Radars and Fences 3 Program

Event Time
Friday, March 12, 2010
9:30 AM – 5:00 PM

Location
Institute for Public Knowledge
20, Cooper Square – 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Please RSVP at Council for Media and Culture Events’ page

Description

A symposium with Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Carroll, Teddy Cruz, Helga Tawil Souri, Laila el Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv.

Radars and Fences 2010 will explore the production of the Israel/Palestine and Mexico/US borders, examining how they engage affects, bodies, and spatial scales. Despite their seemingly confounding specificities, it is our intention to open up a dialogue between these borders in order to enable new terms of practical and political engagement. By bringing this plurality of perspectives into dialogue around the themes of affect and space, we hope to reinvigorate critical analysis of the border in all of its (im)materialities and locations.

More at the Radars & Fences website

Also, read Laila and Mushon’s essay about the Tunnel Trade in Mushon’s blog

Mushon (left) and the rest of the team writing a collaborative book about collaboratin in 5 days

Upgrade! NY presents:

Collaborative Futures Book Launch & Talk
a book about free collaboration written collaboratively in 5 days

Date: March 4th 2010, 7:30pm
Location: Eyebeam, Art & Technology Center, 540 21 Street, Chelsea, NY [map]

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 Eybeam Senior Fellow Michael Mandiberg and Eyebeam Honorary Resident Mushon Zer-Aviv, to talk about the process of writing the book, and some of our 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” 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.

Like many of the sites we build, Shual.com was build on the wonderful Content Management System WordPress. That makes it even more exciting for us to be speaking at Wordcamp NYC 2009 (Nov 14-15). Mushon will be talking about open sourcing the design process with a special focus on the work done by the WordPress community.
More details at 2009.newyork.wordcamp.org.

A lecture at Parsons – The New School of Design, NY

About the Networked Design Talks

With the rise of the Internet over the past few decades we have witnessed the rise of networked culture. The effects of this transition extend far beyond the use of tools: they change the ways we communicate with each other and the ways we manage, construct and perceive our individual and group identities. This cultural shift requires the creative industry to reexamine its use of messages, symbols and aesthetics and to study their function within a constantly changing networked environment. The Networked Design Talks represent the first step of an academic research initiative in this area undertaken by Parsons AAS Graphic Design faculty members led by the Program’s Director, Katarzyna Gruda.

Sponsored by the School of Art, Media & Technology at Parsons, the New School for Design.

Can Design By Committee Work? The case for open source design

“Design by committee”, “too many cooks in the kitchen” and other terms have been used derogatively to imply that the creative process breaks when it involves too many individuals. At the same time, the software world has been completely revolutionized by the open source, networked collaborative process. The one field in which the open source process lags behind the more conventional models involves graphic and interaction designs – two fields critical to software development that have not nourished similar collaboration models. What are the challenges of networked collaboration in the creative process? Can and how might they be solved? Or is it just that designers don’t like to work together? Mushon will be tackling these questions in the light of his creative work and along with the research done in his Open Source Design class taught in Parsons’ AAS Program in Graphic Design.

About Mushon Zer-Aviv

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 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 * a computer game based on Guy Debord’s Game of War; 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.

Get the maps in the ArtTLV headquarters or on the youarenothere.org website

Opening September 10th, the You Are Not Here tour of Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv will be featured as a part of the 2009 ArtTLV biennial. Join us for the opening on Thursday and/or the bike tour on Saturday (Sep 12th). More details on the ArtTLV mini-site and on YouAreNotHere.org

Here’s the beautiful magazine’s cover:

Etapes 171 Cover

And these are our interview spreads (click to enlarge):

Etapes: First spread

Etapes: Second spread

Etapes: Third spread

Etapes: Fourth spread (right page not ours)

Interview with Mushon Zer-Aviv (Upgrade!) by Gabriella Coleman from network cultures on Vimeo.

The Institute of Network Cultures have recently published this interview with Mushon conducted at Wintercamp in Amsterdam, March 09. Mushon talks about the international Upgrade network he is involved with. The interview also sheds some light on the process behind the redesign of the Upgrade blog network.

Image by Robert M. Palmer

Edit July 1st: We’re no longer looking for a designer.
Thank you for all the emails, sorry we can’t hire you all, we will post here again if more opportunities are opened to join our studio.

We’re Looking for a talented and committed designer with at least one year of experience to join our Israeli tail. This young fox should be a graduate of Bezalel / Shenkar / Wizo / Holon or have an equivilant academic degree in graphic design. Send a CV & a Link to an on-line portfolio or a PDF to us: info [at] shual [dot] com

Kriegspiel screenshot

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 will host an evening of presentations by Upgrade! alumni Alexander Galloway, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and Savic Rasovic. The presentations will be followed by a reception and screening of video work from members of the Upgrade! International network.

Alexander Galloway and Mushon Zer-Aviv will present 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 will also discuss their plans to make the game open source.

Savic Rasovic (aka Pirun aka Sasha), a regular contributor to Upgrade! Boston, will present 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.