MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit

date | location: October 10 - 16, 2011 | The New School, New York City

format: conference

Comprised of a conference, exhibition, workshops, project demos and a theater performance, the summit will add an international layer to the existing debate about digital learning. In a high-energy context this summit will bring together artists, web developers, scholars, technologists, teachers, radical librarians, policy makers, critical legal scholars and learning activists. The week-long event will focus on diverse discussions about digital fluencies for a mobile world and explore learning outside the bounds of schools and universities. Learn, laugh, argue, discuss, eat, make new friends, write mini-manifestos or sprint books, record videos, conduct interviews, meet future collaborators and swap learning resources like it's 1999. 

Drawing on New York City’s strengths as a global hub for learning, innovation and design, the summit will showcase theories, people and projects making unexpected connections between self-learning, mobile platforms and the Open Web.

website: mobilityshifts.org

sponsorship: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation

The Internet as Playground and Factory

date | location: November 12 - 14, 2009 | The New School, New York City

format: conference

The Internet as Playground and Factory is a conference about the shifting of traditional labor markets to the Internet. This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals for action.

website: digitallabor.org

sponsorship: Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Yale Information Society Project, 16 Beaver Group,  The New School for Social Research, The Change You Want To See, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York University's Council for Media and Culture, and n+1 Magazine.

Architecture and Situated Technologies

date | location: October 19-21, 2006 | The Urban Center and Eyebeam

format: symposium

Together with Omar Khan and Mark Shepard I organized this 3-day symposium. It will bring together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of "situated" technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.

website: initiative

collaboration:  The Center for Virtual Architecture (SUNY at Buffalo), the Institute for Distributed Creativity, The Architecture League of New York

Share, Share Widely

The first conference on New Media Art Education in the U.S.

date | location: May 6, 2005 | The Graduate Center, City University of New York

format: conference

"Share, Share Widely" is organized by the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) in collaboration with the Office of the Associate Provost for Instructional Technology and the New Media Lab, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Over the past ten years new-media art programs have been started at universities. Departments are shaped, many positions in this field open up and student interest is massive. In China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand enormous developments will take place in the next few years in "new media" art education. At the same time technologists, artists and educators acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to Canada, Finland, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore to the United States and beyond. But so far, at least in the United States there has been surprisingly little public debate about education in new-media art.

website: project website

sponsorship: City University of New York Graduate Center, Institute for Distributed Creativity
 

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Free Cooperation: Networks, Art, & Collaboration

date | location: April 2004 | The Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

format: conference

A conference about the art of collaboration, models of critical web-specific art, and the role media technologies play in the making of social networks. What really happens when we communicate through technological channels daily?

In a high-energy context this conference brougt together 150 artists, designers, musicians, activists, art historians and engineers in formats such as workshops, open mic, parties, performances, interviews, and brain storming sessions — all aiming at ongoing collaborations, genuine dialogue, and the exchange of knowledge.

A DVD of the event is available. 

image report: gallery

facilitators: Trebor Scholz (NYC/Buffalo), Geert Lovink (Amsterdam)

download: conference publication(2.4 MB), mailing list archive (9 months of discussion), free cooperation song

sponsorship: Center for Applied Technologies in Education, The Office of The Vice President for Research (UB),  Springerin (Hefte für Gegenwartskunst), c magazine, Edward H. Butler Chair in the Department of English, Neural, The Department of Media Study, The College of Arts and Sciences

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Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm

date | location: April 2000 | Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon

format: conference, exhibition, film screening, online link collection

"Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm" dealt with issues that crystallized during the Kosovo war: Does "doing" something always mean to engage oneself in the concrete practical situation? Can grasping the meaning of historical events have an impact on them? It is not possible to be adept at histories of cultures from the Balkans to the Middle East and Asia. The increasing complexity of world-political events should not cause disinterest or the illusion of neutrality. Who speaks if we are silent?

websites: project website, original project website

sponsorship: Oregon Foundation for the Humanities, NW Film Center/Art Museum, Pacific NW College of Art

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Crises in the Middle East

date | location: February 2001 | University of Arizona, Tucson

format: symposium

In February 2001, Scholz facilitated a symposium about the current crisis in the Middle East at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The symposium with Israeli peace activists, Palestinian and Israeli students, members of the Israel Center Tucson and the Middle Eastern Studies Department responded to the intensification of the conflict in Israel and Palestine. The symposium presented historical perspectives on the conflict and facilitated debate between Palestinian and Israeli students, faculty and members of the public. Short video screenings alternated with testimonies, informative presentations and discussions.

Concept and production: Trebor Scholz

sponsorship: Department of Art, The University of Arizona 

Politics is Not Enough

Open forum organized by Diane Karp and Trebor Scholz

date | location: Santa Fe Art Institute | Sante Fe, New Mexico

Does "doing" something in relation to global political events always mean to engage oneself in the practical situation? Do we have to be adept at histories of countries worldwide in order to do something, in order to react responsibly to a specific catastrophe? Who speaks when we dwell in "creative silence?" How ethical is it to produce artwork in response to global political events despite their complexity and in the face of indescribable suffering?

Organized by Diane Karp and Trebor Scholz this open forum will pose questions, sought for temporary answers and will strive for concrete action as a result. Which (visual) strategies should be used for public civil disobedience and art activist action? How should our tactics and symbolic language change in the face of corporate marketing's ability to absorb critical imagery?
Are we able to influence public policy with artwork or demonstrations? How can we respond to and escape the prevailing disinterest of geographical and mental distance?

participants: Joanna Bigfeather, Lucy Lippard, May Stevens among others.

Right2Fight

Conference on police violence

date | location: April 27, 2002 | Sarah Lawrence College | Bronxville, NY

format:  exhibition, screening,  poetry readings, concert

Right2Fight was a program at Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. It looked at the increasing brutality and intrusiveness of policing worldwide. From Johannesburg to Melbourne and Brooklyn, this state of affairs is drawing the attention of artists. Right2Fight showcased an important international group of cultural producers whose work stands at the forefront of this movement. Right2Fight is not a symposium but an emphatically cross-disciplinary undertaking: from web-based projects to grafitti, sculpture to video, installations to street wear, Hip Hop to graphic art, experimental music and photography to performance poetry.

Right2Fight was a constellation of performances, film and video screenings, installations, presentations of net.art and web-based pieces. Right2Fight was not an indictment of all police officers. It was, however, a day-long collision of ideas, technologies and images seeks to transcend mere catharsis. The goal was not to satisfy neo-liberal guilt but to engage in concrete action. Representatives of human rights organizations dedicated to ending police violence were on hand to explain their work.

concept and production: Trebor Scholz with Dominique Malaquais

sponsorship: Sarah Lawrence College

website: Right2Fight

Strategies in Web-Based Art and Video: Resistance and the Everyday

date | location: April 13, 2002 | The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY

format: conference session

Organization of session at Socialist Scholar's Conference with contributions by Liz Canner, Ashley Hunt, The Institute for Applied Autonomy, Picture Projects, Martha Rosler, The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification, Valerie Tevere, and Cristine Wang.

website: conference website