Turbulence Commission: Grow Old by Jason Freeman:

Why can’t music grow old with us?

Grow Old is a streaming EP that reflects upon the malleability of digital audio in a cloud-based musical world. The music, regenerated daily by a simple computer program, changes subtly from one day to the next and more dramatically over the course of weeks, months, and years. So just as we constantly bring new perspectives and experiences to the music we hear, the music itself also changes over time. The web site includes the current version of each of the EP’s four tracks, extensive notes on each track, the computer source code used to generate each track, and subscription links to automatically receive new versions as a podcast.

If you are interested in listening to new music or other genres outside of your comfort zone, there are a ton of underrated musicians out in the world. You only need to walk around town and you are sure to spot one after a while. If you are not up for a long walk, you can go to https://musiccritic.com instead. There is a chance you might even feel the urge to be a musician yourself.

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Turbulence Commission: A More Subtle Perplex by Ben Dean [This is an open source project: you can contribute to the Perplex here]:

A More Subtle Perplex is an experiment in quasi-linguistic formalism, in gibberish. Borrowing and inverting techniques from computer science and analytic linguistics, it blindly strives to produce the outer appearance of language — to be all form and no content. The Perplex produces synthetic languages, or at least their syntactic forms, by writing letters to you. The production of the text and the production of a given language are interdependent. Continue reading

Open(Art) – Creative platforms for the open web :: July 12 – August 11 :: Opening Reception: July 12; 6-8 pm :: Workshops: July 13; 12-3 pm :: Eyebeam, 540 W 21st St. New York, NY. Continue reading

Making large volunteer-driven projects sustainable. Lessons learned from Drupal by Dries Buytaert, original creator and project lead of Drupal :: May 29, 2012; 12:30 pm :: Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge, MA (RSVP required) + webcast live.

In this talk, Dries shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Continue reading

New Day New Standard — A public art project and nanny hotline: 646 699 3989.

New Day New Standard is a public art project and interactive hotline that informs nannies, housekeepers, eldercaregivers, and their employers about the landmark Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, passed in New York State in November 2010.

Built on an open source framework, New Day New Standard is a hybrid application that combines regular touchtone phones, Internet-based telephony, and performance art to create an interactive Spanish/ English know-your-rights audio campaign for domestic workers and their employers in New York State.

But this is no drab and dry reading of the law. When you call the New Day New Standard hotline number, you hear what sounds like a radio talk show, ‘hosted’ by Christine Lewis, a real nanny in New York whose charisma as a social justice organizer landed her a guest spot on The Colbert Report. Continue reading

The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’? by Michel Bauwens, Aljazeera: […] Open-source software, shared innovation and crowd-sourced manufacturing threaten capitalism as we know it. Not only is the world faced with a global resource crisis, it is also facing a crisis of intensive development, because value creators are increasingly income-less. The knowledge economy turns out to be a pipe dream, because what is abundant cannot sustain market dynamics.

Thus we have an exponential rise in the creation of use value, but only a linear increase in the creation of monetary value. Continue reading

319 Scholes presents Art Hack Day :: January 26-28, 2012 :: 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn, NY. Continue reading


Spontaneous Combustion! Performance and Social Networking in Digital Art :: New Media Caucus Sponsored Panel at College Art Association, Los Angeles, 2012 :: Call for Papers — Deadline: November 1, 2011.

This panel will explore the dynamics of social networking sites and open source software as it is being utilized in postmodern digital art practice. Currently, artists are collaborating, networking, performing and creating interventions in social, political and conceptual art utilizing frameworks created under a variety of contexts. Continue reading

October/November @ 319 Scholes: Ecologías Correlativas, Notes on a New Nature, Monthly Music Series: Leisure :: 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn NY.

How has the (contested) term ‘ecology’ mutated over past decades? If we cannot separate nature from culture, what is the role of subjectivity in the ‘ecological’? Where are opportunities to reconfigure social models with technology? How does one reconcile the space between a screen and a landscape? What can the natural world tell us about the online environments that we’re building everyday?

Over the course of the next few months, 319 Scholes will be exploring two schools of thought related to technology and ecology. Next week, chimera+ will introduce Ecologías Correlativas, an exhibition of projects by artists, architects and scientists who are creating DIY, largely open source, technologies to navigate environmental and socio-political ecologies. Continue reading

On [nettime] Dmytri Kleiner wrote: #Thimbl, Social Media Week, @dsearls and Economic Fiction as a Performative Artwork

Thimbl[1] has been getting some attention lately, party because of my talk at Social Media Week Berlin[2], partly because of a Tweet by the legendary Doc Searls[3].

Despite being part of Transmediale 2010 and winning a distinction at the festival, many people don’t seem to realize that Thimbl is an artwork. It’s a part of Telekommnunisten’s Miscommunication Technologies series along with such works as deadSwap[4] and r15n[5]. Continue reading