This week, I’m excited to participate in Pop!Tech (October 17-20 in Camden, Maine), exploring some of the many ways human beings impact — and are impacted by — the world and each other. The lineup looks phenomenal. The other exciting news is that you can participate wherever you are, as it’s being webcast live.

If I wasn’t headed to Maine just as the fall foliage nears the peak and/or was able to clone myself, I would be at:

• Bioneers (October 19-21) brings together visionary thinkers and doers exploring forefront of human creativity in scientific and social innovation. The conference takes place in San Rafael, CA, but they’re beaming simultaneous broadcasts in many locations this year.
• She’s Geeky (October 22-23), an (un)conference for women who self identify as geeky and engage in tech-focused disciplines to connect, exchange learning and discuss topics about women and technology.

Om Malik points out some other events this week I look forward to following online:

• Web 2.0 Summit (October 17-19, San Francisco)
• Mobile 2.0 (October 15, San Francisco): a day exploring the future of mobile.
• Niall Kennedy’s Widget Summit 2007 (October 15-16 UCSF Mission Bay): making sense of the widget economy.
• The business of API’s (October 15, San Francisco)

Small Talks are intimate evenings featuring presentations by speakers who represent a broad spectrum of visual culture. Expose yourself to various passions, disciplines, ways of working, and ways of seeing. Join fellow members in the Bumble and bumble auditorium in the Meatpacking District (after wine and hors d’oeuvres in the library) for a series that is sure to inspire and inform.

Michael Bierut has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990, ten years after beginning his career in New York as a designer for Vignelli Associates. He was president of AIGA’s New York Chapter from 1988 to 1990 and the president of AIGA National from 1998 to 2001. In 1989, Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale, in 2003 he was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and last year he won the AIGA Medal. Michael is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, co-editor of the anthology series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design and co-founder of the online journal Design Observer. His book 79 Short Essays on Design will be published by Princeton Architectural Press later this spring.

Eyebeam is pleased to present a daylong Shopdropping Workshop led by the Anti-Advertising Agency. Shopdropping (the opposite of shoplifting) is a tactic used by artists and activists to clandestinely place objects in retail stores. “Dropped” objects are usually versions of consumer products altered or recreated to detourn the retail experience. Shopdropping is a fun and easy form of culture jamming, gently subverting dominant cultural forms to create new meanings.

Starting at noon, participants will receive a shopdropping overview, including artists’ shopdropping projects information and demonstrations of the necessary tools for shopdropping, and time will be given to test out some of the techniques discussed. Immediately following, participants will head into the field to help distribute a new, unreleased Anti-Advertising Agency project (as well as some creations of their own) into stores around Manhattan. This workshop will begin at Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st Street (between 10th & 11th Aves), and is open to the public free of charge.

 If you have a digital camera of any kind, please bring it.
Your hosts:
Steve Lambert – Eyebeam OpenLab Fellow, Steve is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, and former undercover store investigator. Steve will share the secrets he learned on the job leading to the arrest of dozens of shoplifters. Learn the top three things store investigators watch for and how to shopdrop undetected! (He also knows a few things about art.)

Amanda Eicher – Anti-Advertising Agency “Art Director,” Amanda has been developing a project that will visually rejoin products and the labor that creates them. Drawing on two years of research in production factories in Central America, her project incorporates portraits of workers there with the products they have made here.

Marisa Jahn – is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator whose work explores, constructs, and intervenes natural and social systems. Marisa is also the Curator of “Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle” and will entertain participants with an overview of artists shopdropping projects.

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.

Eyebeam’s current programs are made possible through the generous support of the Atlantic Foundation, Time Warner Youth Media and Arts Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. For a list of past supporters, please visit www.eyebeam.org.

540 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
[T] 212.937.6580
[F] 212.937.6582
www.eyebeam.org

Hours: Tues-Sat, 12-6pm

The Girl’s Room features works by an international group of female artists. Each artist submitted several small pieces, each presented in an 8.5×11 frame so we can more clearly and objectively compare the respective works, without the the messages being obscured by irrelevancies such as size and prominence on the wall. The artwork itself will be the message, and perhaps it will answer some questions about the place of women’s artwork in the artworld. Questions such as: What sort of work are women artists creating? How does it differ from men’s art? Are there particular subjects, methods and materials women artists are working with? What role does gender play in artwork? And regardless of any “political” agenda, sometimes its fun to get the girls together and see what’s on our minds.

Image by Elizabeth Huey

Featuring works by:
Aiyana Udesen, Alice Wells, Alika Cooper, Amy Rice, Bianca Buchanan, Candace Gottschalk, Caroline Hwang, Carol Tessitore, Chloé Derderian, Christa Donner, Dana Miller, Dee Dee Cheriel, Elizabeth Huey, Esther Sanchez, Esther Watson, Jacqueline Bovit, Jacqueline DiMilia, Kate and Camilla, Katrin Reifeiss, Kelly Ording, Lily Gilbert, Mara Bodis-Wollner, Mari Dogami, Maya Hayuk, Misaki Kawai, Monica Canilao, Pearl C Hsiung, Rachel Salomon, Robin Cameron, Stephanie Davidson, Swoon, Tema Stauffer, Ye Rin Mok, Youngna Park

White Box 525 West 26th Street New York NY (map) 212-714-2347

Fore Cast will run day and night for six days and one hour, from the morning of December 19, until 1:00 am on Christmas morning.

Mary Mattingly first drew us into her strange world at the Ecotopia exhibition at ICP. She’s pulling us further in with Fore Cast, a water opera. From the artist’s digital diary:

With tree stumps, sand, salt, steam, sonorous operatics, streaming video, sea-water, and a story about WWIV, Fore Cast is about the future. People wear masks (just like in Victorian England), and really, time is time, time is unexplained, irrelevant, played with and time is completely over explained, in 360 degrees, in the new week, in the fact that I will live at White Box for the entire run of the opera.

Fore Cast is a clarion call anticipating the looming environmental catastrophe. Fore Cast is an interactive Opera, opening at White Box on December 19, 2006, at six o’clock pm. Fore Cast will transform White Box’s space into a waterlogged, apocalyptic swampland, soundscape, and videosurround. The opening and closing nights will feature live performances of an original opera score by The Redcoats Are Coming! with members of Antonious Block and Apples and Arrows.

Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness the land’s predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a topographical perspective of a sick new world. The marshy waterscape is the setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV, a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. With an unparalleled innate sense of intelligence, wit and craft, Mary Mattingly creates an installation explains the tragic outcomes of this hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.

Multiple video projectors arranged in a semi-circle fill the walls of White Box and present a Fore Cast) that will loop for six days and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly’s proprietary uniform time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical methodology and translated to a system for future use.)

The videos play continuously in White Box’s waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV, fought by six groups of combatants —The World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestlé, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.— colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered and borderless world. The belligerents’ leaders plot together in a corporate conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, the war unfolding in disastrous environments everywhere.

Image from White Box.