothenberg) of the Invisible Threads virtual jeans factory; and Beka Economopoulos, online organizer, consultant and curator at The Change You Want To See Gallery.

This event will take place at The Change You Want to See, 84 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn.

Go here to view the live stream and participate in the conversation!

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.

This is a prelude event to the conference, The Internet as Playground and Factory: a conference on digital labor at the Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York, NY, November 12-14.

What do we mean by ‘freedom’? Should Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) necessarily be powered by radical politics of ownership and collaboration? Or is the latching of “Free Software” ideological baggage limiting the full transformative power of “Open Source”. How are these questions informed by licenses? Are some licenses more open than others? More ethical than others? This emotional debate has been in the heart of FLOSS from its early days and has created camps and animosities within the community.

Upgrade! NY continues its program series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice. Join us for a discussion and debate on what constitutes freedom within the Open Source and Free Culture movements. We will examine the strong ideological differences through a provocative panel discussion with Gabriella Coleman and Zachary Lieberman.

Gabriella Coleman

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines ethics and online collaboration as well as the role of the law and new media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software” (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is starting a new project on peer to peer patient activism on the Internet. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Zach Lieberman

Zachary Lieberman’s work uses technology in a playful way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body and kinetic response. Recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality card trick, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again. In addition to making artistic work, Lieberman is a co-creator of openframeworks, a toolkit for creative coding and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.

Upgrade! NY
September 3, 2009

Upgrade! NY continues its series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice with a conversation between Larisa Mann and Karl Fogel followed by a DJ set by Larisa Mann (aka DJ Ripley). The discussion will examine how Jamaican music has developed in the absence of an effective copyright regime, how technological and social conditions affect the music and musicians, and then will compare this to the open source movement today. They’ll look at how changes in technology and social convention affect music, software, and culture in general.

Larisa Mann is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley Law School, and resident DJ at SuryaDub, San Francisco. She researches the social implications of intellectual property rules, the legal implications of actual creative practices, and explores the implications of networked life (day-to-day reality permeated by networked technology) for our concepts of rights.

Karl Fogel is an open source software developer and writer who works for Canonical, Ltd, the company behind Ubuntu, helping with the open-source Launchpad collaboration platform, as well as QuestionCopyright.org, a California-based non-profit that promotes public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages the development of distribution systems suitable for a networked world in which the cost of sharing information has gone to zero.

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.

Britta Riley & Rebecca Bray

Upgrade! NY
July 23, 2009

At the previous Upgrade! New York gathering, writer/theorist Clay Shirky suggested that the most successful open source collaborations are those that use recipe-like methods to share information. In order to explore this idea further, this month’s discussion examined recipes, instructions, and open source collaboration. Participants included Eyebeam residents Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley, artist/writer/activist Marisa Jahn, and Instructables community manager Billy Gordon. Presentations by all participants were followed by a discussion and Q&A.

About the Participants
Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are artists working to create crowdsourced R&D solutions for environmental issues. Their current project, Window Farms, seeks to create a new Research & Development model which puts the awesome power of discovery and creation into the hands of the masses, and then spread the know-how to every participant. windowfarms.org/

Marisa Jahn is an artist/writer/activist whose work explores, constructs, and intervenes systems. In 2009, she co-founded /REV/-, a non-profit organization that fosters socially-engaged art, design, and pedagogy. Jahn is also the co-editor of ‘Recipes for an Encounter’ (Western Front, 2009). Through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together art, architecture, literature, and political science, “Recipes for an Encounter” explores the anticipatory nature of recipes together with their promise of what will unfold, take place, be consumed.
www.marisajahn.com

As a former community manager and content producer for Instructables.com, Billy Gordon worked on various projects, such as building a giant 8 foot scale replica of a kitchen match and branding himself with an industrial cutting/engraving laser. His projects have been published in Make Magazine and PC Magazine.com, which named his Lego USB charger one of “The 10 Coolest Lego Inspired Gadgets”. www.instructables.com/member/Tetranitrate/

As an introduction to this season’s theme for Upgrade! New York, Clay Shirky discussed the concepts of forking and failure in the open source process, and its value to the context of activism and the creative process.

Upgrade NY: Clay Shirky on Forking, Failure, and Open Source (Part 1) from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

Upgrade NY: Clay Shirky on Forking, Failure, and Open Source (Part 2) from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a writer, educator, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) in their graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice-versa. He consults to a variety of organizations on network technologies, and is an acknowledged expert on collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and Open Source development. Clay has spoken and written extensively on the Internet since 1996, with regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and his own shirky.com blogsite. He has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and others. In his new book, “Here Comes Everybody”, Clay explores how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination.

Upgrade! NY
May 21, 2009

upgradeny.blip.tv

Upgrade! New York celebrates its 10th anniversary with a reception, video screening, and presentations by Upgrade alumni.

After a humble beginning in a New York bar in 1999, Upgrade! has blossomed into an international network with over thirty nodes meeting regularly all across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. To celebrate ten years of dialog and debate on issues related to art and technology, Eyebeam and Not An Alternative hosted an evening of presentations by Upgrade! alumni Alexander Galloway, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and Savic Rasovic. The presentations were followed by a reception and screening of video work from members of the Upgrade! International network.

Alexander Galloway and Mushon Zer-Aviv presented their collaborative project, Kriegspiel, a computer game based on Guy Debord’s Game of War. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord’s game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares. Galloway and Zer-Aviv also discussed their plans to make the game open source.

Savic Rasovic (aka Pirun aka Sasha),  a regular contributor to Upgrade! Boston, presented his work done in collaboration with Catherine D’Ignazio. Rasovic and D’Ignazio run iKatun, an organization that engages public participation in transforming the meaning and use of public space.

About the Presenters
Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book cowritten with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, an educator and a media activist from Tel-Aviv, based in NY. His work explores media in public space and the public space in media. In his creative research he focuses on the perception of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through politics, culture, networks and the World Wide Web. He is the co-founder of ShiftSpace.org – an open source layer above any website; Shual.com – a foxy design studio; YouAreNotHere.org – a dislocative tourism agency; Kriegspiel; and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network. Mushon is an honorary resident at Eyebeam – an art and technology center in New York. He teaches new media research at NYU and open source design at Parsons the New School of Design.

Savic Rasovic (Sasha or Pirun) was born in Titograd, Yugoslavia (now Podgorica, Montenegro) and lives and works in Cambridge, MA. Rasovic is an entrepreneur, new media artist, curator, publisher, designer, programmer, political activist, and performer. He is the co-founder with Catherine D’Ignazio of iKatun, an artist-run organization whose mission is to foster public engagement in the politics of information and a member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things troupe that uses research and performance to investigate social and political everyday “tiny things” in order to transform public spaces dominated by corporate and political agendas.

Upgrade! NY
April 27, 2009

We are pleased to announce that Upgrade! New York is now co-produced in collaboration with Brooklyn-based activist organization Not An Alternative, and will focus on topics related to open source activist and creative practices for the upcoming year.

This gathering took place at Not An Alternative’s storefront gallery space, The Change You Want To See, and featured a talk and video screening from the September 2007 Monk protests, known as the Saffron Revolution, in which mobile phones and the internet allowed protesters to coordinate and publicize the largest protests seen in a generation.

Co-presented by Not An Alternative and Digital Democracy

Upgrade! NY
March 2, 2009

Winter Camp was an event, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures and took place 3-7 March ‘09 in Amsterdam. Network Cultures Winter Camp was a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done.

It was a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks worked on their specific current topics.

Participants from various nodes of the Upgrade network were in attendance, including Mushon Zer-Aviv from Upgrade! NY.

Upgrade! NY
June 26, 2008

The launch of Interactivos?: Better Than the Real Thing.

R&D OpenLab fellow Zach Lieberman set the scene with a presentation about Interactivos? and its beginnings

at Medialab-Prado. Discussions of the real, the fake, and spoofing will ensue, with a presentation by The Yes Men. Informal discussion and a reception will follow. Eyebeam projects on display, that evening, included BoozBot by Eyebeam senior fellow Jeff Crouse and Eyebeam Production Lab fellow David Jimison.