Upgrade! NY presents:
Collaborative Futures Book Launch & Talk
a book about free collaboration written collaboratively in 5 days

The event will take place in NYC (at Eyebeam – 540 W 21st Street) but you can watch the live video stream on March 4 at 7:30PM (EST) and participate in the discussion!

About the project:
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 Eyebeam Senior Fellow Michael Mandiberg and Eyebeam Honorary Resident Mushon Zer-Aviv, to talk about the process of writing the book, and some of their 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.

Upgrade! NY will be hosting a discussion at Eyebeam in New York on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice. Gabriella Coleman and Zachary Lieberman will discuss and debate on what constitutes freedom within the Open Source and Free Culture movements.

***Live streaming and live chat from the event will be available: http://www.livestream.com/eyebeam

About the event
What do we mean by ‘freedom’? Should Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) necessarily be powered by radical politics of ownership and collaboration? Or is the latching of “Free Software” ideological baggage limiting the full transformative power of “Open Source”. How are these questions informed by licenses? Are some licenses more open than others? More ethical than others? This emotional debate has been in the heart of FLOSS from its early days and has created camps and animosities within the community.

About the participants
Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines ethics and online collaboration as well as the role of the law and new media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software” (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is starting a new project on peer to peer patient activism on the Internet. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Zachary Lieberman‘s work uses technology in a playful way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body and kinetic response. Recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality card trick, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again. In addition to making artistic work, Lieberman is a co-creator of openFrameworks, a toolkit for creative coding and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.