I’ve been doing a series of events in Istanbul for the last ten days. These include the Terms&Conditions show at the Amber Festival exhibition, lectures on generative and networked arts at Aksanat and Marmara University, Meta-Control performance at the Dugumkume party, and the Networked Arts Workshop at ITU TBT. The last event will be another Meta-Control performance tonight. Then I will fly back to New York.

Tonight we are performing with Özer Yalçinkaya (Klaustro at Myspace), he also put up the flyer below for tonight’s show. See you if you are around.

Check out the iPhone waiting line happening in front of the Apple Store 5th Ave, New York. This is a concrete Long Tail.

I got some live YouTube videos and Flickr streaming.

I will do a performance with Ali Demirel and Richie Hawtin at the Time Warp festival in Mannheim, Germany on April 1st. It will start at 7 am on sunday morning. Yes for the vampires! There will be no lazer shows nor fog machines, just the visual software set we call Meta-Control. Most part of the set is the reincarnation of the Dynamic Compositions I did back in 2003.

Here I put some shots from the software set for now. I’ll post movies and the source code after the show. We’ll also have a DVD of the whole thing including the footage by Demirel. For the reincarnated pieces, the 2003 version of the source code is available in the Dynamic Compositions pages if you want to play now.

UPDATE: Videos

• Meta-Control @ Time Warp, Mannheim
• Meta-Control @ Club Phazon, Tokyo
• Time Warp videos shot by the audience

Minus

Ticker

Drops

Master Balance

Walk 1D

Walk 2D

Cell Packing

Stairs

Gridnet

Hoffman Blocks

Surveil

Arb (See the ARB movies)

I’ve created a new system called a stock market in life.

http://market.openio.org

a stock market in life is a market that uses the value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors at different urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. These spaces will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the Upgrade! A Day in Life event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms.

You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. The market is open now, you can sell and buy shares using the buraks you will have when you register – 25ß.

UPDATE! Events take place as these locations:
Oklahoma City: IAO Gallery
Gallery with large windows to street.

Munich: Muffathalle Cafe
Interior space, no view to outside. Popular cafe, part of complex of club spaces playing world music and often holding avant garde events.

Boston: Art Interactive
Alternative gallery near Central Square, Cambridge, halfway between Harvard and MIT. The space we have for this project is an interior space with no view of the street outside.

Istanbul: Zoo
A kitsch and playful night club in Taksim.

I have attended the Wizard of OS conference in Berlin. Main discussions were around free open software culture technology privacy copyrights licenses and so on. In yesterday’s keynote, Lawrence Lessig simplified the “everybody is producer” paradigm into RO (Read Only) vs. RW (Read Write) culture. Mixing media is good, fight DRM, use open source software, build open source software… He also mentioned that contemporary media technologies are freeing the media production as printing technology did for written words. However there were missing perspectives:

1. Software and hardware are seen as tools for creating media such as image, text, music, movie etc. Today artists use software and hardware as the medium of the artwork itself. We write custom programs running on custom hardware. People not only stare at the artwork, they also interact with them. Furthermore, we produce artwork that run on network of machines. We develop platforms and environments as artwork in which people not only interact with it but also live in it. Issues such as DRM or copyright can not even be discussed in this type of work, because we create cultural systems, not cultural objects.
2. Cultural production is seen only as the work done in the studio or the work done with tools for media production. However, we also do work out of the designated working time and space. This is known as immaterial labor, that is the work done by just living. During the day, in our blend of work and leisure, we not only browse things on the web but also actively contribute to various information aggregation systems from website statistics to search engines, increasing the value of advertising sales or the quality of search algorithms. Moreover, we consciously tag images on image sharing services, we bookmark links in social bookmarking services, we write our opinions about books and so on. These metadata are informational and cultural content of the commodity that contribute to our zeitgeist, aesthetic views, political ideas, and economic wealth. This production can be criticized as art or not, but what is more important is these service providers (Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc.) accumulate data from us, and under US laws, corporations own our cultural products.

View from a dinner and the sleeping spots.

The French pavilion in Venice Architecture Biennale is my favorite. While the rest of the biennale pavilions are showing images and concepts, creators of the French pavilion are living in the given space. They have a kitchen, a sleeping place, a bar, an office, a party space, a watch tower, storage space, and a sauna. Plus wireless internet and wine for everybody. They cook right in front of the visitors and serve them lunch and dinner. They have full on parties with homemade music and drinks. This place, Metavilla, is constructed out of scaffolding, the temporary framework used for construction. This modular system of metal pipes creates a raw aesthetic blended into the honest atmosphere and we experience a great architectural statement. Some architects naively criticized this as the revival of the 60’s commune life. However I think they are the real in the reality of architecture.

The exyzt group is the curator of this living environment. They will be living in this place during the biennale, you can keep up with their blogs, see pictures and movies on their website.

This kitchen was the most active place.