Fridge Gallery Art 836 / G is presenting ‘Dead Drops’ installation. ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures.

Aram Bartholl is a Berlin based media artist who started the ‘Dead Drops’ project during his stay in NYC at EYEBEAM as artist in residence, October 2010. Dead Drops was part of the show “Talk to Me” at the MoMA July-Nov 2011.

Artwork will be displayed till Jan 12, 2016. After that, it moves into the walls of AKC Medika.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1482046732104089/

Shu Lea Cheang’s presentation of her latest projects, 5th June 2015, 7 pm, at UR Institute, Medjimurska 19, Zagreb

Shu Lea Cheang  is a multimedia artist who works in the fields of net-based installations, social interface and film production. Over the past decade, she has emerged as a prominent figure in new media art.
Cheang is one of the leading multimedia artists dealing with multidisciplinary studies. Her work is unique in allowing viewer interaction. She is most noted for her individual approach in the realm of art and technology, creatively intermingling social issues with artistic methods.
Cheang’s art ranges in mediums such as film, video, net-based installation, and interface, which explore ethnic stereotyping, the nature and excesses of popular media, institutional – and especially governmental – power, race relations, and sexual politics.  
Most recently, she has moved to 35mm feature filmmaking. She has been a member of the Paper Tiger Television  collective since 1981. Though originally based in New York, Cheang is currently living and working in Paris, France.

At Upgrade!Zagreb gathering she will present her latest food-related projects. Afterwards we will have Seeds Underground Party. You are welcome!

http://www.mauvaiscontact.info/
http://seedsunderground.net/
http://www.e-waste-performance.net/
https://vimeo.com/user5349216  

First presentation of the project ACGarden Zagreb will be on 21st and 22nd May, 2014, at Technical Museum, Savska 18, Zagreb.
More (Croatian only):
http://radiona.org/hackathon_subtle_tech/#more-1290

Alexandra Reill – Presentation of the book written entirely on FB platform:

7th june 2013 at 7 pm at Booksa book club, Martićeva 14d, Zagreb

“WB: quoting Walter Benjamin”

A print compilation and real-time performance reflecting the contemporary relevance of the media theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin. 
The structure of facebook as a social networking tool and magazine with decentralized notes, essays and media publications, in a mixture of private and public statements coming from all kinds of content fields, enhanced the concept of short daily updating and interactive communication to collectively create an associative publication on life and oeuvre of Walter Benjamin.
 The book serves as the central requisite of the audiovisual real-time performance. People raise their voice as well as media stations, and there is an interplay between media and human voices. In a mixture of reading, discussion and interactive performance correlations between relevant factors and opportunities for development of democracy in the context of the 
information age, globalization, Capitalism and Marxism are reflected together – on the basis of the work of Walter Benjamin. Wo/man learns options and limits of self-determination, options and limits of scopes of action. Technology serves wo/man, and only a framework, only a context is given, in which each moment is designed differently – a moment which Walter
 Benjamin described as the Angelus Novus: the space where past and future coincide and where not ideas shape presence but where presence emerges.

More info on:
http://www.kanonmedia.com/portfolio/publications/benjamin_paris.html

In the years 2010-2012, Alexandra Reill developed a trilogy of interactive media enactmens reflecting the contemporary relevance of life and oeuvre of Walter Benjamin, Hans Richter and Bertolt Brecht in an information age digitizing itself in manifold ways and at the same time struggling with turbulent economic difficulties. Besides Tribute to WB, Alexandra Reill will present also two more pieces from her interactive trilogy: Tribute to Hans Richter and Blessed Simonida.

Alexandra Reill, born in Vienna, is a conceptual and media artist and works as a filmmaker in documentary film; she invests her work with socio-cultural themes, examining the societal and sociological repercussions of digitalization and the information age for human identities. Her experimental visual worlds and live compositions as much as her performances are often participative and characterized by rhythmic and cineastic dramaturgies and the conscious employment of associative formal language, combining interactive technologies and participative communicational approaches in off- and online
 settings.

Selection of projects:

2008 / 2012 / 2013 – Nelkengasse: a documentary film and portrait of Heinz
Moldau who was forced to flee with his family from Nelkengasse in Vienna in 1938.

2012 – Tribute to Hans Richter: interactive real-time media performance
honouring life and work of one of the first filmmakers.

2012 Blessed Simonida from the Brilliant Grounds: interactive real-time performance, following Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards.

2009-2010 / 2011 – #WB: quoting Walter Benjamin: publication and participative media performance reflecting the relevance of the media theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin today.

2008 / 2009 / 2010 – Would We Say No?: communication project in the streets of Vienna reflecting attitudes toward work in fascist times and today.

2008 Home Sweet Home: documentary film on [auto]biographic tracking of fascist traces in four post-war generations of a “majority society” in Vienna.

2006-2008 – Art Following the Trend? Artists′ Voices: interviews, publication and a study on the functions of artists in society.

2004 – founding of THARA, first competence center for Roma and
Sinti in Vienna. Several experimental short films and interactive installations on time and space.

2001 – S.P.I.N.Y., an interactive feature film on CD, first production of this kind funded by MEDIA in Austria.

2000-2003 – save / safe: post-wiki and publication on borderlining as a
symptom of contemporary conditioning, Deserts & Backbones: documentary film on religion and free will.

1985-1995 set and costume design for stage and film.
http://www.kanonmedia.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kanonmedia/176764872365994

This year again Upgrade! Zagreb in cooperation with Hacklab01 maintains the traditional Xmass Recycling Party: a little learning and a lot of goodwill and fun! If you do not know what to give to your loved ones for Christmas, come and create an original item of pvc bags, scrap metal and wood. The workshop will be held by Hacklab01 members, with the online radio broadcast as sound background. There will be video presentation of the most successful eco DIY projects in 2012, selected by the med-i-kids curators. After that, surprise concert. Join us, free entry! To apply for the workshop, e-mail to: medikids at wowm dot org. See you there!

Step into a world where you can experience 36 unique performances from around the world, all from the comfort of our homey lab. Hacklab01 is this year again joining places around the world which are streaming the event in real time. Our stream will start on Dec 12 at 6.30 pm. Join us!

More than 100 artists have produced works for the 121212 Upstage Festival of Cyberformance – an international festival of innovative live online performance from 5-12 December. The schedule for the festival performances which we will stream is here:

The annual festival, now in its sixth year, is organised by artists Vicki Smith and Helen Varley Jamieson, with a team of dedicated volunteers in New Zealand and around the world-online meetings of the team cross multiple timezones and languages.

Complete schedule can be found here:
http://upstage.org.nz/blog/?page_id=4058

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency created by the pseudonymous entity Satoshi Nakamoto. It is subdivided into 100-million smaller units called satoshis. It is the most widely used alternative currency,with the total money supply valued at over 100 million US dollars.

Bitcoin has no central issuer; instead, the peer-to-peer network regulates Bitcoins’ balances, transactions and issuance according to consensus in network software. Bitcoins are issued to various nodes that verify transactions through computing power; it is established that there will be a limited and scheduled release of no more than 21 million coins, which will be fully issued by the year 2140.
Bitcoin is administered through a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Cryptographic technologies and the peer-to-peer network of computing power enables users to make and verify irreversible, instant online Bitcoin payments, without an obligation to trust and use centralized banking institutions and authorities. Dispute resolution services are not made directly available. Instead it is left to the users to verify and trust the parties they are sending money to through their choice of methods. Internationally, Bitcoins can be exchanged and managed through various websites and software along with physical banknotes and coins.

How to be a part of an alternative independent financial network, how to be an international bank with the help of graphic card, how to make some money, and how to change the world? All that you can find out at the Vjekoslav’s lecture about crypto currency and Bitcoin technology.

Vjekoslav Radišić –  Born in 1978. Lives and works in Beli Manastir. Activist, entrepreneur and dog owner.
Besides participating in different citizens initiatives, he researches new technologies which are empowering human freedom, as are crypto-currencies and DIY 3d printing. He also practicises and believes in learning through coaching.

CONCEPT
DJs / VJs / WJs

WJ-S is a software and a flexible public device for web performances allowing WJs (webjays, artists, curators, web addicts, web mutants…) to play live with online text,  sound and visual… WJs take  the  control  of  a multiscreens  environment  and  surf at distance in  different browser  windows simultaneously.  WJ-S  is  a  visible  and  collective  experience  of  the  surf.  WJ-S  is  an  immersive experience in the flux.

Following the steps of DJs and VJs, WJs (weejays, webjays, webjockeys …) directly draw their sources from the Web and mix the network flow in real time. The WJ-S/essions are organized indoors or outdoors in a public space, in front of an audience..

Taking out the network from the web

As it is often related to a solitary adventure led in a very intimate relationship with one’s machine, the virtual experience is seldom extended to another dimension of time-space. Projects involving network actors mostly take place in closed circles, within the network, and hardly ever outside, within a live performance environment.

The idea of the WJ-S project is to disrupt this tendency by offering a public surf where the feeling of being immerged in the flow and the pleasure of browsing are shifted to a live performance environment. Individual and collaborative online productions (in different geographical sites) become collective events (to which an audience is invited).

The web as a medium / the web a giant hard disk

WJ-s/essions make it possible to handle online contents (texts, sound, video, animations…) coming directly from the web, this giant hard disk.

The widened, shared and liberated opening of context creates a sensitive and lively situation that allows the full potential of scenography, writing, forms, combinations and practices to arise and flourish.  The contexts generated in this way develop mobile dynamic display and hybridization.

The multiscreens projection system is a reduced model of the internet, a metaphor of its codes and of the way information flows and appears on the network.

Different WJ-S productions

The WJ-S productions can take many forms : performances, demos, presentations of projects, , parties, workshops, conferences… The WJ-S productions are specifically related to the network’s activity, they can be works in progress, unique or original actions The themes revolve around transmission, communication, dialogue, sharing, open and wide distribution, personal experience, experiments, history, processes and issues of the network.

The artists   (the webjays)

According to the themes and the contexts of the events where the project is presented, the international media artists, famous or emergent, are selected in collaboration with the cultural operators

Webjays explore and experiment with the changing and fluctuating territories of the Internet. They subjectively articulate its intimate contours and zones. They play with an exacting choice of plastic, graphical, sensitive, political, social, aesthetic and narrative works they select on the realm of theweb… Webjays become flux stalkers offering things to see, hear, feel, observe and think about, through progressive and dynamic processes. Guided by their critical spirit and their own personal outlook, Webjays reveal the fragrance of the Web, defragment and confront worlds that make the invisible become visible.

Hundreds of artists and art students have already participated to the WJ-S project, among them : Isabelle Arvers, Sylvie Astiè, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Lucille Calmel, Agnès de Cayeux, KRN, Olga Kisseleva, Anne Laforet, Jérôme Joy, Marika Dermineur, Jérôme Joy, Mia Makela, Antoine Schmitt, Janez Jansa, Igor Stromajer…

Workshop schedule

Day 1 – Monday, Oct 3rd, 2011
Presentation of the project with its theoretical, esthetic, artistic goals in the context of contemporary
creation.
Presentation of the wj/software and of its potential.
Teaching how to master the software.
Organization of the schedule of the week for the rehearsals

Day 2 – Tuesday 4th, 2011
Selection of the websites for the performance.
In order to look for the websites for the elaboration of the WJ-S playlist , it is advised that
the participants bring they own computer or that the organizer provides computers for the each
participants for the documentation.
Selection of the first websites for the playlist
Test of the websites in the wj/software
Test of the links in the WJ-S environment

Day 3 – Wednesday 5th, 2011
Rehearsals 30/60 minutes required for each participants per day.
Each participant, one by one, needs to practice in order to work on the theme, the concept and the
narration of the performance.
Each participant has to find a coherent way of playing with the web content, the rhythm, the
interaction, confrontation and combination of the sound, visual, textual sources.
Work on the sound and the spatialization.

Day 4 – Thursday 6th, 2011
Rehearsals

Day 5 – Friday 7th, 2011
Performance at 8 pm

Workshop will be held at the net.club mama, Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb.

Application for participation are accepted till Sept 23rd, 2011, via e-mail: csdvu@wowm.org.

Anne Roquigny (concept- coordination – production)
« Internet as a space of creation »

Anne Roquigny, media arts curator, has specialized during these last fifteen years in the production and curating of hybrid digital projects linked to sound, visual arts, flow, networks and to the Internet.. After devising and organising for 3 years (1995-1998) the cultural programs of events of the Web Bar, an internet café cum art gallery in Paris she joins in 1999 the CICV Pierre Schaeffer, one of the first French new media center where she was working as artistic coordinator and curator of  the international urban multimedia arts festivals Les Nuits savoureuses and Interferences     and then as co-director of the center with Pierre Bongiovanni. From 2002 to 2004, Anne Roquigny is in charge of the general co-ordination of the preliminary project for the future Digital Arts Center in Paris, dedicated to digital production and to electronic music, at la Gaité Lyrique.
Anne Roquigny is now developing the web performances project WJS  and co-coordinates with Peter Sinclair and Jérôme Joy the Locus Sonus research laboratory  specialized in audio art and it’s relation to space and networked audio systems.
In November 2009 Anne Roquigny launched WJ-SPOTS #1 “15 years of artistic creation on the internet”a special edition of MCD (Musiques et cultures digitales Magazine) in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events look back on 15 years of Internet history.

http://www.roquigny.info

http://www.locusonus.org

http://www.wj-s.org/WJ-SPOTS-1-15-years-of-internet

Upgrade your recycling skills

::see croatian for more info::