Not An Alternative

Upgrade! New York’s 10th Anniversary: Thursday May 21

Upgrade! New York celebrates its 10th anniversary with a reception,
video screening, and presentations by Upgrade alumni on Thursday, May
21, 8PM.

After a humble beginning in a New York bar in 1999, the 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! and Eyebeam alum Alexander Galloway, Eyebeam
honorary resident Mushon Zer-Aviv, and Savic Rašovic. The
presentations will be followed by a reception and a 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 Rašovic (aka Pirun aka Sasha), a regular contributor to Upgrade!
Boston, will present his work done in collaboration with Catherine
D’Ignazio. Rašovic and D’Ignazio run iKatun, an organization that
engages public participation in transforming the meaning and use of
public space.

About the Presenters
Eyebeam alum 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.

Eyebeam honorary resident 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. He teaches new media research at NYU
and open source design at Parsons the New School of Design.

Savic Rašovic (Sasha or Pirun) was born in Titograd, Yugoslavia (now
Podgorica, Montenegro) and lives and works in Cambridge, MA. Rašovic
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—a 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.

About Upgrade!
Upgrade! is an international network of autonomous nodes located
throughout the world that are united by art, technology, and a
commitment to bridging cultural divides. Upgrade! NY is a monthly
programming series co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. The
2009 curatorial theme explores open source activist and creative
practices.

http://www.upgradeny.net