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Tag Archives: surveillance

Uncategorized events

tobias c. van Veen, Trace Reddell, and Jamie Allen

November 10, 2006; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York
2_nov2006jpg

Upgrade! NY
November 2006

tobias c. van Veen (curates Upgrade! Montréal), Trace Reddell and Jamie Allen performed and discussed their new audio works.

tobias poked his head into the aether of the airwaves to perform a short interpretation of AUTOSEVOCOM TACSAT and gave a taste of the as-yet unreleased audiowork FOIL. AUTOSEVOCOM TACSAT explores surveillance frequencies of encoded police channels against a backdrop of low-end sound composed from fragments of real and virtual war-torn landscapes. FOIL is a blend of urban recordings from a peaceful Western city with its modernist though unpeaceful counterpart in Beirut falls prey to explosive interventions in EA’s BattleField 2 online wargame, eventually detonating itself into the debris of alterity.
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Uncategorized events

We Passion Power and Control – the dark desires of art under surveillance

August 29, 2006; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York
International Little Feet Bureau

Upgrade! NY
August 2006

This time the Upgrade event attempted to take on the dark desires beyond the basic art/privacy/surveillance discourse.

Through three projects exercising different modes of surveillance we discussed artists jealousy of authoritative powers and the desire to posses these powers themselves. Read On »

events

Ken Goldberg

March 31, 2005; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York

Demonstrate

Upgrade! NY
March 2005

Demonstrate was timed to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and with campus political activity in the weeks before the 2004 Presidential Election.

Ken Goldberg discussed his latest project Demonstrate, an installation of state-of-the-art robotic webcamera placed over UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. For six weeks, the camera was made accessible to anyone on the Internet. Online participants shared remote control of the robot camera, allowing them to zoom in to and photograph activity on the Plaza at any time of day or night. Photos, textual captions, and dialogue were archived in a public database. Read On »

Uncategorized events

SWIPE

April 29, 2004; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York
SWIPE

 

 

 

 

Upgrade! NY
April 2004

Brooke Singer, Beatriz da Costa,and Jamie Schulte discussed their ongoing collaboration.

SWIPE began as a performance and installation that focused on data gathered from driver’s licenses—a form of data-mining that businesses are starting to practice in the United States. Bars and convenience stores were the first to utilize license scanners in the name of age and ID verification. These businesses, however, admit they reap huge benefits from this practice beyond catching underage drinkers and smokers and fake IDs. With one swipe—that often occurs without notification or consent by the cardholder—a business acquires data that can be used to build a valuable consumer database free of charge.

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events

Marie Sester

February 26, 2004; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York

ACCESS documentation

Upgrade! NY
February 2004

Marie Sester presented three recent works based on the notions of transparency, visibility, and access.  Her  work explores ways that societies implement forms. 

Marie Sester’s work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order.  She employs archetypes and referents as starting points. For several years, Marie has been committed to working with already-existing data or phenomena, including airport and large scale x-ray imagery, architectural ground plans, elevations and sections, vehicle plans, city maps, aerial views, and historic, archeological and art documents. Marie has also been creating immersive installations using technologies from both the Hollywood and surveillance industries. Together these propose a connection between individuals and wider forces, or larger scales, or longer time-bases. And thus reconsider what a society or a community is engaged in, and therefore the individuals, in their everyday life. Read On »

Uncategorized events

John Klima

February 28, 2002; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York
Glasbead

Upgrade! NY
February 2002

Artist John Klima presented The Upgrade! audience with a lively and candid display of his work.

John Klima discussed three of his major works beginning with Glasbead, a web-based “musical toy” that allows up to twenty users to interact with the piece at once. Glasbead centers on the notion of linking people together for a multi-user experience, an idea he found to be extremely powerful at the time of its conception.

Klima emphasized that his work favors an artistic look and feel over function, so that it is always art rather than a tool. As a result, he explained his translation of real-world data into art. Read On »

events

Denis Beaubois

June 28, 2001; 7:00 pm;
Eyebeam - 540 W21st Street, New York

 

Upgrade! NY
June 2001

For the past 6 years Denis Beaubois has explored the phenomenon of surveillance via his video-making process.

By tweaking the typically “dystopian tool for oppression of the individual” that is surveillance, Beaubois has been able to create a “playful mechanism allowing the individual to interact and ultimately question/challenge the medium.”

Denis began his talk screening a piece titled Incrimination of Light Parts 1-3, which exemplifies his use of the audience (as accomplice/performer). In this first example, one looks on to an audience in a darkened theater, adjusting to the lack of light-until given the verbal command to turn left. After responding by turning, the audience is caught in the flash of light of a camera…and are at once transformed into participants in Beaubois’ work. The experiment/art work continues as the audience receives further commands and continues to respond by turning to the right for the camera, holding up signs with random text for the camera (in an uninformed attempt to create a live narrative), and then ultimately leaving the theater as instructed. Each stage of the piece is documented via video and still camera, while the audience is engaged as participants and performers—both willingly and circumstantially. Read On »

Uncategorized events

Tina LaPorta

January 28, 2001; 7:00 pm;
Josh and Tanya's loft - Soho

Upgrade! NY
January 2001

January’s gathering took place at Josh Harris’ loft, which was wired to the Internet via 32 cameras, motion sensors and microphones.

 

 
The gathering brought to a closure the Warhol Hijack, a weekend of performances by twelve of Upgrade! artists. The space was a perfect setup for Tina LaPorta to talk about the body of work she has been developing for some time which focused on the CU-SeeMe environment as a platform of inquiry on how people make use of technology to communicate over the network. Read On »